Design of Microgrid-Based Resilience Solutions to Improve Public Health Impacts of Earthquake-Induced Power Outages
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Earthquakes often cause prolonged electricity outages that disrupt essential health services and basic water, sanitation, and hygiene functions in hospitals and field clinics. This study combines a focused literature review with a time-step energy balance simulation developed in MATLAB 25.2 and Simulink to examine how power interruptions translate into public health risks and to evaluate microgrid-based resilience solution designs. Conventional electricity supply with diesel backup is compared with hybrid solar power, battery storage, and diesel generator configurations under five outage scenarios that vary by duration, fuel availability, and solar conditions. The results indicate that diesel-only strategies are highly vulnerable to fuel supply disruptions, leading to substantial downtime of critical services and increased unmet essential electricity demand. Hybrid microgrid configurations demonstrated a significant improvement in critical-load continuity, thereby enhancing the capacity to sustain essential care during prolonged outages. In the fuel-constrained 72 h outage scenario (S2: 24 h diesel availability), the hospital case shows critical service availability increasing from ~48% (diesel-only) to ~87% (PV + battery + diesel), with similar improvements for the field clinic (~46% to ~85%). Hybrid microgrids improve critical-load continuity via solar generation, battery buffering, and priority-based load shedding, while reducing diesel runtime and extending fuel autonomy. The model also relates energy performance to a WASH-supportability proxy relevant to infection prevention.
Source: Sustainability
DOI: 10.3390/su18052552
Institutions: Gazi University, Ankara University
Language: English
Subfield: Control and Systems Engineering
Field: Engineering
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,896
OpenAlex ID: W7133799299