islanding

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of island.

   Heavy rains were islanding whole neighborhoods as the flooded streets disappeared underwater.

   The developers' canal scheme risked islanding the historic chapel from the mainland.

   Note

   One spelling does two grammatical jobs. After a form of be it is the participle (rains were islanding whole neighborhoods). After a verb like risk it is the gerund, naming the act itself. Every verb sense behind it is transitive, so it takes an object: a place cut off by water, a landscape dotted with islands, or anything set apart. Keep it distinct from the power-engineering noun, which takes none.

2. 2
   noununcountable

   The situation in which a distributed generation unit keeps supplying power to a location after the electric utility's supply has stopped.

   Like a small island staying lit at night after the bridge carrying power from the mainland has been cut.

   Islanding poses a safety risk because line workers may not realize a circuit is still energized.

   Inverter standards require islanding to be detected within about two seconds after the grid disconnects.

   Note

   An engineer's metaphor. When the utility's supply drops out, a local generator and the circuits it still feeds become an island of live power, cut off from the grid around it. The image draws on the "isolate" meaning of the verb island. As an uncountable noun it takes no article: engineers speak of preventing islanding, not of an islanding.

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