[FRIAM] infrastructure and faux-diversity

[Steve Smith]

Glen -

Thanks...  that entire body of code is long lost to bit-rot and
sequestration behind a high security fence.   The bit of java/processing
I shared with you a year or more ago was a (lame) attempt to get back to
that, but with the dynamic aspect implicit...   interesting/useful
dynamic test data is hard to come by.   Weeks of work to resurrect a
fraction of years of work!   Sometimes that is a good ratio for refactoring.

I think the *coupling* of systems at different scales and in different
domains (power grid generation vs home consumption for example) is a
challenge for society... most of us don't really understand the
heat-flux dynamics of our own homes under normal conditions, so when we
go into extreme weather (or resource limitation/interruption) we are not
particularly prepared to make good decisions.   And all this while
operators/regulators/politicians are trying to set and execute policy
for the larger infrastructure.

>From what little (and archaic) knowledge I have of energy-distribution
systems (electric and NG in particular), I think they have very limited
(but reflecting normal operating ranges, including "normal" extrema)
heuristics for control...  20 years ago it seems that expert operators
with decades of experience and intuition were very critical for
proper/safe/efficient operation of these grids.   It seems like a great
domain for machine learning, at the very least for smoothing out
transition regions between different operating regimes.  I believe that
shutting down any of these (sub)systems has huge implications for the
infrastructure.   The development of microgrid technology would seem to
have good potential for stabilizing regional grids.   TX, after this
incident,  would seem to be a good place to accelerate adoption.  CA
with the PG&E wind/wildfire problems would seem to be another good place
to focus on introduction of hybrid grids that have more local generation
and finer grain islanding capabilities.

I'm chatting later with my NREL client and may get some insight...   At
the very least the implications of having Rick Perry's (and successor
Broulliete) lame hand/brain off the tiller of the ship of DOE...  
Perry's recent public statements on the TX weather/power/energy crisis
are an extra level of absurd on top of the other myriad TX GOP voices
trying to play both sides of the politics.   I doubt that Perry learned
much of anything about DOE during his tenure.

- Steve

> Your graphs are interesting, even without interactivity or 3d. But more interesting still would be their (potential) evolution through time. If I understand the TX situation correctly, the "hoarding" behavior you mentioned was an accidental increase in load with which the traditional energy sources couldn't keep up ... less about bumping up the thermostat for a buffer and more about simple demand.
>
> It would be interesting to see a dynamic graph of the load/demand.
>
>
> On 2/16/21 7:58 PM, Steve Smith wrote:
>> We did not get around to visualizing dynamic graph loading...   it is still somewhat of a holy grail in the biz.