Is distributed generation the future and the central grid old hat?
There is a great facility in convention: its longevity of presence gives it confidence that nothing after it is possible nor superior. It will last forever. Convention also nurtures a certain intellectual habit and conceit.

Habits of thinking become dogma. Some may even aver there is an ideology of the central grid. Some people have long held sway over how we think of transmission and distribution. Ideology is also a cover for vested interests. Well, let us also not forget about the patents and commercial rights over technology and a whole industry of experts who are reliant on the continuity of the central grid for their livelihood. The message is: do not even try thinking out of the box – you simply won’t be able to shift the Titanic of opinion that bolsters the edifice of convention.

Centralisation of power and connectivity also lever control over lives. But this too has its limits because, now and then, the thing that is a means of control also becomes an uncontrollable device when the central grid suddenly plays up on you or behaves in unpredictable ways.
Suddenly, kings and lords of grid technology find themselves without their magic wand.

This is the story of the central grid – the old way of thinking about how electricity should be supplied. This system has done us good for a long time. It is an impressive network of copper, steel and skyscraping pylons serving as a transmission highway running for miles upon miles across vast landscapes and crisscrossing the country as large power plants dispatch their electrons to homes, factories and strategic installations. Power lights the world and drives the engines of economies.

The grid symbolises how the network of power from generation to transmission and distribution also produced the networked society and economy. It – like the Egyptian pyramids – has a resonance of awe, a sign of progress and a symbol of human ingenuity.

Perhaps, an opportunity to decide whether the central grid is the way to go or not has come.

Africa is a prime continent where the central grid may not always be the best solution. Distributed generation and more decentralised grid systems could be more pervasive and cost effective.

There is no doubt the grid is a marvellous example of innovation, where innovators like Tesla and Edison fought over direct current or alternating current would reign supreme in how the grid was configured and standardised. Both, eventually, found their place in the network system.

The recent Indian power blackout, though, demonstrated the central grid is also vulnerable. There will always be transmission losses. In countries like India and South Africa, electrons are persistently diverted through illegal connections and there is the problem of recovering enough cost to pay for the maintenance and extension of these long wires (a source of endless battles between central governments, local authorities and customers). The central grid is also the target of new threats from cyber attacks (the most recent being an attack on Saudi Arabia’s national oil company, Aramaco) and terrorism.

The inability to timeously relate supply to demand or sudden shifts in weather patterns produces the inevitable: collapse, disruptions and mayhem, all of which make us realise how profoundly vulner- able we are to this particular pathway, along which modernity has taken us and for which we have been given no option but to stick to the course.

The central grid is also a source of gridlock – similar to highways being clogged with traffic or when the Internet collapses on us because of oversubscription.

However, there are indications that a postgrid society is possible, but it will be networked in a different way. The grid will evolve. There will be features of centrality and, if the ten:ten rule of innovation applies (ten years for an innovation to reach fruition and ten years for it to take hold), we may well be on the cusp of a new grid revolution – leading to a grid that is more intelligent, where different components can be isolated from other parts to take volatility out of the whole system and where smaller grids are interconnected and shared with a larger grid in both receiving and sending back power.

The picture will look much more varie- gated, with small independent power production, homestead self-power and neighbourhoods with their own grids in which the central grid is not the primary source but really the backup system.

If storage technology improves and costs are reduced, distributed generation will go mainstream en mass. In this picture, the world will be turned on its head, with power being physically and notionally shifted from the centre to the periphery.

The postgrid society may well not be in the distant future.