It’s been a little since we’ve posted anything (there’s some longer form stuff coming soon!), but here’s a real grab bag of things to snack on in the meantime.
It was late 2016, and I was working at a battery orchestration company. We had a virtual power plant, about 100 residential batteries (not big now, but big at the time!), in South Australia as part of an early trial. A massive storm was forecast to hit, and since these batteries were wired for backup, we figured it made sense to pre-charge them in case of a blackout.
I quickly wrote some custom code to issue a fleet-wide charge command. This was our first attempt at dispatching the whole fleet to simultaneously charge like this - risky, and fully dependent on my hastily written script. I ran it then we watched the logs, expecting a quick, clean response within a couple of seconds.
A clean response did not happen.
We started losing communications to many systems. Others started charging, then stopped entirely. Some were reporting grid voltage of zero. I was worried my code had somehow taken out the entire fleet right as the storm was picking up.
Then one of our BD folks came sprinting down the stairs and said: “All of South Australia has gone black.”
My first thought, being a young naive engineer, was that I had just caused a state wide blackout.
I remember popping down to the news agency while on holiday on the Great Ocean Road, at the height of Smart Meter Fear, and being astonished to find three different magazines with Smart Meters Are Gonna Get Ya front-pages. Two were overt weirdo publications, but one was just a regular electronics hobbyist mag!
I once worked for a company that billed customers for the energy they consumed, at one point the distributor change how they charged kVA demand on high demand sub 160MWh per annum customers. Set retailer was having issues adjusting their billing engine to accommodate these changes, I was advised by a fellow colleague that it was estimated to be costing set company something in the vicinity of 3-4 million dollars per annum. This continued for at least 3 years that I'm aware of. It is strange to me that some uninformed members of the public think they're paying too much for electricity. Surely.............right?
It was late 2016, and I was working at a battery orchestration company. We had a virtual power plant, about 100 residential batteries (not big now, but big at the time!), in South Australia as part of an early trial. A massive storm was forecast to hit, and since these batteries were wired for backup, we figured it made sense to pre-charge them in case of a blackout.
I quickly wrote some custom code to issue a fleet-wide charge command. This was our first attempt at dispatching the whole fleet to simultaneously charge like this - risky, and fully dependent on my hastily written script. I ran it then we watched the logs, expecting a quick, clean response within a couple of seconds.
A clean response did not happen.
We started losing communications to many systems. Others started charging, then stopped entirely. Some were reporting grid voltage of zero. I was worried my code had somehow taken out the entire fleet right as the storm was picking up.
Then one of our BD folks came sprinting down the stairs and said: “All of South Australia has gone black.”
My first thought, being a young naive engineer, was that I had just caused a state wide blackout.
I remember popping down to the news agency while on holiday on the Great Ocean Road, at the height of Smart Meter Fear, and being astonished to find three different magazines with Smart Meters Are Gonna Get Ya front-pages. Two were overt weirdo publications, but one was just a regular electronics hobbyist mag!
Thanks Alex - particularly appreciate the sanity on the Iberian blackout.
The sane in Spain?
I once worked for a company that billed customers for the energy they consumed, at one point the distributor change how they charged kVA demand on high demand sub 160MWh per annum customers. Set retailer was having issues adjusting their billing engine to accommodate these changes, I was advised by a fellow colleague that it was estimated to be costing set company something in the vicinity of 3-4 million dollars per annum. This continued for at least 3 years that I'm aware of. It is strange to me that some uninformed members of the public think they're paying too much for electricity. Surely.............right?