In tropical cities, afternoon thunderstorms can plunge entire neighborhoods into brief moments of darkness.
When civil engineer Markus Schläpfer moved to Singapore a decade ago, he recognized these thunderstorms as an emerging engineering challenge. For cities that hope to run on solar energy, these short periods without strong sunlight could destabilize urban power grids and undermine reliability.
In a new paper, published April 7 in Nature Communications, Schläpfer and collaborators explain how tropical cities, which will soon contain half of the global population, can address this problem without expensive infrastructure build-outs. For Schläpfer, the solution lies in connecting electric vehicles to the grid.
"If you have a thunderstorm moving over an area with solar energy, you can have your electric cars that are parked serve as the energy source and balance out this lack of energy generation," said Schläpfer, assistant professor of civil engineering and engineering mechanics at Columbia Engineering. “When the thunderstorm moves away, the cars are charged again by the photovoltaics.”
You can read the full story on the Columbia Engineering site.
