Dissertation Simulations Continue

A month ago, I projected that I would be done with all the computer number crunching in just a matter of a few days.  I was very, very wrong.  My few day estimate turned into three weeks.

A week ago, I discovered a mistake in my program.  In looking through the results I noticed a particular value, which I knew was always a sum of a bunch of fractions, was always coming out as a whole number. I investigated and found the obvious error I had made.  It had take me a lot of time writing the code that would generate those very significant fractional values and I was accidentally throwing it all away, choosing to round them all up to one and add that up instead.  These fractions are an important part of the simulation and drive a lot of the results; incorrect values here mean my overall results were invalid.

My bad results were saved (because hard drive space is cheap) and the simulations were restarted. Oh, and another sixteen cases were added, bringing the total up to forty-eight.  After letting my main computer at school work at it for a week or so, I surmised it was going to take a long, long time to get through all the simulations. We had just recently cleaned the lab and taking an unused machine, I spent a day getting it set up and put it to work. It is not near as powerful as my main computer but every little bit helps.

Monday afternoon, as I was watching results slowly trickle in, I began racking my brain for where I could get more computing power.  There was another souped-up computer there in the lab just like mine that probably wasn't getting used much but it was assigned to another student.  Maybe she'd let me get on and run my simulations in the background?  There were plenty of other older computers around but, besides not having the desk space and network connections, they looked much less capable than the one I commandeered. Where could I get the number-crunching machines I needed?

My home computer.  It is new, relatively high-powered, and I had most of the software already installed. It took me a few hours to get it up and running and right before bed the other night, I set it to work.

In the morning I looked at the results and there is no two ways about it: this machine is a monster. I've compiled results from all the runs that have completed so far and I'll let the graphs do the talking:

Each bar is one case that was simulated.

There are two significant differences between my school computer and home computer: my home computer has processors running at almost twice the speed and it also has a solid-state hard drive.  My simulations write out to disk a lot, constantly logging results and reading back in logged values to make calculations.  I wrote the simulations this way so that I could stop and start them at will, giving them the ability to always pick-up right where they left off. (The more fundamental motivation was due to Matlab, the simulation environment I'm using, silently crashing on my school computer.  I have no idea why it does this and wish it would stop.  Having the crash recovery has been essential in getting simulations done and it has given me a lot of flexibility in scheduling the simulations.)

A solid-state drive is MUCH faster for disk writing and reading, giving my home computer a big advantage.  My school computer only has a conventional spinning-disk hard drive and, to make matters worse, it runs eight of the simulations in parallel, each constantly trying to access the disk.  I've done testing during development that showed the per-simulation time increases as the number of simulations being run in parallel increase.  Its still faster overall to run as many as I can in parallel but they definitely get in each other's way.  My computer at home is only running four simulations in parallel but I bet the solid-state drive presents virtually no roadblock to any of them.

The graphs above aren't a purely apples-to-apple comparison but it is clear for even moderately disk-heavy tasks like my simulations, the solid-state drive goes a long way.  Even though my home computer got in on the action a week late, I'm betting it will end up completing half of the simulations itself.  Why didn't I think of this last month?

Dissertation Simulations

As of this morning, I have begun what I hope to be the official simulations for the work on my dissertation. I have 33 separate cases to study and this morning I queued them all up to run on my school computer over the weekend.  For exactly this reason, the machine I get to use has eight cores and 48GB of memory so it should be able to handle the workload; nevertheless I don't expect it will be done for several days.

I've been working since summer 2013 on the development of the computer code that is being run in these simulations.  I started with a model of the electrical grid in the western US and have been working on a way to add energy storage (a battery) to a specific location in the grid.  It was important for my research that the simulated behavior of the battery should wear out over time (like batteries do) so a bit of my work was getting that implemented. A week or two ago I started putting the individual pieces together and began testing the system as a whole, making sure everything was behaving as expected.

When the final development test results came back this week with the system appearing to function I was faced with a startling realization: I was ready to run the simulations with the specific conditions I wanted to study.  Though the difference between these "real" simulations and the test ones I had been doing involved only changing a few lines of code, the psychological hurdle was immense.  I'm actually doing it; I'm almost there.

These simulations will take a while to complete.  They have to figure out, for a given set of demand for electrical energy in the western US, the output level for each generator in the western US that will provide this energy for the lowest cost.  And it has to do this for every hour of the year (8760 of them).  In half the cases I'm simulating, it has to do this for five years in a row.  

I hope everything will be done when I come in on Tuesday.  When I left, all eight cores on my computer were maxed out and I expect they will stay that way for a number of days.

The completion of the simulations is a significant milestone but I still have plenty of work even after they are done. Analyze data, make graphs and tables, and write the several hundred page document that PhDs traditionally have to write. I won't be done this semester but I'll be very close.

First Day of School (Again)

The doctor has cleared me to return to school, good friends are able to give me ride in the morning, and I'm mobile enough that I can get around campus. Its time to get back to work!  Now what was I doing again?

I return to find that the printer is out of toner. In fact, its out of both yellow and black.  I'm betting his means the color printer was effectively a black-and-white printer until the black toner ran out, at which point it became effectively broken.  Last time we ran out of black I was the one that ordered the new toner and the first thing I did when I got in was order a complete set of cartridges.  When later installing them one of my lab-mates commented, "That thing has been broken since December."

My desk is like an archaeological site, with artifacts of the former occupant's life covered in a fine layer of dust. That former occupant is me and though this is all my stuff is mine, I hardly remember it at all.  I see a complex colored diagram I did of some of the system power flows and I remember thinking how useful it was but I look at it now and it puzzles me.  What was so important about this?  I see other scraps of paper with notes on them; are any of these worth saving? What's the number for the phone at my desk again?

I'm recounting the story of being hit by a car with my lab-mates and one of them mentions a class that he is taking this semester.  Its highly related to my research and I think it would be a great class to take.  Is it too late to enroll?  Do I want to officially enroll or just sit in to learn what I can?  I'm not very interested in doing homework and taking tests again and I'm really trying to get done with this degree but how can you pass on a class that is over half of your dissertation? For this week, I'm going to be sitting it in and see how it looks. How do I enroll in a class as an audit?

The clock in the lab isn't working.  Battery ran out?  Actually broken? Its high on the wall over a doorway so getting to it to diagnose the problem could be tricky.

Somebody unplugged/turned off the fridge over the weekend and everybody's food rotted. It stank in the lab until we were able to drag it out into the hallway and let everything air out. Now the microwave, which was on top of the fridge, is living in a chair in a semi-level fashion.

Really, we are all working on graduate degrees here.  I promise.

STEM Crisis

The professional electrical engineering society I'm a member of (IEEE) recently published an article looking into the alleged lack of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) graduates.  I've been suspicious of such claims for some time mainly based on my (and others') experience managing a career in the field. If nothing else, a true lack of STEM workers would result in low unemployment rates and high salaries.  In the dozen years I've been in the field, I have experienced neither.

And now this article gives some research to my intuition and experience.  If you care about such things, I suggest you read the whole article but for those you don't, here are my take-aways.

• Many reports and studies have been done looking into this alleged shortage and each seems to classify STEM differently.  Some include fields like social science, psychologists, and health-care fields.  Some do not.  As you might suspect, this can have a big impact on the results.
• Not all STEM graduates find jobs in STEM fields (mathematicians on Wall Street being a great example) and not all STEM jobs are filled by STEM graduates.  Depending on how each study looks at these details can have a significant impact on determining whether there is a shortage or not.
• Estimating demand in certain fields over many years can be tricky.  The Great Recession has invalidated many studies that assumed more linear growth in the fields over time. As an NSF study says, "Projections of employment growth are plagued by uncertain assumptions and are notoriously difficult to make."
• Immigrant workers (often admitted on the famous H1-B visas) increase the number of STEM workers available for employment.
• Reports from Duke University, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and Rand Corporation all conclude there is no shortage, now or in the near future.
• “If there was really a STEM labor market crisis, you’d be seeing very different behaviors from companies,” notes Ron Hira, an associate professor of public policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, in New York state. “You wouldn’t see companies cutting their retirement contributions, or hiring new workers and giving them worse benefits packages. Instead you would see signing bonuses, you’d see wage increases. You would see these companies really training their incumbent workers. None of those things are observable,” Hira says. “In fact, they’re operating in the opposite way.”

Nice to know I'm not just making this up.

Male College Degree Holders

An article in Washington Monthly (summarizing a Lumina Foundation report) confirms a suspicion that I've had for a while; of those aged 25-29, 47% of women hold a degree compared to 37% of men.  I ask this in all honesty since I have not applied for undergraduate scholarships for some years: are there scholarships that target men?  When I was seeking to fund my education there seemed to be plenty scholarships that I couldn't apply for because I was not a woman.  I never saw any that were just open to men.

I regularly see reports and articles discussing the efforts to get more women into the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields where they are not as well represented. I don't see similar reports of efforts to get men into fields where they are equally not well represented such as (and I'm completely guessing here) elementary education and nursing.

College funding is a politically complicated issue and I wish that it were not so.  I haven't done a lot of research but it appears that, with regard to gender,  the recent political efforts to restructure accessibility to higher education have been very successful.  Though it is not politically correct, the data seem to support the fact that our efforts have produced results that pass gender equality and are now significantly favoring women. I'm assuming that this was not the intended outcome and that with the victory of getting more women through college, we should rethink our choices.

Maybe the time has come to focus on getting men through college.

Proposed

To complete the PhD program in the engineering department at Wichita State, the following steps must be completed:

1. Complete 60 hours of graduate course work.
2. Pass a qualifying exam.
3. Do large amounts of background research and preliminary testing.
4. Write a dissertation proposal.
5. Successfully present said proposal.
6. Actually do all the work outlined in said proposal.
7. Write the dissertation proper.
8. Successfully defend said document.

After five academic years here's how things stand for me today:

1. Complete 60 hours of graduate course work.
2. Pass a qualifying exam.
3. Do large amounts of background research and preliminary testing.
4. Write a dissertation proposal.
5. Successfully present said proposal.
6. Actually do all the work outlined in said proposal.
7. Write the dissertation proper.
8. Successfully defend said document.

We're getting there.

(And in case you're wondering, here's a not-quite-finished copy of the proposal.)

International Graduate Students at WSU

US News and World Report confirms the reality I experience every day: there are a lot of international graduate students here at Wichita State.  As I've said before, being a white guy in my world makes me the vast minority.  According the the report, 84.4% of the graduate students in the engineering program here are international students.

That sounds about right to me.

UPDATE: Nationwide most/many engineering graduate students are international according to this New York Times "article" (its one paragraph long).

Foreign Graduate Students and Industry Employment

I read an article in Bloomberg (PDF) recently; it was titled: "How Foreign Students Hurt U.S. Innovation". (The URL for the article reveals a more aggressive title: "Glut of Foreign Students Hurts U.S. Innovation".)

The article builds the following case:

1. Though there are plenty of domestic STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) undergraduates, there are very few domestic graduate students.  
2. Domestic graduate students are virtually non-existent because
1.  Wages in the STEM fields (academic and industry) are lower than they should be due to the oversupply of foreign graduate students.
2. Universities choose foreign students over domestic students "because they can pay" (versus those students who pay the much reduced, tax-dollar subsidized in-state rates).
3. Domestic STEM holders of bachelor's degrees are being diverted into non-STEM fields due to lower wages in STEM fields.
4. To encourage development of our STEM talent pool, we should focus on the domestic students by removing competition from foreign students.  This will reduce the supply of STEM workers, raise wages, and provide an economic incentive for domestic students to continue in their STEM education.

I am a STEM graduate student now, worked for eight years previously in a STEM job, and since I am working towards being a professor in a STEM field, I think I can safely say I have the means, motive, and thanks to this blog, the opportunity to speak to this issue. Here are my opinion-neutral observations (as much as such things exist).

Item 1 - There are a lot of foreign students in the graduate program at Wichita State.  All of my graduate classes here have had far more foreign students than domestic. I would guess that most have been over 80% foreign students. In some, I am the only domestic student in the class.  Most of the faculty in our department are foreign-born.  I would expect this to be the case in many universities around the nation though I only have my experience at conferences to extrapolate from; no hard data.

My time in the engineering workforce also showed that there are a lot of foreign workers.  Not near as high as Wichita State but I would guess a that one-quarter to one-third the department was employed through a work visa. I don't know exactly how these visas are granted but it is clear that my employer was going to some amount of legal effort to get these foreign-born engineers jobs in the US.

Item 2 - Universities do enjoy getting the extra funds that foreign students provide.  As state support of public universities and colleges has diminished over the years, these institutions have become more dependent on private donations and student-derived income to continue as a going concern. The amount of student-derived income is much larger for foreign students than domestic (in-state) students so universities have an incentive to admit more of these higher-paying students. 

Item 3 - Wages in the STEM fields are lower for those who posses STEM skills.  For reasons that are still not clear to me, the invisible hand of capitalism has recently valued positions in finance (for example) over those in engineering and if a student is simply looking for the highest-paying job, they won't choose STEM.  For the amount of effort and difficulty it takes to graduate with a respectable STEM degree, the STEM industry pay does not seem proportional.  This is not to say that STEM workers are universally impoverished, just that the cost/benefit trade-off does not provide a strong incentive for students to pursue STEM fields.

In these fundamental ways I can agree with the article. I don't know enough to speak very well to many of the specific facts cited in the article but my experience generally echos sentiments alluded to by the author, an academic himself.  My personal experience makes it easy for me to believe the general trend of items 1 through 3 above.  Its item 4 that gives me pause.

The author believes that limiting the number of foreign students will reduce competition for domestic students who desire to enter graduate school and allow them to continue on with their education.  To make this case well, the author would need to provide some evidence of a direct connection between reduced domestic graduate student enrollment and increased foreign graduate student enrollment. In other words, are domestic graduate students being pushed out?  The article implies this is the case but provides no evidence.  My question: do domestic students want to go to graduate school but can't get in because all the slots are taken by foreign students?  I don't know.  

Clearly universities have the financial incentive to admit more of the higher-paying foreign students.  If the financial needs of the universities are the only barrier for domestic students, the solution is simple: remove the incentive for universities to balance their books through income from foreign students by providing more public funds. If the admissions office is being run with the university finances as the key factor, tax money from the states will change the equation. This will only work, though, if money is truly the only barrier for domestic graduate students; I suspect it is not.

The author also seems to equate a strong STEM workforce with a strong STEM academic workforce.  The F-1 visa program is for students and the article deals strictly with this type of visa.  The H-1B is the common foreign worker visa and is completely separate from the student visa. A glut of F-1 visas may in fact be the core factor in the lack of domestic STEM graduate students but what about all of the STEM employment options outside the university? It is entirely possible for the U.S. to have a thriving STEM industry that is achieving many of the things the politicians want while having a limited representation of domestic STEM students in graduate school.

Said simply: I believe the power of the American STEM industry does not primarily lie in advanced degrees.  Those degrees help and may even be a central piece in forming a the business but it takes more than an academic understanding of an issue to make a company successful. Entrepreneurship, risk-taking, and daring ideas don't come simply from working towards a PhD; the gap between a good idea well proven through a dissertation and a game-changing company is large.  The problem with the STEM industry in this country cannot be so simply tied to foreign graduate students.

Reading Academic Papers

Today marks the day that I have been working on my dissertation for one month.  By "working" I mean that I have been devoted full-time to the endeavor; last semester the time I put in was severely limited due to the course I was teaching.

And what I have been doing the past month: reading, mostly.  A little bit of writing as I try to organize, collect, and synthesize the material I've been reading.  But mostly reading.

Reading academic papers is a bit like reading poorly written textbooks.  The value in the writing is not in how it is said but in what is trying to be communicated; there is no poetry in these papers.  The papers are not entertaining, there is no florid language; at best, they are interesting because of the results they present and the conclusions they purport.

"Reading" is even a strong word for what I'm doing; mostly its just skimming.  Read the abstract, maybe a little bit of the introduction, read the section headings, look at the tables, charts, and graphs (even graduate students like pictures more than words), and slowly skim the results and conclusions.   I highlight any important details I happen to catch, rate the paper on its expected usefulness, and sort it into folders that I've set up for my dissertation.  I "read" most papers I for the first time in less than ten minutes, more interesting ones that I know will be useful I spend a bit more time on, looking for specific details.

So how many of these have I "read" this past month: 214.

I've got 32 in the queue and am constantly adding more, usually referenced from a paper I'm currently reading.  There is also a significant subarea of my research I haven't specifically been reading in so you can be sure that there will be more reading once these 32 are done.

Teaching is Hard

Feedback from my students over the course I taught last semester.

• "I can't understand his English. the voice. the way to talk. not only me but also many foreign students agree with this."[sic]
• "He should understand his student, not just teach this course."[sic]
• "I like this course. However, I don't like the instructor" [sic]
• "He is a really good researcher, not a helpful teacher."
• "Should improve himself."
• "Hardy is a new teacher. He doesn't know how to teach professionally."
• "Many times he cannot answer to student problems. He always avoid those by saying 'Uhm, I haven't think about it' and I never get the 'right' answer from him."[sic]
• "The tests and quiz are way too hard. For some reason, he thinks that those must be very tricky."
• "Rate 2/10" [sic]
• "Office hours are there to help students answer or solve problems not to give vague answers or make them feel dumb for coming."[sic]
• "Please instructor needs to improve seriously on teaching and communication skills. Answer the students question, of course the student makes an attempt to answer but if WRONG PLS ANSWER THE QUESTION."[sic]
• "I HIGHLY DO NOT RECOMMEND HIM A PROFESSOR."[sic]
• "I like nothing. This class was a waste of time."
• "Teacher is unhelpful and the material is hard."
• "This is an easy class. The instructor made it difficult by having too much workload."[sic]
• "He was rude and inconsiderate. Graded harshly. How he worked the total grades was generally poor." [sic]
• "The grading, oh my God."
• "Listen to Minorities in the class, we pay tuition fee too." [sic]
• "I felt like you don't care about the students who struggle in the class, Never even listen them."[sic]
• "I wish they would be Dr. Teshome back, Your worse Instructor ever come across in my 4 yrs in college." [sic]
• "This Course seems to be interesting about I guess I would have gain more of it if the instructor knew more about the subject." [sic]

The composite scoring of the multiple-choice part of the survey showed very low scores as well.  The students who took this survey scored me in the bottom 2% of 35771 courses ever taught at Wichita State (since this survey started being given, at least).

The feedback from previous classes I taught tended to be of the opposite nature so its a bit tricky to figure out how to interpret these results.

Well, you can't win them all but least there was this:
"Basically you're a super harsh teacher but I learned a lot in class. I know you will be a lot of backlash because this class had a bunch of assholes in it who got by in their other classes by having a super easy teacher or copying shit and that's practically impossible to do in your class. I think you were a good teacher."

The Library, Its Full of Books

I have been unsure about my career in higher education since before it began. In fact, I let my ignorant fears and misunderstanding of the typical university professor job description scare me away since finishing my undergrad. Now that I'm on this path I my ignorance is decreasing but the uncertainty is receding much more slowly. I enjoy teaching so much that I have been fearful the other demands of the professorial life will hinder me from this task and turn the work into drudgery.  More specifically put, being a university professor is more than being an excellent teacher, particularly at bigger schools where research is most highly valued.

To better understand what I would be facing, I undertook the reading of "Balancing Acts: the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Academic Careers" by Huber. (Micro review: Outlines four professors who found ways to make teaching a priority despite working at research-oriented schools.  Good read but definitely thickly written in the ways of academics.) As is common in academic works, this book cited many sources including "Advice for New Faculty Members" by Boice.  This title was so highly recommend that I began to hunt for a copy.  Amazon had it and for $40 would let me own my own copy.  Wichita Public Library had not heard of it; no surprise.  I felt I had run out of options until I remembered, Wichita State has a big library, they might just have this title.

They did.

And many, many others, all on this seemingly obscure topic of managing an academic career.  Literal shelves stacked with books covering topics from the failings of universities to finishing a dissertation topic to being a mentor.  More books on the topic of university life than I could read even if that's all I did for the six years of my PhD.

I shouldn't be surprised, though; academics writing books about the academy.  It seems obvious in retrospect.  "Publish or perish" and all that.

Bueracracy Frustration

This past week had been a week of delays for me as the bureaucracy that is Wichita State has been dominating my attention. That I even have time now to voice my complaints and frustrations when I should be busily solving the world's energy problems (at least a small subset thereof) is evidence enough.

Item 1 - New computers
I came to school on Monday to find the new computer I will be using in my simulations had arrived.  By "find" I mean "eventually find somewhere on campus" as it took about an hour to locate them and get them moved to my desk.  I spent the morning unpacking them, scrounging for a monitor that will work, and installing basic software.  By the afternoon it was time to move on from basics and get the big, expensive software I'll be using installed.  I go to the IT department to ask for the disks and find out that my work this morning has been out-of-bounds.  Only the IT department can set up computers and I needed to turn them over for processing along with the list of software I would like installed.

I feel all hope draining from my soul.  I'm ready right now to work on getting my computer up and running and am confident that if given this opportunity, I can be done by the end of the day.  The IT department, on the other hand, has many other jobs on their plates (some with higher priority than mine) and may have the job done by the end of the week.  Additionally, some of the software I would like installed is not available for general use, despite indications otherwise.  Oh, and they need me to generate a work order so they can officially take on this task.

With heavy heart I wheel the computers to the IT department, like a father watching his children being sent off to a labor camp or prison.  I might see them again, someday, and maybe they'll be better for it, but they won't be the same anymore.

Item 2 - Network access
This computer I just got is the first one I've had at my desk.  When I was clandestinely setting it up Monday morning I discovered the network port at my desk didn't work.  I submitted a work order to have the port activated and in the mean time, used  a fifty foot cable to connect to a known working port elsewhere in the lab.  Today I received an email today stating that this work order was being cancelled and I needed my supervisor or the department head to authorize the work.  My supervisor is out of town and the department head probably has better things to do than submit work orders for network ports.  We'll see when it gets done.

Item 3 - Timesheets

I don't know if something has changed recently but I also found out that this week that as a Graduate Research Assistant, I will now be required to submit a timesheet.  I felt like the protagonist from "Office Space" as I received multiple emails each from a different person informing me of this, each with slightly different instructions for completing the form.  The form needs to be printed out and signed by my supervisor who is out of town for a few weeks.  The form needs to be turned in on Friday and include the time worked on Saturday.  The form has no easy way of indicating that I have gotten very little done this week as IT has had my computer except to write in "0" hours for each day.

I'm in favor of accountability and actually appreciate the discipline of having to document the time I spend working for the school; I am being paid for this research I'm doing.  I think this paper form is not the best way of going about this.  This fall when I teach, I might be on the "supervisor" side of the form if I'm managing lab assistants.  I doubt the experience will be any better.

Wichita PSERC Day 1

Yesterday was the first day of the spring 2012 PSERC conference and this year Wichita State is hosting. Unfortunately, due to the reconstruction of the student center on campus, we're hosting the conference at the newly remodeled Drury Plaza Hotel Broadview. The hotel is great but it's not the same as being on a university campus. There was a lot of interesting material covered yesterday (at least for power nerds like me) but there was one talk in particular that seemed more widely applicable; it was titled "Do We Need a 21st Century Electrical System?". The speaker's answer was a resounding "YES!" and he made a compelling case. The system we are using today is by and large over 50 years old and was built in a very piecemeal fashion with each utility around the country doing its own thing. As the system grew these utilities began to connect to each other which allowed more and more energy exchange between the utilities, helping each other during emergencies and other unexpected events. These energy exchanges soon became the daily norm these local utilities found themselves as parts of a much larger system, each controlling a small part of the system and being influenced by the choices of others, even those geographically distant. The grid when it was built was not designed with this kind of operation in mind. Energy is now routinely flowing long distances from the generators to customers and a much higher degree of coordination is needed between the utilities. More and more we are thinking of the "grid" as a single entity and a greater need for information regarding the state of the grid is becoming evident. Customers are using more and more energy and the ability to build additional transmission lines is becoming more difficult due to population growth and the lack of available land in and around urban centers. We, the power industry, are being presented with a unique opportunity. In a relatively short portion of time, much of this aging equipment will be replaced and/or upgraded; we have the possibility of largely transforming a patch-work system that has been organically grown to meet pressing needs of the moment into a system that has been designed with intentionality and foresight to handle the expected needs of the future. The hardest part of making these changes in a unified fashion is the question of coordination. Standards need to be agreed upon by all the industry members and decisions need to be made with the bigger picture in mind. This is extremely difficult to do purely from a technical standpoint, never mind the vast political complications. I don't know how this will turn out. I think we as power engineers all desperately want a better system that we have now and recognize the opportunity we have. But will we choose to sacrifice and expend effort to together to make this happen? I don't know, we'll just have to see.

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.

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.

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.

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.