26 October 2011—On 11 March, when the 9.0-magnitude earthquake struck off the northeast coast of Japan and triggered one of the deadliest tsunamis the world has ever seen, the bustling port city of Sendai was directly in harm’s way. The port was destroyed, the airport was swamped, and waves reportedly rolled 8 kilometers inland, killing hundreds of people. While downtown Sendai escaped heavy structural damage, activity in the city ground to a halt. Every traffic light and office lamp went dark after the wall of water knocked out the electricity grid for the entire city. In some areas, the outages would last for weeks.
But in one small section of the city, the lights stayed on. At Tohoku Fukushi University, in the northwest part of town, the laboratories’ servers kept on humming, the clinic’s MRI machines didn’t lose a tesla, and the hospital’s lights and equipment operated without a hitch. These facilities were the beneficiaries of an experimental microgrid project fed by three types of energy generators—fuel cells, solar panels, and natural gas microturbines. Because the project also uses the thermal exhaust from the gas turbines and fuel cells to heat the buildings, the hospital’s patients were kept warm through northern Japan’s cold March nights.
The project was intended to demonstrate a microgrid’s potential to improve power-supply reliability. It seems safe to say that its performance in the wake of the Great East Japan Earthquake provided ample proof. read more>>>
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