Neighborhood Power Simulations

I'm taking a class on smart grids this semester and a good chunk of the classwork is actually working on a large project. I'm working with a good friend of mine who specializes in networking and we are trying to study the effect of residential power customers (normal people like you and me) and how we all might be more involved in helping the power grid run more efficiently and economically. One of the ways this can be done is to limit the amount of energy being consumed during the periods of peak demand, specifically those hot summer days when everybody's air conditioner is running like mad.

To study this more in detail we are using a relatively new simulator called Gridlab-D.  This simulator is, in a word, quite amazing.  It was written by Pacific Northwest National Lab  under a grand from the DOE specifically to address the problems with simulating in a smart grid environment.  Smart grids are tricky because they break a lot of the traditional thinking about how the grid works.  With the old power system, the power flows from the generators to the customers and whenever the customer wants more power, it is available on demand.  The new smart grid paradigm allows for customers to become something closer to peers in the relationship: solar panels on the roof or electric vehicles in the garage putting energy back onto the grid, customers changing their consumption to save money as the prices or energy changes throughout the day, customers voluntarily limiting their AC use during peak periods for a price break the rest of the year, charging of electric vehicles being co-ordinated among owners (by computers) so that large surges in power don't occur at in-opportune times, all of these can allow the grid to operate more efficiently but require much planning and development if they are to become a reality.

And that's where the academic nerds like me come in.  With Gridlab-D, we can simulate these kinds of situations and see what happens on the power grid.  Specifically, if somebody has a promising idea about one particular aspect of the smart grid concept, it is likely that it can be programmed into Gridlab-D and we can run a simulation to evaluate the idea.

To do this, Gridlab-D has been provided with incredibly detailed models of neighborhood power grids. These models include things like:

• Number of houses in the neighborhood
• Size of houses
• Insulation level of the houses
• Thermostat set-points for the houses
• Efficiency of the air-conditioners
• Number and size of windows in each house
• ...

Almost any type of house you could imagine can be set-up in this simulator.  The houses that come "pre-built" have all of these variations built in so that they mimic the actual variations of houses in a neighborhood.

And the weather.  Gridlab-D allows the user to define which set of recorded weather data to be used so that the neighborhood can be simulated as if it is in Wichita or Chicago or Miami.  You can run the simulation for a day or for a year. How much sunlight hits the houses, how the wind blows, all of it is there.

I'm just getting my feet wet with this simulator and managed to get a simple simulation up and running today.  I took one of the built-in neighborhoods and subjected it to the summer weather here in Wichita, running the simulation four times, each with a different thermostat set-point applied to all the houses in the neighborhood.  To see what happened, I looked at the amount of power the neighborhood consumed throughout the day and I looked at the number of air-conditioners running at any given time.  Here are the pretty pictures:

As you can see from the graph above, the power consumption in the neighborhood goes up as the heat of the day sets in and then backs off as the evening cools down.  Also note that more power is consumed if the entire neighborhood set their thermostats to 73 'F (blue line) vs (81' F).  Going further, we can see that the biggest difference in energy consumption between these two cases is from 8am to noon.  That's kind of interesting.

Looking at the number of running AC units we can see a similar phenomenon.  As the day heats up, more AC units are running and that lowering the thermostat causes more units to run, particularly after 8am. 

Just to make the nerd case clear, this is all being run in simulation.  The simulator is taking the weather data and the house data, calculating how fast the house is heating up, calculating when the air-conditioning turns on, calculates how much energy it is going to consume and does this all for all the houses for the entire day.  That I, with my limited programming ability, could get this all up and running in a week or so is a great indication of just how powerful this simulator is.

Now that I've validated that I've got the simulator running, its time for the real work to begin on our project.  I'm looking forward to this.

Minority

I found out today that I was turned down from a program at North Carolina State designed to help aspiring faculty get a better handle on their career path.  The program is mostly geared towards "under represented" (I think this is the new term for "minority") graduate students and being a white male, as always, my application was kindly rejected.


The irony is that a quick survey of the faculty in the electrical engineering departments of most universities would show that most faculty are not white males; south-central and east Asians rule these programs. In every graduate course I've taken I have been the minority.  I would say that in most cases I am out-numbered 50 to 1.  Its not unusual for their to be more Asian women in these classes than white men.  


And don't even get me started about all the scholarships for women when women out-number men on virtually all US campuses and have for several decades.  These programs seeking to correct injustices and imbalances in higher education appear to have accomplished their goal yet continue to exist, pushing the balance past the point of equity.  I hear of opportunities all the time for women in engineering; where are the special promotional opportunities for men in fields traditionally dominated by women?  Do you know of any scholarships for men seeking to be nurses or elementary school teachers?  I don't.  


There may be a day when our culture decides to value men but I don't think that day is coming soon.

University Education

A good friend of mine gave me an interesting model for defining the roles of universities: discovering new knowledge (research), disseminating knowledge (education) and preserving knowledge (libraries). Though there are many other aspects to universities (dorm life, campus clubs, and don't even get me started on the tail-wagging-the-dog of athletics), these three seem at the core of why universities exist and their traditional value in society. 

If asked to rank these three in order of centrality, I bet most people would place education at the top of the list. When we think of colleges and universities, we think of going to classes, cramming for tests, and reading books (among other things). We have the phrase "a college education" for a reason and for most people, we aspire to such an education. Being college educated means something in our culture and the effort it takes to get that diploma is generally respected.

Without an education role, universities would look very different and be unrecognizable.  There would be no lecture halls and classrooms, no student union, no students milling around campus.  There would be labs and libraries filled with older men and women working on the next great idea.  In some sense these would be like monasteries where the chosen or the elite go to their private work.  It may be possible to visit and observe but it would be difficult to ever be a part of the life of the university.  They would be places where important people did important things and most of us would never really participate.

Thankfully, this is not how most of our universities exist today.

Sort of.

Though our universities continue to espouse a role in education, classes continue to be held, tests administered, grades given, it doesn't take too much time of being a university student to discover that something is distinctly  wrong.  Classes can be large, instruction may be provided by graduate students instead of faculty, instructors don't always know their students by name, textbooks are expensive and unreadable; students can feel like small cogs in the university machine.  Getting an education, actually learning something, takes place in spite of the system, not because of it. Pay these fees, pass these classes, get this diploma, feel college educated.  And the larger and most prestigious the university, the more alienating this feeling can be. How did the education part of university become so lacking?


At least part of the answer (perhaps all of it) becomes clear when the other half of the eduction process is examined: that of the knowledgeable professor who it would seem has been charged with filling eager young minds with profound thoughts. Particularly at larger, research-oriented universities, job security for faculty members comes from the number of scholarly articles they write, the number of conference presentations they give, and the general esteem they develop for themselves and the university as a result of their research. When the time comes for the university to decide if they will retain a professor indefinitely (tenure), the primary factor in that decision is often their research activity. A professor can have documented proof in the form of student surveys and complaints demonstrating a distinct lack of teaching skill or disregard for the education process and still be granted tenure at many universities.  The converse, an excellent educator who has mediocre or poor research accomplishments has virtually no chance of being retained.

So you can see the problem.  Even if a new faculty member desires to be a good educator and wants to invest the time and energy into providing an excellent classroom experience for his or her students, there is little incentive to do so.  The new professor can read the writing on the wall and if he or she wants to still have this job ten years down the road, the path is clear: produce original research, get published, get noticed.  In this context, classroom responsibilities are a hindrance and barrier holding back the new faculty member.

In light of the incentives universities have placed before their faculties, it is easy to see how a university-level education isn't always what it is cracked up to be. New faculty can't be bothered to care about classrooms, their jobs are on the line if they don't produce research.  Even tenured faculty who do have a large degree of job security have no specific incentive to become excellent educators.  If they desire to do so they have that freedom but it will mean walking away from the traditional measure of a successful faculty, namely research. Using graduate students as instructors in lower-level classes allows universities to free up faculty to do research, provide instruction at a much lower cost, and provide graduate students an opportunity to learn how to teach in a very trial-by-fire manner. 

The scenario described above is obviously a generality but it is true.  There are universities that have avoided this problem and generally they do it by choosing to be not research-oriented.  Many of these colleges and universities have no graduate program and have very little if any research being conducted. Often they are also smaller, less prestigious, and private (rather than state-funded).  But because the faculty make their bread-and-butter teaching, the instruction can often be excellent and the students get the benefits of a true college education. 

To the extent that big state schools have diminished or forsaken their role in truly educating their students, they have become corrupt, placing the prestige of the institution over the good of the students.  The students in these places are forced to make a choice: do they stay in the system that has walked away from education to get a name-brand diploma or do they find a smaller school that can provide a high-quality education.  (Often, there is little choice due to other factors like cost and lack of feasible alternatives.) So the universities keeps producing graduates who may or may not have learned what they should have learned and the diploma of a school is less and less a marker of quality and more a symbol of which club the graduate belonged to.

The situation is more complex than I paint it here and as you might suspect, money is wrapped up in many aspects of it.  My point is simple, though.  Despite these complexities if a university is not providing a worthwhile education, if the faculty has little or no incentive to provide excellent instruction, if the seal of approval that is called a diploma does not certify something meaningful and valuable about the product of a given university's education process, then the university is failing in one of its fundamental roles.  Furthermore, the value of the university to society will diminish over time and what a college education once meant, it will mean no longer. If graduation from a given university is not related to the demonstration of the acquisition of something (skills, knowledge, expertise of some kind), then the university has become a diploma mill and we are all the worse off for it.

Political Parties

Says Newt Gingrich:

"You need a solid conservative because you have to be able to draw the contrast.  If we [Republicans] run a moderate who is in any way close to where Obama is, we'll lose."

I understand political parties have a primary goal to win elections.  These parties are formed so that somewhat disperate beliefs can be unified behind single candidates that are generally close enough to the parties common goals.  Its always an imperfect fit and everybody is always unhappy in some ways with the candidates and leaders they put forward but everybody in the party agrees that having their candidate win is better than letting somebody else into office. Political parties are fundamentally about winning.

Newt Gingrich is a very experienced politician and he understands this in very practical ways much better than I probably ever will.  His words above make sense, too, because he is the "solid conservative" compared to the front-runner and more moderate Mitt Romney.  He is making the case that a moderate candidate will appear too similar to President Obama and all those in the center of the political landscape will view little distinction between the candidates.  If there's no difference between the two, why vote for one over the other. Even if a voter doesn't care for Obama, he or she may reason it is better to stick with the "devil you know" rather than vote for a similar but unknown candidate.

Here's the fundamental flaw in Gingrich's argument: you can't win an election if most of the voters don't want a
"solid conservative".  It could be that most voters are more interested in more moderate candidates and that running a candidate too far from political center will ensure that only a minority of voters will be interested in said candidate and the election will be lost.  If this is the case, the Republicans are in a difficult spot: they need to run a candidate who is centrist enough in beliefs to attract enough votes to win but distinct enough to motivate voters away from the politically similar incumbent.

And, of course, there's the more general problem with political parties and their focus on winning: if the goal is winning and beating the other teams, its easy to lose track of what should be the more fundamental goal of making the country a better place.  I suppose political parties do believe that their way is the best way in which case what is best for the party (winning elections and being in political power) is best for the country.  For this equality to hold, the other side must be void of good ideas, completely bereft of worthwhile plans, and lacking in any moral authority; it takes arrogance to make this claim.  If "best" equals "our team" then by definition the other team must have nothing to offer, there can be no good ideas they can contribute; if the other side did have something to offer, the combination of ideas would be better than "best".

To ensure victory often means discrediting the other team, even the ideas that may be good and helpful.  My friend calls this "football politics", placing victory in the political contest above the good of the country.  It seems that the major political parties today have decided that winning is the most important thing and seem to do all they can to vilify, discredit, and destroy their opponents.  Each side seems to have decided the only way to victory is through the complete refutation of the other side including the ideas that might be helpful.

This is why I'm an independent.

PDX Wonder

Of all the airports I have visited, I enjoy the Portland, Oregon (PDX) airport the most.  I like the skylights,  the central listing of flights right after security, the floor map of the rivers, the MAX terminal, the glass canopy, the sky-walks and the free wireless internet. (I don't care for the carpet which has not changed style for as long as I can remember.  It may not have been changed period, even when the airport was redesigned.)

This, though, this is my absolute favorite part of the entire airport.  It serves no purpose but to whimsically amaze and it works on me every time.

I'll leave it to you to figure out the magic.

(The fixtures are on both sides of the ramp down from security at the start of Concourse C.  With the "new" connector in place once you get through security on either side you can walk over and examine the miracle for yourself.  I highly encourage this.)

The Amazon Return

I just spent half an hour dealing with Amazon on trying to start the return process for a defective gift I received.  I've had great experiences with the retailer in the past but this time it was awful.  All of the problems I had stemmed from not having the order number for the item.  This seems like an unnecessary burden to place on me, the gift receiver.  I know what the item is, I know who gave it to me and I know it was ordered from Amazon.  It seems like this should be enough to uniquely identify the transaction and process the return.

It isn't, though.  I can't process the return online without an order number and despite the statement on the return webpage that I can contact customer service to get the order number, I still don't have it.  I did an online chat with a customer service representative (hi, Alvin!) who said that without a tracking number or an order number he could not start the return process.  My second attempt (once it became clear to me that Alvin was not a top-notch support specialist) was a phone call that was quickly answered but where the representative stated a similar story. This time I countered that the return webpage stated I could get the order number from him if I provided certain details on the sender (name, email address, ...).  I provided the particulars, he put me on hold and then hung up.

Clearly there has been a holiday hiring binge and I don't expect these representative to be the best Amazon has to offer.  I do expect them to be competent, though, and I do expect there to be agreement between what their website says and what the representatives say.

For now, I'm trying to get an order number and see if I can actually get the return processed.  I think the downsides of the gigantic online retailer are becoming more clear.

Conference at Berkeley

A week ago I was fortunate enough to head out to another power conference, this time it was off to Berkeley where the 60'F temperatures were much more welcome than the 16'F temperatures I left behind.

First up, look what I found in my purse after arriving in California:

This is a saw blade (about the size of a pocketknife) that I accidentally smuggled onto the plane and I didn't find it until my second day in California.  I have no idea why the x-ray machine did not catch it; maybe it looked like a comb?  This is one more anecdotal indication that taking off our shows and belts doesn't seem to be keeping weapons from making it onto planes.

We stayed at a hotel within walking distance of campus that is by far the fanciest hotel I have been a guest at: the Claremont.  As was proudly displayed behind the check-in desk, this was a four diamond hotel.  In the lobby was a large, two-story Christmas display. The hotel looked like a palace from the outside and it was clear after spending some time inside that this was an old building constructed in a time long before Berkeley was the place it is today. 

What's more, for reasons I don't quite understand, the room I was staying in was upgraded and I was put in a suite for the two nights I was there.  One bedroom, one bathroom, and one common living room and dining room.  The desk clerk said the room was $1500/night and in the high-priced housing market of the Bay area, I would believe that.  Its a shame we were in meetings all day and didn't get a chance to enjoy the room.

We did have a little bit of free time to spend walking the neighborhood and it was interesting to see how living was managed in such a space-constrained area.  This was definitely an urban neighborhood;  I saw very few apartment buildings but only the most wealthy seemed to be able to afford a front yard.  Some neighborhoods were row-houses packed right next to each other and some were only slightly more spread out.  Lots of people of bikes, not much parking and a fair amount of pedestrian traffic.

I also saw a church in our walk with a very interesting architectural style.  Mostly concrete with a very cubic design (that doesn't show up well in the photograph).  It looked more like a bunker than a place of spiritual communion; I have no idea if the building was designed as a church or not.

One of the residents used their small plot of garden/front yard for an orange tree: I think this is the first time I had ever seen one.

And what would a trip to Berkeley be like without out some politically liberal culture.  I have here for your examination disposable silverware made from potatoes and a protest recruitment poster.

The conference itself was great as usual.  I always enjoy the opportunity to hear what others are working on and the ideas that are being kicked around.  Within hours of the completion of the even, one of the presenters made a great point about how the power grid is changing right now.  Up until recently, it has been the responsibility of the utilities/generator owners to ensure that they could provide enough power for all customers on demand; the generation followed the load.  With the growth of renewables whose output is beyond our control we are starting to see small reversals in this trend where some load is starting to follow the availability of the generation.  

For the longest time the electrical industry was a one-way street where there was no negotiation and the electrical customer was always right. If the customer wanted electricity, the customer got it.  Now the relationship is starting to gain elements of negotiation and the utilities are trying to find ways where they are providing incentives to allow them to control customer's loads (like charging an electric car or running the clothes drier) based on when cheap electricity is available.

Something to think about and keep in mind when you hear stories about the smart grid or changes in the power industry.

Bicycling

After nearly two years of having my bike in mothballs, I was back on the road today.  The weather was beautiful today and I greatly enjoyed the ride.  My plan is start my year-round riding again, even though fall is fading fast and winter is near at hand.  I'll need to figure out my commuting routine, how to handle shleping my stuff back and forth to school and work out some details with my afternoon-oriented school schedule. 

But I'm back on the road and it feels great.

Earthquake and the Internet

As some of you may heard, the normally seismically boring Plain States (that's what I'm calling the part of the country where I live) have had a number of tremors over these past few weeks.  The epicenters have been between Oklahoma City and Tulsa and all have scored under 6 on the Richter scale.  This past Saturday evening one of them was large enough that we felt it here in Wichita.

I was mostly asleep and was waken by the shaking of our bed. The shaking was minor enough that I thought one of our dogs had broken out of its kennel and was up on our bed busy trying to relieve an itch.  The fog cleared in  my mind to realize that probably wasn't likely; I then noticed our rafters were popping and cracking like the wind was blowing heavily.  This wind, though, was very rythmic in nature and just so happened to be blowing in a way to match the vibrations of our bed.

My mind was still futily trying to figure out what was going on and I asked my wife if she was casuing this rucus.  I have long suspected her of having superpowers but she flatly denied responsibilty. 

The shaking stopped; she and I stared at each other in the dark, not knowing how to respond. 

"That was an earthquake."  I knew I was right the moment I said it but how to confirm this?  I read a newspaper article yesterday that said over 300 residents of my fair city called 911 to report the news or ask for confirmation.  I was almost one of these but realized the operators probably wouldn't appreciate the call and weren't seismological experts.  Local TV news?  Maybe, but I'd have to get out of bed for that and who knows what they would say.  There was a computer right by the bed so I grabbed it and started trolling the internet looking for an authoritative source that would provide details.  After several minutes of general searching I tried the United States Geological Survey website and a few more mintues after that found this page.

In less that 10 minutes I knew that yes, there had been an earthquake just minutes before, the epicenter was down in Oklahoma and it was significantly larger than many of the recent quakes in the same area.

The USGS has a great website that put the data up quickly.  The internet made the data available quickly.  We had our confusion oblviated quickly and fell back asleep.

Published

Sometime in the past few weeks I officially began my career as recognized academic: my paper got published.  The paper in question was one I submitted for the conference in Detroit at the end of July and for reasons that I don't understand it took them roughly three months to get it posted online.

But here it is.

As circumstances would have it, just yesterday I started writing the paper I'll be submitting for the 2012 session of the same conference.  The deadline is the end of the month and I've got all the research done; all that's left is the process of assembling the words in a clear and helpful manner.  This paper will be on a completely different topic: rather than dealing with wind turbines I'm looking at the effect on the electrical distribution system of the addition of a significant amount of generation.  Said differently, when a bunch of people, businesses, and manufacturers install solar panels and wind turbines, how does that affect the operation of the neighborhood electrical system?  Traditionally power flows from the big generators to the customers but in this case, if enough people install solar panels, that flow may end up reversed.

(For the power nerds out there, here are the details. Due to the effective limitation in IEEE 1547-2003, inverters can only contribute real power to the distribution feeder.  At high penetration levels this could lead to a case where real power is flowing towards the substation but reactive power is still having to be supplied by the substation and/or capacitors on the feeder.  My paper seeks to discover if this counter-flow between real and reactive power is a significant issue or not.)

My greatest fear is going through the process of submitting it through the IEEE website.  Last year it was a torturous process due to an unspecified problem with how their software interpreted the files I sent over. Now that I'm aware of the problem I'm going to try to get it all squared away before I submit it but there is a lot out of my control and I expect there will be problems once again.

Federal Tax Burden

The Occupy protests sparked my curiosity yesterday with their "99%" slogan.  Specifically, it got me thinking about tax burden in the United States as it relates to income. I did some digging around this morning and came up with some data from the Congressional Budget Office and put together a chart that confirmed by suspicions.

The above chart splits the US population into fifths and shows the percentage of total federal tax dollars each group would be paying under two different taxation systems: a simple flat tax (outer ring) and the 2006 tax structure (inner ring).  Again, this is all about actual federal tax dollars, not about marginal tax rates.

The data on the 2006 tax structure comes directly from the CBO.  To calculate the (highly) theoretical flat tax revenues, I used the CBO numbers for average income for each income bracket  and population for each income bracket.  I chose to compare the actual 2006 data to a theoretical flat tax not because I am necessarily a proponent of such a system but because a flat tax is probably the simplest tax structure. Everybody pays a certain percentage of their income, no matter where the money comes from or how much they make. (Because of this fact, in doing my tax revenue calculations, the proportion each income bracket pays is unaffected by the flat tax rate.  The total number of tax dollars would be, though.)

Items of note:

1. Even under a flat tax, the richest 20% of tax-payers will provide over half the tax dollars the federal government collects.  The obvious reason for this is that the richest 20% make a lot more money; 10% (for example) of $1,000,000 dollars is a lot more than 10% of $10,000.
2. In 2006, the richest 20% paid ~70% of all the federal tax dollars.
3. The poorest 20% hardly paid any of the federal tax dollars in 2006 (~0.8%).  Under a flat tax they would pay ~4%; this would be a five-fold increase in their tax rate.
4. If we moved to a flat tax, everybody's tax rate would go up (each group would be expected to pay for a larger portion of the total tax revenue) except for the richest 20%; their's would do down.

I'll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.

Results from Measuring Household Temperatures for Most of the Summer

The temperature measurement system I installed in late June has been running for several months now with only minor problems and with the highs now in the 80s, two of the experiments I've been running over the summer have come to a close and I'd like to share the results.

Let's do the easy one first: attic temperature.  A month or so after I got the temperature system going we could see that our attic was getting quite warm on those hot days, often above 130'F.  I talked with my wife about it, we did some reading, and decided that adding a bit more ventilation would be good idea.  The cost would be minimal and we hoped it would lower the difference between the outside air and the attic.  Thankfully it did; the results are below.

The difference between the old and new ventilation is pretty clear: adding the ventilation did lower the temperature difference between the outside and attic air. The statistics show a nine degree cooling in the attic by adding the extra ventilation.  (For you statistics nerds, the sample size is ~25 for both conditions, and standard deviation is ~5 degrees.)

The other experiment I ran was based on a conversation I had at a cook-out over the summer.  One of the gals there said her father was a HVAC guy and that he recommended keeping a constant set-point during the summer; that is, don't turn the AC off when the house is unoccupied.  It was hard for me to believe that this would use the same amount of electricity as a more "conservative" approach of turning it off when gone but I realized I didn't actually have anything more than opinion to back up my assertion.  Time to do some science.

I decided to test this theory and added a sensor that would show me when the central fan in our house was running.  The fan only kicks on when the air conditioning (or furnace) are on and so this allowed me to measure how long the air-conditioner ran during a given 24-hour period.  I semi-randomly changed the programming on our thermostat to either hold a constant temperature all day or to turn the AC back shortly before we got home from work and school.  Here's an example of each:

The yellow line at the bottom is the state of the fan: 55'F is on, 15'F is off.  For a day when the AC was on a schedule, it turned off around 7am and would come back on around 2:30pm in an attempt to get the house down the temperature by 5pm when we came got home.  You can see the purple (kitchen) and cyan (hallway) lines rise throughout the day and then when the AC comes on in the afternoon, begin descending.

When we kept the thermostat constant all day, the AC cycles to keep the temperature in the house at the thermostat set point. The purple and cyan lines stay at an even value throughout the day.  (You'll notice the basement sensor is relatively unaffected by the AC.  This is why everybody should have a basement if they live in a place that gets hot.  Basements are the best.)

After a summer of running both cases, here are the results.

The results are much more mixed than I would expect.  I think to make any good conclusions a statistical linear regression would need to be done; I haven't done that yet and probably won't ever get around to it.  Its clear that the run-time of the AC is strongly related to the peak temperature for the day.  This should be no surprise to anybody.  It is less clear which thermostat schedule uses less energy.  For the very hot days (> ~105'F) you could make a pretty good case that turning the AC off when you're gone at work will save some energy.  For days when the highs are less than 100'F, though, it seems there is very little difference between the two cases.

These results are surprising to me.  I would have expected that keeping the AC off for seven or eight hours a day would cause it to run less in the grand scheme of things.  It may but the difference isn't huge. I may try repeating this experiment next summer, just to see how it turns out.  I guess the good news is that if you're home all day with kids or work you don't have to feel too guilty about having the air-conditioner running the whole time; its not killing your bill much worse than the rest of us.

New Skylight

For the past few weeks I've been "in-progess" on installing a tubular skylight for the stairwell leading to our basement. There was been no overhead light from the day we bought it which means the stairs were always dark. No longer the case: I give you before and after pictures taken at the same exposure for an apples-to-apples comparison.

Both of these above photos are deceptive; it wasn't that dark before and isn't that heavenly bright now. Such are the limitations of the dynamic range of today's digital cameras. Below is something that is more akin to how my eyes perceive it now.

The installation spanned multiple weeks due an unconventional installation that lead to needing extra parts only available online. These tubular skylights use a dome on the roof to collect sunlight and then channel that light through highly polished and reflective tubes to an opening in the interior ceiling. Due to the stairwell's location, to get the dome on the west side of the roof (where it would get the most sunlight) meant making a very non-direct route for the light to follow from the dome to the ceiling opening.

The hardest part in all of this was determining which extra parts I would need and if the installation would work at all. You couldn't do a test fitting with all the pieces until they arrived and that didn't happen until I knew which parts needed to be ordered. Very chicken and egg. I think if I had all the parts in hand, it wouldn't have taken me more than five hours to complete the project.

This is the second such skylight in our house and we are very happy with them both. When we bought the house there was one in the dining room and we were so happy with it we decided to try this one. I don't know why it took us this long to get around to it but now its done.

I think there's a good chance the hallway will get one as well.

The Midwest

Shown below is one of many large displays on campus used for things like campus announcements, latest headlines from the news, and weather forecasts including the weather radar for our region.

Note the title on the left: "Midwest Radar".

Note the emphasis on "west" by including Idaho, Utah, Arizona and even a small part of California on the map.

Note the lack of inclusion of many traditional Midwest locations such as the states of Illinois (and of particular note, Chicago), Michigan (including Detroit), Indiana and Ohio.

At least now I know that Kansas is officially in the Midwest. Along with New Mexico.

Storm Damage

Last night we had a severe thunderstorm roll through the area, causing damage throughout the city. Winds were up to 70 mph, 2.25 inches of rain. We lost power around 10pm and it was eventually restored by 4:30 pm. We had minor damage to our fence but many of our neighbors had much greater damage. Here are a few pictures I took while wandering the neighborhood, waiting for power to come back.

Evidence of the large amount of rainfall: the high water mark of leaves in people's yards. The street would have had to be completely flooded for the water to get this far into the yard.

This street light was pulled down by a limb from a tree limb that fell and landed on the power line for the light.

I'm guessing the damage at this utility pole was the cause of the loss of power in our neighborhood. Our block is fed through these lines and as you can see, several were snapped (again, by falling tree limbs).

Two Nerd Ideas from the Nerd Conference

As I mentioned previously, I spend the first half of last week in Detroit at a conference for those of us in the power and energy part of electrical engineering. There were many interesting topics discussed, two of which I thought might be interesting to the general public.

The first is not something that is actually a new idea but rather one expressed in a new-ish way. About a year ago it first came to my attention that people outside the electrical power industry probably don't realize that there is virtually no energy storage in our power system. (There are a few exceptions but not enough to matter much.) No energy storage means that whenever you turn on a light in your house, some generator somewhere has to produce a tiny bit more power immediately. There is no way to produce a bunch of energy ahead of time and serve it up as needed later. My professor said it this way: "The electrical energy industry is the only manufacturer whose goods are consumed the instant they are produced."

Using this manufacturing analogy, you can think of any time a light is turned on or an air-conditioner starts up as an "order" being placed to the electrical company for some energy. Unlike every other manufacturer, though, the delivery of the good must be made immediately. None of us would accept a situation where a light switch is flipped and the light turns on minutes, hours, or days later. When we want energy we want it now. Thankfully, physics also makes the same requirement and the energy will either flow immediately or not at all. We'll never get an email from the power company confirming our energy order to run our air conditioner with an estimated delivery date of next week (or the ability to pay extra for two-day shipping).

It is actually possible for the electrical energy companies to fail to provide the right amount of energy in two ways: undersupply and oversupply. Undersupply is something we've all experienced in some way as brownouts and/or blackouts. Actually, a true blackout due to a lack of energy being produced is fairly rare; most of the time when our houses loose power its due to other event like damage to equipment due to a storm. This past winter, though, Texas had some customers in blackout due to a combination of unexpected down-time on some of its generators and unusually cold weather causing customers to turn up their electric heaters.

On the other end of the spectrum are oversupply situations which may not seem as bad. What does it matter if the generators produce more power than we use? The answer to this is a tiny bit technical and it relates to the frequency of the system operation. Without worrying about the details, I'll simply say that all the generators are designed to run at 60 Hz and everything we plug into an outlet expects power at 60 Hz and if more energy is generated than used, the frequency begins to drift up and bad things begin to happen. 60 Hz is the standard and deviation from that standard isn't good for anybody.

All of this I've laid out so far can be summarized in one sentence: at all times, electrical energy supply (from generators) must match electrical energy demand (by consumers). This is the definition of stable system operation. Balancing supply and demand turns out to be very complicated for many reasons, not the least of which is that demand by consumers varies throughout the day and year and that demand can change suddenly. There is much effort being made to predict the amount of electrical energy that will be needed but theses efforts will always be imperfect. (Here's a graph for the California system showing the predicted and actual demand for the day showing this imperfection.) The result of this is that electrical system operators need to always have generators standing by to pick up any extra demand that may suddenly appear. These generators have to be able to respond instantaneously (not in a minutes, or fifteen seconds, or even five seconds) to changes in demand which means they have to be fully up and running responding quickly as the demand on the system changes. What's more, there have to be still other power plants that are not fully online but able to ramp up their output quickly if even larger changes in demand begin to form.

All of this say one simple thing: there are many many more generators in our electrical system than are needed for most days of the year. Many of these generators are not regularly used or do not produce their full output power most of the time. In fact, some of them may only be used during the peak demand for the year, during the hottest days of the summer. Going back to our factory analogy, this is the equivalent of building a factory so that it is able to produce enough goods during the peak Christmas season even though the rest of the year much of the factory will be idle. It all comes back to the fact that there is no energy storage in our system. There is no ability to produce a bunch of energy and put it in a warehouse to be shipped out when needed.

This leads to the second idea I heard at the conference: electric vehicles and their batteries. As these vehicles become more popular and affordable, we are going to start seeing the introduction of non-trivial energy storage introduced to our electrical energy system via the large battery packs in these cars. There is a lot of talk concerning the use of the battery packs in the cars to provide backup power for your house or even electric utility companies paying the car-owners to use that energy for whatever needs the grid may have at a given point in time. There are many interesting ideas floating around out there and all of them will help the system run more efficiently but there are still a lot of details to be worked out; I'm not going to discuss any of them.

I'm going to talk about what we do with the batteries once they have reached the end of life for use in cars. Again, due to physics (and in this case chemistry) batteries that are useless for electric vehicles are far from dead. The figure I heard thrown around was 80%; battery packs in electric vehicles will be removed once, when full charged, they only have 80% of their original design capacity. This means these batteries still have a lot of life left in them, just not for transportation purposes. Many smart people are considering a second-life use for these batteries as distributed energy storage in neighborhoods going by the name "community energy storage" (CES). If these batteries can be repackaged and assembled economically into large battery banks, they could be put out in neighborhoods and act as energy storage distributed all over the grid. From the utility's perspective there are many things that could be done with these battery packs, most of which we as normal people don't care that much about. What we do care about is not losing power and these battery packs could solve that problem; we would have neighborhood-wide battery-backup with the potential to have virtually uninterrupted power.

The other implication of this second life for car batteries is that it may help lower the cost of electric vehicles. If there is a well-established market for "used" electric vehicle batteries, when the time comes to replace those batteries, the car owner may get 80% of the value of a new battery pack by selling the old one. Using made up numbers, if a battery pack costs $10,000 when new but can be resold when its "dead" for $8,000, the net cost to the care owner is only $2,000 for the battery pack in his or her electric car. Batteries in electric cars are a significant cost-driver and having a way to recoup those costs could make electric vehicles more affordable.

Conference in Detroit

The front half of this past week I spent in Detroit at a conference, the General Meeting for the IEEE Power and Engineering Society. The meeting is held ever year with the purpose of presenting the results from the research work being done by universities and actual implementation of these ideas by energy utility companies. In addition, there are a long list of meetings held by the various committees, sub-committies, working groups and task forces addressing current the areas of concern in the power and energy world. At any given moment there are dozens of meetings taking place and just figuring out which meetings and presentations to attend takes a significant amount of work; there's a paperback-sized conference guide that is (poorly) designed to help attendees navigate all the options.

The content of the conference meetings and presentations was great; it was very helpful to hear work being presented by the authors themselves as well as presentations from people who don't traditionally publish and thus aren't normally directly visible to academics like me. I'll write more about this later but for now you can safely assume it was nerdy in nature.

So until I get that put together, here's a little show-and-tell from the few days I spent there. I would have put this up earlier but the internet access at the hotel was not up to the onslaught of 500 graduate electrical engineering students.

Most of the conference meetings were held in this building, the GM Renaissance Center. Based on my wanderings in the building, it appears to multi-purpose. My guess is that all of the building you can see in this picture is office space, maybe mostly used by GM? The lower levels house a Marriot hotel, retail space, conference rooms and a show-floor for the latest products from GM.

Here's a view of the lower levels. The sky bridge shown here connected the hotel I was staying in with the Marriot hotel in the Renaissance Center where the conference was being held. I barely went outside during the conference, walking back and forth between the two buildings. I know that Detroit is going through some tough times but the view from my daily commute between the two buildings revealed none of that.

The interior of the lower levels was very open with suspended walkways between the five different towers of the building.

Down on the showroom floor I got my first look at the Chevy Volt, the car every electrical engineer wants to own. I took this photo because I noticed that the grill normally used to allow outside air to enter the engine compartment and cool the engine no longer did so; it was entirely decorative and non-functional. The Volt does have a gasoline engine that is used to charge batteries but it is rather small and as you can tell from the picture, it isn't located in the traditional front-and-center location in the engine compartment.

Every morning all the cars in the showroom on the ground floor get a cleaning.

I'm revealing my ignorance of geography but who moved Canada across the strait from Detroit? There is it, just a drive through a tunnel and you're in another country. Windsor, Canada also hosts a very visible Harrah's casino.

More frivolously, the hotel I stayed in seemed to be missing several floors. My room was on the 14th floor and the elevators in the hotel were the fastest I've ever ridden. My guess is it took less than ten seconds to travel from the ground floor to the floor labelled "14", however high up that actually is.

And my pet peeve for the trip: the air conditioner in my room. The hotel had central air rather than an individual unit in each room. This cut down on the noise which is certainly nice but in this case there seemed to be a critical design flaw. The vent at the top dumped could air into the room and the vent at the bottom pulled the air out; in-between was the thermostat. First of all, having the outlet and inlet for the room so close together doesn't encourage circulation of the air throughout the entire room. Secondly, putting the thermostat between the two does accurately measure the temperature of the air as it moves from outlet to inlet but not as much the temperature of the room. Due to these two design choices it was very hard for the AC to do a good job of actually cooling the room. It did a great job of cooling the space between those two vents, though.

Impression Planting

A friend of mine pointed me towards this video on Youtube of an impressionist doing a speech from Shakespeare in a variety of characters. The video is below but here is my challenge to you: close your eyes, listen to the audio, and see how many of the famous characters you can identify. Once your done, go back and watch the video (where the names of each character are given) and see how you did.

Here's my theory: the impressionist, though highly skilled, is relying on your existing knowledge of the characters to fill out his impression and make it seem more realistic. When you don't know who you're supposed to be thinking of, the impression is not as strong and it is harder to know who he is impersonating. This is not to detract from his incredible performance, just wondering how much of the impression we as audience members are providing ourselves.

Anyway, take the test and let me know which ones you got before looking at the answer key. My wife got three on her own.

Dogs and the Frog

A frog happened to wander its way into our backyard. Our dogs found it. The poor frog will remember this day for a while (assuming he makes it out alive).

UPDATE: NPR has a great little story about one dog and her dealings with the frogs (or rather, toads) in her life.

Basement Sensor

My previously mentioned tutor and nerd mentor who enabled me to get started on this project took one look at my code and found the mistake that was keeping the basement sensor from working properly. Making its first-time ever screen appearance, I give you: the Basement Temperature (brown line).

The next problem to solve: why all the "noise" in the data during the second half of the day? We have a few guesses but don't have any firm convictions at this point but we're assuming that something is happening to drive a single measurement to an unreasonable level. The proposed fix is to throw out all unrealistic measurements either based on absolute limits (no temperatures greater than 200'F and less than -30'F) or a relative limit (no temperature change more than 50 degrees away from the previous measurement). This will complicate the code slightly but, hey, that's what nerd friends are for.

Whole-House Fan and Attic Temperature

A year or so ago we installed an Airscape whole-house fan. The fan is supposed to provide cooling to the house in two ways:

1. Pulling cool air from the outside into the living area, replacing the air in the house as well as cooling the interior structure of the house.
2. Displacing the highly heated air in the attic with cooler air from the outside (via the house).

We've been very happy with the cooling the fan provides to the living area of the house but we've had to simply assume that the fan was adequately cooling the attic.

Until now.

With the installation of my super-nerdy temperature measurement system, we now have proof that the fan is doing its job. Last night we turned it on as we we're going to bed, knowing the overnight lows would be cool enough to provide benefit. Looking at the graph, you can see around 10pm when the fan turns on the attic temperature (green) drops pretty quickly.

Nice the see our assumptions were correct.

Nerd Project: Household Temperatures

I spent most of Saturday crawling around the attic and drilling small holes in the ceiling to complete a project I've been batting around for over a year now. Since we put in our whole-house fan (about a year and a half ago) I've been curious to see what effect the fan would have in reducing the temperature in our attic. This got me thinking about temperature regulation in our house in general: the basement having much smaller changes in temperature during both the winter and the summer, the temperature in the two bedrooms we've don't used and have closed off, how much cooking in the kitchen heats the house, et cetera.

Enabled by a friend of mine who loaned me a critical piece of hardware (because he's even nerdier than me and had extras just laying around his house), I built a little system that measures the temperature in six locations around our house throughout the day. This collection of little programs creates an internal webpage that shows the current temperature for all six locations in the house and every morning creates a graph of the previous day's data and adds a link to that graph on the webpage.

Here's an example from yesterday.

A few items of note:

• The dark blue line for our garage shows a little ramp starting around 5:30am. This is when we started the clothes drier which vents into our garage and thus, warms it up. My wife has been interested to see how pronounced this effect is and whether we need to try to modify the venting so it dumps the air outside.
• The spike in the purple line a little after 6pm is dinner being cooked. Again, another wife-requested measurement.
• You can see attic (green) gets very hot during the day, hotter than the outside temperature. It was too hot yesterday to run the whole-house fan so there was no circulation in the attic. This data seems to suggest that getting some kind of attic fan that ventilates the attic better throughout the day may help in keeping the house cooler. We've got a fair amount of insulation but with the temperature knocking around 130'F during the peak of the day when the outside air is barely at 90'F, it seems like our attic could be acting as a heat source and some of that heat is sure to be leaking its ways back into our house.
• Relatedly, the garage is definitely getting warmer than the outside our throughout the day as well. More insulation between the garage and the house would help but an easier solution may be to open the garage doors to allow the air to ventilate. There are plenty of hot days left in the summer to try this.

This system has been running for a few days now with only minor hitches. The biggest bug is that I something is wrong the basement measurements. I know the sensor is good as it was the first (and easiest) one to install and I used it as a proof-of-concept. I've been talking with my nerd-enabling friend and we've got a few ideas I'm going to pursue. I'm also a bit perplexed at how noisy the data is at times. The indoor data (kitchen and hallway) seem very smooth but the rest vary much more than I would expect. Maybe its not noise and the temperatures do vary that much.

Aside from adding a few more sensors (closed-off rooms, maybe the bedroom and the living room), I would also like to add sensors that detect when the whole-house fan is running and when the air-conditioning/furnace fan is running. I hope to get those last two in sometime this summer but I need to figure out the best/easiest way to do it.

I'll write another post soon in a few days detailing the specifics of how the system is put together for any fellow nerd out there who is interested.

Infant Rabbit Update

After about 24-hours of peace and quiet away from Anise, our little guys seemed to be doing fine (psychological damage aside) and so we decided to release him back into the wilds of our backyard. He spent the first hour or so just huddled in the grass. By the time I was leaving for work he was starting to be a bit mobile and explore around. When I came back from work, he was gone. Here's hoping he survived.

Anise did find a sibling of our friend (also under the deck) and after using it as a toy for a few minutes, managed to kill it. I buried it in the side yard out of Anise's prying nose and paws.

Hopefully this is the last of our infant-rabbit woes. Anise is still carefully exploring the deck for opportunities though she hasn't been barking like she did before. The family may have moved on.

Half-Way

For several days now whenever we have let Anise outside to run around and get out some of the crazies she has been trying to get under our deck and, failing, barking animatedly. This is the same thing she does when there is a rabbit out of reach (in the neighbors yard, across the street) and she is excited by the possibility but frustrated by the circumstances. This morning she found a way under the deck and shortly thereafter a rabbit did emerge. A very small rabbit.

I have no idea what transpired under our deck this morning. The rabbit that emerged had a small amount of blood around its mouth and one eye appeared to have been permanently damaged. It was making small, pathetic squeaking sounds and was laid out on its back, chest heaving but otherwise unmoving.

What do you do with a half-way dead infant wild rabbit?

We couldn't leave it laying there but we had and have no interest in a baby rabbit for another pet. We choose to give it shelter for the morning, to try to make it as comfortable as possible. We fully expected it to be dead within the hour and made a home that would be easy to bury when the time came. I found a spot in our basement that they dogs can't get to and where its nice and cool. I left two ice cubes in the improvised water tray we were using along with a portion of a leaf of lettuce and small strawberry before I went to school that morning.

This evening when I returned it was still alive. It seemed to be resting and though not moving around in traditional rabbit style, it was clearly still able to move. We're going to try to assess the situation more clearly this evening.

The end game isn't very clear to me. Do we hope to nurse it back to health and set it free? Where is its mother? What if it has been permanently injured in a way that will make it impossible to survive on its own?

Its hard to say what were going to do with this little fur-ball our dog thrust into our lives.

Its not clear from the photo but the little guy is only a few inches long, more like a mouse than a rabbit.

Basil Goes to the Barber

We've got two outdoor-oriented trips in the near future that our dogs will be joining us on and to cut down on the amount of bramble that Basil collects in his fur, we took him and for a haircut (and bath, ear-cleaning, and nail trimming). We hope this well also help him be more comfortable in the coming hot summer months. Take a look at these very professionally done before-and-after photos.

Just the Simple Truth (Mostly)

Check out this little article I stumbled upon in my blogger reading today: Just the Simple Truth. For those of you who are a little bit more lazy here's a pertinent part where the author is quoting President Obama: "But after the Democrats and Republicans committed to fiscal discipline during the 1990s, we lost our way in the decade that followed. We increased spending dramatically for two wars and an expensive prescription drug program-but we didn't pay for any of this new spending. Instead, we made the problem worse with trillions of dollars in upaid-for tax cuts-tax cuts that went to every millionaire and billionaire in the country; tax cuts that will force us to borrow an average of $500 billion every year over the next decade." Let's parse this paragraph and look at the basic assertions the President is making in this speech, stripped of their rhetorical ornamentation.

1. Both parties were involved in "fiscal discipline" during the 1990s. (I believe this is a reference to balanced budget we had for a few years in the late 90s.)


2. Spending increased significantly during the 2000s thanks to two wars and Medicare part D.


3. Tax cuts during the 2000s prevented a lot of revenue from being collected from those in the highest tax bracket.

Assuming my interpretation of item one is correct, all of these assertions can be shown to be true.
I don't want to get into the policy angle of whether the extra spending on wars and Medicare was a good idea or the decision to reduce tax income as a whole. Clearly, though, we can say that this combination did not end up working out well in terms of balancing the budget. I know there are plenty of people out there that are philosophically committed to trickle-down economics but in this case the lower taxes rates didn't generate more tax dollars and the budget got way out of balance. Its worth noting that Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan's assertion that "the more you tax something, the less of it you get" may be true; our budget wasn't balanced through the 2000s, though. It didn't seem to work for that decade.
Here's my main point: assuming the above three facts are true, their validity is a red herring in the larger problem of our national debt. Here's one of many graphs you can find online showing our annual federal deficit over the years, this one in terms of GDP rather than just dollars (to try to level out effects of economic growth).


The simple truth that isn't acknowledged by the President or stated in the article I linked to is that the "fiscal discipline" that resulted in a budget surplus for a few years at the end of the 90s was an aberration. From 2011 all the way back to the 1960s it is clear that this period of time is the only one where we had a balanced budget for any significant length of time. It appears there are a few toe-dips into balanced-budget territory over the last half-century but they are minor and are in no way equivalent to the massive overspending that happened in all the remaining years.
We have a systemic problem. For many years now, our country has not been living within its means and this is a trend that we cannot afford any longer. We need to get serious about our problem and make some hard choices. We can not continue to borrow money for government programs and somehow expect to never have to pay it back. There are good programs that are working well that we will need to cut; there are tax breaks that seem fair and good that will have to be removed. We are so far in debt and it is unreasonable to expect that we can get back to living within our means without making significant sacrifices. Our expectations and lifestyles covertly subsidized through our government in the form of low taxes and expensive government programs are unsustainable.
I'll end with the political finger-pointing. Republicans, you have abandoned any claim of being fiscally responsible based on your performance this past decade. I know you believe in lower taxes but you have to also believe in lower spending as well. In fact, during times of national crisis like the launch of our war on terror, you might even need to increase taxes to pay for the military activity or cut other programs so that our budget can stay balanced. Wars don't pay for themselves and emergency overspending for a few years needs to be followed with determined underspending to pay all that debt back.
Democrats, specifically President Obama, its hard for us to take you seriously as a man determined to balance the budget. You inherited a difficult situation in 2008 and choose to try to spend your way out of it. You and your allies are the ones responsible for the spike in the national deficit at the far right-hand end of the graph. You too need to find a way to generate huge budget surpluses to counter-act the huge spending we just went through.
To both parties I say this: I have a house that is always falling apart, a car that needs repair even more regularly and family members who get sick. I understand that there are months that we need to spend more than we make because of these emergencies that pop up. But you know what happens next month? We spend less to make up for it and replenish any emergency savings that has been depleted. Nobody would let me overspend for 35 out of the last 40 years of my life and call me fiscally responsible. They wouldn't lend me a dime.

Season Change

I just turned off the gas to our furnace and turned on our the fan to cool the house off this morning. I think its officially the start of the warm season.

I didn't quite get the timing right this year with the amount of kerosene that I bought for our indoor heater: there's about half a gallon left in the tank of the heater. I guess I'm just going to have to burn it off outside; I doubt the house will be cold enough in the next month or two to justify using it.

This "shoulder" period between winter and summer (I hear some people call it "spring") is the best few weeks to live in Wichita. The highs during the day are not astronomical and the lows at night are cool enough to feel a tiny bit chilly. The trees are starting to bloom, grass everywhere is getting green, and I don' need to bundle up to walk the dogs in the morning.

This is much different than summer here, which is oppressively hot and humid. Nobody wants to be outside and its hard to image how people lived here without air conditioners. The overnight lows are often 80'F; it just never cools off. Being in the city probably doesn't help; maybe outside of town where the wind and blow more to cool things off would help.