I have been exploring a particular kind of hope, specifically called forth by our current climate and ecological plight. That hope is addressed to ways in which the life-threatening scenario now looming for humanity and the biosphere might nevertheless still be prevented from unfolding at its most drastic. In the course of the discussion so far I have characterized it in two different ways – as life-hope in the Introduction and first chapter, and as counter-empirical hope in the second. Each of these terms represents a distinct perspective on the nature of this literally vital force.

Life-hope characterizes the hope which we need from the perspective of its natural relation to the instinctual drive of life-energy in human beings. Thought of in this way, such hope is an expression of that drive as it comes to consciousness in a reflective creature endowed with language and reason and aware both of its individual future, and of its involvement in speciescontinuity through the lives of its descendants. It arises unprompted in the ordinarily robust, healthy individual. As such, it can manifest itself – as frequently in art – in the form simply of an eager openness to the vibrancy of ongoing life, taking no intentional object. But, as brought to bear on the actualities of our present plight, it spontaneously invests itself in the indefinite sustainability of a sufficiently flourishing human life.

When such hope is characterized as counter-empirical, however, that is to attend to it from an epistemic perspective. We thereby foreground its ultimate independence of whatever we might have learnt from experience about the scope and tenacity of the obstacles which it confronts and the possibilities of adequate action to remove or circumvent them. In doing so, we emphasize the natural inclination of life-hope to persist against even huge odds in a wide variety of life-threatening situations. And a corollary of that persistence is its investment in open-ended transformative possibility, occurring by definition contrary to the odds.

Taking these two aspects together, we can see how life-hope held onto counter-empirically is a fundamental given of human life, a feature of our way of being not resting for its warrant on any other such features.

In this chapter, we introduce a Software-Defined Active Synchronous Detection (SDASD) approach to defending against both the cyberattacks on SDN network and power bot attack on inverters. First, an effective defense strategy is devised and implemented in the SDN network controller to identify and mitigate cyberattacks on the SDN network of networked microgrids. Second, with a secured SDN network, an active synchronous detection method is devised to accurately detect and localize power bot attacks on networked microgrids by sending a probe signal to inverter controllers in networked microgrids and checking the responses.

This chapter discusses an SDN-enabled architecture that transforms isolated local microgrids into integrated networked microgrids capable of achieving the desired resiliency, elasticity, and efficiency. It provides an overview of SDN architecture, OpenFlow protocol, and SDN-based microgrid communication architecture. A distributed power-sharing scheme is developed on the SDN architecture. Event-triggered communication and control are introduced to networked microgrids to allow for unprecedentedly resiliene and efficient control and plug-and-play in networked microgrids.

This chapter introduces the concepts of microgrid and networked microgrids, describes challenges in building networked microgrids, and provides an overview of the topics of this book.

This chapter introduces a generalized power flow approach to networked microgrids situational awareness. Techniques such as copositional power flow, power flow incorporating droop control, and power flow incorporting hierachical control are provided as solutions to the steady-state analysis of networked microgrids.

This chapter envisions a game-changing way for distributing power: the software-defined distribution network (SD2N), a novel gigabit urban infrastructure that integrates software-defined networking (SDN), real-time computing, Internet of Things (IoT) techniques, and distributed control and optimization algorithms for urban distribution networks.

This chapter focuses on the small signal stability assessment of DC microgrids. Dynamical models of bipolar DC microgrids are introduced. A Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) method is developed to investigate the mutual interactions and small signal stability of bipolar DC microgrids. Singular value decomposition (SVD) is introduced to discover the frequencies of unstable poles.

This chapter elaborates some initial efforts in establishing a tractable method, namely Formal Analysis (FA), for assessing the stability of networked microgrids under uncertainties from heterogeneous sources including DERs. Both centralized and distributed formal methods are established for computing the bounds of all possible trajectories and estimating the stability margin for the entire networked microgrid system.

The chapter introduces smart programmable microgrids (SPMs). The vision is to virtualize microgrid functions, making them software-defined and hardware-independent, so that converting DERs to community microgrids becomes affordable, autonomic, and secure. The development of SPM is expected to lead to groundbreaking, replicable technologies that could transform today's community power infrastructures into tomorrow's flexible services toward self-configuration, self-healing, self-optimizing, and self-protection.

This chapter introduces a powerful online distributed and asynchronous active fault management (DA-AFM) tool which proactively manages the fault currents by controlling the power electronic interfaces and eliminates the barriers against networked microgrids resilience and the ultrareliable operations of DERs/microgrids. Upon fault occurrence, DA-AFM is able to maintain the total fault current unchanged to avoid detrimental impact on the power grid, to eliminate the damaging power ripples for inverters in DERs/microgrids, and to ensure that the power flow of each individual microgrid is identical before and after fault to avoid loss of loads and maintain networked microgrid stability.

This chapter covers basics on microgrid operation, distributed energy resources modeling, microgrid control, and virtual synchronous generator. The main topics are hierarchical control principle, droop control, and other advanced controls.