How vulnerable are we? How can urban infrastructures be designed to withstand crises and disasters? In short: How do you make a society resilient? A high-profile team at the LOEWE-Zentrum emergenCITY, led by TU Darmstadt, has been working on these questions since 2020. The solution concept is interdisciplinary and encompasses modern information and communication technology as well as the historical, legal, social and structural aspects of urban planning.

‘The European electricity grid is very secure on average, but vulnerable due to its complexity and geopolitical risks,’ says Professor Florian Steinke, Principal Investigator at the LOEWE Centre emergenCITY and Professor of Energy Information Networks and Systems at TU Darmstadt's Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology (etit).

“At the LOEWE Centre emergenCITY, we are researching decentralised, resilient solutions to supply people with electricity in an emergency. With the help of distributed, renewable energies, in particular photovoltaics and battery storage, a basic supply can be efficiently ensured. For example, energy self-sufficient smart homes could also supply other buildings, traffic lights or mobile phone masts.”

In addition to TU Darmstadt, the University of Kassel and Philipps University Marburg are involved in emergenCITY. The Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK), the City of Darmstadt and the German Aerospace Centre (DLR) are also involved in the centre as associated partners.

Professorin Jutta Hanson, Head of the Electrical Power Systems with Integration of Renewable Energies Lab at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology (etit), also addressed the issue of large-scale power outages on the news portal tagesschau.de. The background to this was an act of sabotage on an electricity pylon in Albig in the Alzey-Worms district last week, which raised the question of how well the electricity grid in Germany is protected against attacks.