Analyzes by the German government show the drastic effects of a long-term and large-scale blackout. In particular due to the severe impairment of critical infrastructures, a collapse of society as a whole and thus a national disaster would hardly be avoidable.

A potential solution to significantly reduce the resulting damage is the emergency power supply of critical infrastructure by utilization of island networks.

The aims of the research project are

• to transfer the findings of the LINDA research project to other, more typical constellations of decentralized generation units and critical infrastructures;
• to put the methods developed in the LINDA research project to increase the load integration potential into practice;
• to generalize the LINDA concept to such an extent that transferable results and information on the technology and the costs for implementation in other water supply systems are available after the research project LINDA 4 H₂O has been completed;
• to use the knowledge gained in the pilot project to derive recommendations for action for upgrading the operating systems and for the stable setup and operation of emergency supply islands.

The main research areas in the project are:

• Technical and economic evaluation of the suitability of biogas plants for the emergency supply of drinking water supply systems
• Conceptional design and operational management of small isolated grids (microgrids) with decentralized generation systems and selective supply of sensitive consumers (voltage control, reactive power management, frequency control, active power management)
• Further development of the simulation software to simulate the dynamic network behaviour
• Determination of the load switching capability of the biogas unit as a grid forming power unit (possible load steps: P, Q) and development, testing of measures to upgrade the biogas unit (control, load bank concept)
• Development of protection concepts for microgrids with decentralized generation systems
• Transferability of the results to other locations