Electric Island

A home battery can help one household during a blackout. Electric Island asks what happens when those resources can support an entire block. The concept uses automatic islanding switches at homes, transformers, and utility poles to connect local sources of power during an outage.

Resilience at the scale of a block.

Our team developed the concept in 48 hours and pitched it at the Dual-Use Hackathon, taking first place among 60 teams. Afterward, I built and deployed an interactive grid simulator to explore the idea further and reviewed prior-art patents to help define its novelty.

A reason for every home to opt in.

Each island battery holds an emergency reserve of about 10 kWh. The rest of its capacity charges on low-cost power and sells back at peak demand, so homeowners earn money from the same battery that keeps the block running in an outage.

48 hrs

to develop and pitch the concept

1st / 60

teams at the Dual-Use Hackathon

~10 kWh

emergency reserve held in each island battery

• Explore the authored outage animation and switch-safety sequence.
• Orbit the 3D home-node concept, inspect parts, and try the lockout and exploded views.
• Consider neighborhood energy sharing through the original project explanation.

Engineering concept and interactive simulation; the site does not present a field-deployed electrical system.