Thinking about Thinking about Turkey Point

Last week five power plants in Florida went off line following a problem in a substation. Active discussion ensued in the blogosphere. One of the first headlines was “Terrorist attack not suspected in plant failures” One of the first comments I saw was on the lines of “Great. Now the IT guys will all come on-line and tell us how we should have done it”.

I’m not going to do that. I have nothing useful to say on the design of any power plants, let alone nuclear plants. All systems were performing as designed. In the belts and suspenders world of nuclear plants, the entire grid is one of the redundant power sources for the cooling systems. The plants were supposed to shut down one of the safety systems lost redundancy. What we saw in Florida was carefully designed systems doing what they were designed to do. If every one of my ideas were fully implemented in the grid, in the building systems, and in building design, these plants would, and should, still have shut down.

If the grid as a whole were re-built as interoperable services with economic interfaces (prices), the blackouts in Florida would not have been as far reaching in their effects. The service oriented grid will enable an ecosystem of local reliability and storage. That ecosystem will support innovation and technology diversity at the distribution and building level. (Note: In power, transmission refers to the long distance transport of energy, the high voltage towers marching to the horizon; distribution refers the lower voltage movement of power around neighborhoods). That market will create islands of reliability wherever it is worthwhile.

The key element is informational interoperability. In engineered systems, interoperability usually means “we can get some signal of some kind between systems”. That signal is data oriented, meaning it is a raw fact that is neither actionable nor useful on its own. Someone with deep domain knowledge program the interactions around those facts. This leads to over-integration between systems.

Very good systematic thinkers tend to extend their systems beyond the domain in which they are skilled. Power engineers tend to build a single giant robot covering continent-sized territories. Faced with the diversity forced upon it by scale, this robot becomes more and more brittle. The only response within the paradigm is for the engineer to become more and more controlling, which ameliorates the systems but makes the long-term problem worse.

Bad systems interfaces hide information about scarcity and value; good systems expose such information. Power systems hide information about scarcity, value, and reliability in systems without interfaces. Utility regulators simplify system interfaces to support historical practice rather than innovation.

The best system interactions are defined around reusable informational interfaces. The most accepted and best understood reusable informational interface is money. Money provides actionable information about scarcity and value. Monetary interfaces are highly re-useable and interoperable.

If we had good informationally interoperable interfaces including a substantial monetary component between each system in the power grid, the plants at Turkey Point would still have shut down. They are well designed systems engineered for safety and long-term reliability. What would be different is that their customers would not rely solely on the fragile power robot. What would change are the local markets in reliability that would spring up. Local markets would let new classes of innovators seek profits in providing new value.

Feeling past today’s interfaces

I attended a talk this month on haptic interfaces and education. Haptic interfaces provide feedback by touch. A mouse or joystick may stop when it gets to a virtual wall, or become bumpy when traversing certain surfaces. I found it humorous that the talk was delivered on Valentine’s Day. Combining holiday stay-at-homes, haptic interfaces, and how a lot of internet hours are spent seemed too close to self parody.

I first saw haptic interfaces in “real life” at a Comdex a decade ago. One booth was demonstrating a vest to wear while playing whatever first person shooter was popular that year. Speakers embedded in the vest would slam the chest when firing; hits from the enemy would slam the wearer’s body with some other sub-sonics. I’ve seen temperature haptic interfaces as well. Haptic interfaces are creeping into the mainstream with the ambitious Falcon and the pervasive Wii.

The theme of the talk was that today’s college student has spent more time in immersive computer games, perhaps, than any other experience before college. Reaching back to John Dewey’s theories on experiential learning, the speaker urged departments to explore how immersive technology including haptic feedback could be used to present material. “Instruction must change to meet the expectations and learning styles of today’s students.”

The talk went on to discuss the advantages of virtual dissections with haptic feedback on each incision, as well as the difficulty in constructing a truly immersive experience. There was some discussion of helping students to better understand geographic information by tagging maps and letting students explore the space with haptic feedback. My first reaction was that the argument was amusing, but trying too hard. Then I remembered an actual project that assisted a nice new analysis of historical data from several years back.

More than five years ago, Jason Morris applied to the graduate program in classics to work with Carolina’s renounced collection of maps of the ancient and classical world. The Jason wished to explore some aspects of Roman military command structure. He wanted to use the detailed maps, including how Roman military camps were re-located over time, and their interaction with roads and the physical geography. An interesting if unexceptional graduate thesis in the making, except for the important detail that Jason Morris was blind.

Skipping over many details, the Ancient World Mapping Center devised a system whereby Jason student could move an optical mouse over the maps. Distinctive sounds were produced when the mouse was over roads (galloping horses), rivers (rushing water), and so on. The student developed a model for how much authority and autonomy each commander in the field had based upon contemporary writings and the travel time between camps, whether for messengers or for reinforcements. The interface was not silly, but useful, and the basis for some good work.

Most interfaces to building systems are remarkably unimaginative and low tech. Static JPEG images with floating numbers above them are as good as it usually gets. These interfaces are nice to close the sale, to show management. In practice, they are so clunky and uninformative that real life technicians usually spun them to look at screens of tabular data.

Today’s students are tomorrow’s workforce. When they leave school comfortable with the virtual world, they will expect what they have learned. Even engineering students today are spending as much time exploring virtual models as they are with pen and calculator. Today’s system interfaces will be considered hokey at best, inadequate at worst.

Tomorrow challenges are more complex and more abstract. Dynamic coordination and choreography of multiple systems is a tougher problem than simple operation of a monolithic system. Systems will need to interact with engineered systems from different domains as well as un-engineered systems. While the expectations of performance will be greater, performance will be driven by economic signals and interactions with the business processes of the enterprise.

Are haptic interfaces parts of the solution?

AC/DC without the wailing

The American Scientist has an excellent summary on issues of AC/DC this month, including some confirmations of points made here earlier, sometimes eliciting howls and snarky email.

One interesting account is that of the municipal ISP in Gnesta, Sweden which opted to build a DC data center years ago. They did not order specialized equipment. They replaced their existing UPS systems with one supplying a steady 350 watts of power into existing systems. As odd as it seems, they did not fry any hardware; they simply saw a continuing 28% reduction in energy use. The worst problems they faced were over-riding some safeties during equipment start-up. One can only imagine the savings if the system were actually designed.

This account leaves out that since their system runs on the batteries of their UPS, the batteries now have 28% longer life. As the electricity in data centers is converted directly to heat, the air conditioning needs of the data center have a similar drop.

One last interesting point is that after Westinghouse and Tesla won out, Consolidated Edison continued to offer legacy DC services in Manhattan to support DC elevator motors and such. The surprising thing, to me, is that this service was finally phased out just this last fall (or possibly the fall before depending upon the publication lead times for the American Scientist).

To reprise the argument, now with more confidence, most modern equipment is DC (Direct Current) internally. Power coming over the lines is AC (Alternating Current). . Those little warm bricks and “wall warts” on the plugs convert AC power to DC. Batteries are DC. Solar power is DC. Wind Power is DC. AC has an advantage in long lines transmission. If power were converted once when it came to the house to DC, then the heat of conversion, now separated onto so many systems, could be better used.

Every DC source today must be converted to AC so it can be converted back to DC. This wastes energy. If the internal distribution of power in the home and office were DC, energy storage would be more effective. On-site generation would be more effective.

In any case, I recommend reading the article.

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/56694