An Example of What I Do During the Day

My day job is at Pacific Northwest National Lab working in the Electricity Infrastructure group. Most of the time, best case, the conclusions from my weeks or months o work ends up as part of a report. A technical report full of terms most people don't need to understand and even those of us who care about such things resent having to read. A lot of times the report is public because it was funded with government dollars but when was the last time you went looking for a report by a government contractor on ANYTHING you were even slightly interested in? Let's just say, as a rough approximation, that a lot of what I write is not read by many. (Probably including this blog. Hi, Mom.)

But this project I just finished is different. I was part of a small team that made a website that estimates the emissions impacts of various smart grid project.  People more gifted than I did the actual website coding but I had a significant hand in the design of the analysis engine and wrote most of the code that performs those calculations. The site is called the Emissions Quantification Tool and there are people out there who are very excited about it.  It was even mentioned by the Secretary of Energy, Ernest Moniz. (Around here, we call him S-1.)

So go and enjoy; play around. The easiest project to start messing around with is solar PV; that's the one I go to when I wanted to verify some general functionality. Play around with the graph at the bottom of the page. If you really want to be surprised, check out the impact that energy storage has on emissions.

Its nice to have work you can take pride in be so publicly placed.

Hot Air Balloons

A few weeks ago we took an early morning trip to see a hot air balloon launch in a nearby town. I hadn't been to one since I was a kid and my wife had never been before.

Just as the balloons were due to launch, the wind picked up and gradually, the pilots concluded, each on his or her own, that they weren't going to fly that day. We were one of the last to leave, hoping that somebody might take the chance. The upside: we got to see how the balloons are deflated and repacked.