A Decentralized and Renewable Bidirectional Utility System
DARBUS is a utility agnostic on-demand Power Backup as a Service (PBaaS) that enables low-income households to achieve energy resiliency in the wake of power outages in their community.
How does DARBUS work?
1. The subscriber pays a one-time installation fee for the DARBUS power backup kit to be installed on their property. The battery in the kit is owned by the PBaaS provider, relieving the subscriber from the burden of buying and maintaining the equipment.
2. Once installed, the DARBUS backup kit enables you to be prepared for outages by allowing you to visualize which home appliances can be used during an outage and for how long using the DARBUS app.
3. In the case where the battery in the DARBUS backup kit runs out, you can simply request a replacement using the app and the PBaaS delivery partner will deliver the battery at your doorstep.
DARBUS backup kit installation
PBaaS delivery partner replacing battery the wake of battery drainage during an outage
Repurposing EV batteries in delivery vehicles for bidirectional charging and swapping
The DARBUS system proposes revising existing large batteries in delivery vehicles to multiple swappable batteries wired in parallel such that each battery ‘cell’ would add to the capacity of the entire battery. When a battery in the DARBUS backup kit runs dry, the dead battery can simply be replaced with one of the cells from the truck.
For reference, a common pack is composed of blocks of 18-30 parallel cells in series to achieve a desired voltage. For example, a 400V nominal pack will often have around 96 series blocks (as in the Tesla Model 3).
Why DARBUS?
Climate change is causing an increase in many types of extreme weather. Heat waves are hotter, heavy rain events are heavier, and winter storms have increased in both frequency and intensity. To date, these kinds of severe weather are among the leading causes of large-scale power outages in the United States. Climate change will increase the risk of more violent weather and more frequent damage to our electrical system, affecting hundreds of millions of people, and costing Americans and the economy tens of billions of dollars each year.
Climate Central’s analysis of 28 years of power outage data supplied to the federal government and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation by utilities, shows a tenfold increase in major power outages (those affecting more than 50,000 customer homes or businesses), between the mid-1980s and 2012. Some of the increase was driven by improved reporting. Yet even since 2003, after stricter reporting requirements were widely implemented, the average annual number of weather-related power outages doubled. Non-weather related outages also increased during that time, but weather caused 80 percent of all outages between 2003-2012.