[FRIAM] infrastructure and faux-diversity

[Steve Smith]

I got a good premonition of this event with a major DOE project some 15
years ago to build coupled ODE (ordinary differential equation) models
of 20-something infrastructures...   energy infrastructures comprising
about 1/6 of them...   the funding/goal was in response to terrorist
threat but since we were also modeling natural disasters and cascading
failures...   the variety of intra-US geopolitical idiosyncrasies was
very eye-opening.  

Another obvious not-obvious "cut" in *all* infrastructure networks is
the Mississippi river where *virtually all* networks are connected at
the few Interstate  and rail bridges.   Modern communications does not
depend as *much* on physical connections (e.g. microwave links) but we
don't have any meaningful analogs for transportation, power lines,
pipelines, raw and processed materials/food, etc.  

As I learned it then, TX is very self-isolating for myriad reasons
ranging from being large enough and self-sufficient enough to "get away
with it" (until now?) to something more like a collective "character
flaw".  I suppose AK is *more* prone to these challenges and CA has the
similar risks but different character flaws(?).  Private, for-profit
concerns will naturally optimize for shareholders over stakeholders
(think PG&E and the wildfire disasters of late), and short(er) over
long(er) term concerns.

As a practical matter, it an emergent collective awareness of the
supply-demand oscillations by the consumers in TX might reduce if not
actually avert system collapses/failures.  Understanding *when and
where* demand reduction (shared pain) can keep the systems
under-stressed.   Rolling blackouts are a top-down imposition of this. 
Human nature has *some* people upping their consumption in a very
"hoarding-like" style... as if running your house furnace at 80F until
the natural gas pressure or electric grid fails will give you more than
perhaps an extra half-hour of comfort while increasing the chances of a
failure significantly?  I have been known (in my youth) to drive faster
when I was afraid I was going to run out of gas before the next
refueling opportunity.

 

The above figures, from left to right, represent the infrastructure
interdependencies "as-modeled", the same networks in a less critically
*ordered* manner, and the same allowed to self-organize according to
their weighted interdependencies.   The first two are hard to analyze
without depth from stereo or motion parallax and interrogation
capability, but the last also benefits significantly from interacting
with the attractive/repulsive force equations.  None of them model
explicitly the geospatial aspects of the electric grid, for example, but
do capture the interdependency between pipeline, rail-delivery, OTR
delivery, comms, finance, etc. and electricity production.  We did not
get around to visualizing dynamic graph loading...   it is still
somewhat of a holy grail in the biz.

On 2/16/21 2:21 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:
> What went wrong with the Texas power grid?
> https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Wholesale-power-prices-spiking-across-Texas-15951684.php
>
> I haven't verified the information in the following tweet. But it's interesting.
>
> https://twitter.com/amberwbooker/status/1361495140519587844?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
>> The next time you vote, just remember that ERCOT (Texas' electrical grid) refuses to become part of the national electrical grid to avoid federal regulatory oversight. There are only three electrical grids in the contiguous United States - the Western Interconnection, the Eastern Interconnection, and ERCOT. The interconnectedness of the former is why places iwth much harsher winters than Texas don't experience the same types of outages. S many pe9ple ar literally freezing to death tonight because we live in a state that resents a fundamental tenet of federalism and is still salty about he Confederacy losing the Civil War.
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