Leaves of Yggdrasil, Part II

I never imagined the 7 am train would be so packed but it is Christmas party season. Lots of people wearing Christmas jumpers - okay I lied. Mostly just me and one other guy. Mine is pretty garish. I love it. It's awful. It's so long it's like a dress and it has a giant Rudolph on it. PERFECT. I just wanted to use this post to revise really. 

I have a busy day ahead of me and I wanted to keep up the streak of writing as many blog posts as possible. 

Leaves of Yggdrasil by Myrkur music video.

Revising Edge Management, Asset Management, and How This All Fits In With Distributed Intelligence (DI)

Once and for all, and first and foremost, and for all of time: the way that consumers are using electricity is changing. 

It is getting more and more complex. We no longer just turn the lights on any more. We no longer just have a washing machine and a fridge and an oven. We don't even just have mobile devices and TV's and laptops that we need to charge up every day anymore.

WE HAVE EV'S. We have heat pumps. We have solar and batteries - allowing us to do things like export excess energy to the grid (which in turn can cause overload - we need to be careful of that!!!). 

We are now PROSUMERS of electricity. 

We are both producers and consumers. In a funny way, this is like social media - we both produce and consume the content. However here, we are talking about electricity. Many of us both produce and consume it. Therefore, the grid was not designed for a two way electricity system between consumers and the main power stations.

What does this mean for Edge Management

Therefore, we need real-time monitoring to maintain the realisability and quality of the grid. Therefore, demand management solutions and grid metering solutions from software companies can help utilities companies to enhance both their data collection process, and the quality of their data. This in turn can increase customer engagement which will support the optimisation of the smart grid - we need data from these "prosumers" in order for our grid data to be as accurate as possible. This will thus support usage optimisation and support demand management. What more could we possibly ask for? I still don't entirely know or understand or see the link between these software solutions and what they can do for customers (both utilities companies and the final users). 

I wish that there was a little bit more information on the website I am looking at. I also wish that, as a Software Engineer, I had a little bit more of an idea of how to build these things. Everything I am looking at screams "Python" to me! But what about JavaScript? I am a JavaScript/TypeScript developer (my first language was JavaScript; I mostly work in TypeScript; they are very very similar) - will I be able to work in my current language? Probably, yes. 

It depends what I want to do. 

You can do most things in JavaScript anyway.

I sometimes wonder if I might have to learn C one day. I guess that depends on how close I want to be to programming the hardware.

But for the work I am doing right now, which is building consumer apps (YAY!), then TS is more than enough - although we do get closer to Python sometimes and I would really like to learn Python anyway and get better at it. Because it's a beautiful language. Why not anyway?

What does this mean for Asset Management 

Well most importantly of all - software solutions for asset management allow us to integrate workflows which have traditionally been siloed. This allows for more timely and informed decision making. Therefore, teams can act faster and move quicker - together. Grid faults can be repaired quicker and power outages and associated costs can be prevented - grid financial resources can be better INVESTED - as well as a fault we can see when the next planned repair is - maybe move things around - thus saving money.

This can maximise crew resources, save costs, and avoid power outages. Basically - crews can decide how to use and how to spend their resources better - and therefore, this can save time. Saving time and planning more efficiently saves money. And also - by planning and fixing resources appropriately and in advance - or in swift time - power outages can be avoided. And that's great! We love that! We don't like power outages! YAYYY!

So what about the DI proposition then

ARRRGH. Well so imagine a charger. A charger for an EV. Now imagine a fleet of chargers for a fleet of EVs. Now imagine those chargers could be SMART. Imagine they could communicate with each other. Imagine they knew what one another was doing. 

Imagine they could turn off and turn on, not only in interdependence with each other, but also in relation to the current state of the grid and how much load they knew that the grid could handle.

This is the DI proposition. 

Imagine smart grid solutions that were so intelligent that you didn't even need to go via the back office. 

Now I'm not saying machines are always the answer - and the solutions I have outlined above in edge and asset management - I don't think they are DI solutions (mostly). But this article I have been reading which interviews Itron - they take it one step further. So in some instances, where instant action is needed - like with a fleet of EV's charging, that needs to charge overnight, but can't overload the grid - well that's when it makes sense. And equally with stuff like meter bypassing solutions - of course this will need to go back via a revenue assurance team as well. But I wonder what it is that can be done by DI in the moment. The article doesn't explain.

With the ever-increasing complexity of the data we have available to us - powered largely in part by the advent of smart meters and their ever-increasing regularity of reads - we have more data available to us than ever was before. 

So what are we going to do with all of this data? Well, it is potentially too much for even a computer system in the back office to process - even with smart and well-designed software this may be too much for a human to process. So we are looking into smart machines then.

Is this new? Is this the future of is this a controversial idea? I don't know.

I don't think that smart hardware is avoidable - nor should it even be - should it? I think smart wind turbines and grids and sensors and pylons make sense.

We just have to not surpass the role of the human in the back office.

That role of that human will always be important. And okay so NOW I'm really excited to move onto the next article. 

And this one will be on... 

Software sparking changes in the power sector

I'm planning to read it all with an especially high focus on the smart grid...

I'm just reading the intro - the author, Cecilia Manduca, talks about falling hardware costs - and how DERs are become cheaper - YAYYY! She mentions what I learned recently and fascinates me - we are going to needs to increase the capacity of the electricity grid by 3x. WOW! I never cease to be fascinated or amazed by this. 

AAAAAAAAND there's more to talk about tomorrow but I'll leave it there. We are drawing in to London. It's time to get ready for my office day and Christmas party. Bye 💙