Research & Development of Equality & Power

23/06/2015
Sahar Mirshafiei
Manager

This blog post touches on something important – automation’s role in supply, demand, and essentially, leveling out the playing field.  Electricity distribution to homes and communities in Africa is of critical importance, as it is in other emerging markets.  Optimization, efficiency, safety and reliability are key aspirations.

Nigeria, with a population of 166 million, has the same electricity capacity as Manchester and Liverpool which have a combined population of just 2 million.  This illustrates the critical nature of distribution in certain parts of the world, to ensure productivity and diminish waste.

This blog post touches on something important – automation’s role in supply, demand, and essentially, leveling out the playing field.  Electricity distribution to homes and communities in Africa is of critical importance, as it is in other emerging markets.  Optimization, efficiency, safety and reliability are key aspirations.

Nigeria, with a population of 166 million, has the same electricity capacity as Manchester and Liverpool which have a combined population of just 2 million.  This illustrates the critical nature of distribution in certain parts of the world, to ensure productivity and diminish waste.

For 2M, key considerations in an R&D project of this scale involve:

Inclusion – how best to ensure equality of supply throughout the population?

Community – how best to avoid overcompensating in favour of industries?

An intuitive system is better able to avoid loss of power to the general public unnecessarily.

Early Warning – how best to provide up to a weeks notice of precise and planned power cuts?

Currently, little or no notice is common.  Our aim is to enhance individual autonomy, whilst also enabling the protection of equipment and appliances from unexpected power surges.

It’s surreal to think that a city like Manchester has vastly greater energy capabilities than Ghana’s capital Accra – imagine what the impact on infrastructure, education, health, and other vital services would be? At the same time, if we consider the biological form as a complex mass of cells predominantly consisting of water and our functionality being an electromagnetic wonder – what repercussions could millimeter waves have around and about us?

Here is a photograph showing Ghana’s natural habitats – a reminder that the role of automation is preservation, not destruction.