9 - The Multiple Temporalities of Self-Healing Infrastructure: From the F-15 Fighter to the Smart Urban Microgrid

Summary

Introduction

Recognition that the urban context is now the key site of societal vulnerability – and of its management through infrastructural interventions at the nexus of climate, ecological, population, technological, and other security concerns – is claimed to be the ‘hegemonic discourse of our time’ (Davoudi, 2014: 371; see Braun, 2014; Derickson, 2018; Bulkeley, 2021). Critically, the issue of vulnerability is a matter of strategic and systemic concern for both civil society and the military– security complex. Within the US military, there is now widespread acknowledgement that key operational defence facilities located in North America are also vulnerable to multiple forms of turbulence because they are reliant on the same centralized electrical grids as neighbouring cities and communities.

Consequently, there is emerging commensurability between urban resilience and military security. In both sectors, establishing enclaves of critical assets with bespoke infrastructure configurations via the installation of smart microgrids appears to offer protection against both human and climatic threats. The development and roll-out of smart microgrids are being rapidly accelerated in US urban and military contexts to enable a new automated management of interruptions to the central grid (Rutherford and Marvin, 2022). Smart microgrids are energy systems of varying sizes/scales within specific territories that draw on local sources of energy production, increasingly focused on renewables, and storage capacity. Key to their functionality is the way systems are reconfigured to switch in ‘microseconds’ between ‘grid-connected’ and ‘islanded’ modes, thus seamlessly maintaining fail-safe power for a variety of ‘critical assets’. Smart microgrids are emerging infrastructural configurations that are always on ‘alert’. As such, they aim to secure operational continuity through hardware-and software-enabled adaptive functionalities that operate in ‘real time’ and that are configured simultaneously for on-and off-grid operations and normal/emergency modes. They operate by removing the temporal interval between the detection of the emergency and the initiation of the response, thus eliminating power interruption for those critical assets connected to a microgrid.

This chapter examines the emergence of the smart microgrid as a logic of grid security that can seamlessly switch between different grid configurations in microseconds. Crucially, this does not provide continued power for everyone because the ‘critical assets’ whose functioning must be guaranteed are pre-selected, producing a differentiated form of urban resilience (Rutherford and Marvin, 2022).