The U.S. Power Grid | Hacker News Reader

The U.S. Power Grid

nomagicpill.site

96 pointssurprisetalk28 comments

This is cute and interesting but I would really prefer, as maybe a general rule for vibecoded projects, that we try to not just place the thing you've built onto the internet, but also give us context for your context. This is what READMEs were for before we decided to turn those into a workspace for LLMs

Like yes, I can infer a lot about what this is, what it's doing, etc. but its trivial to get claude et. al to make a one-time onboarding screen that actually gives me an idea about what this is supposed to be, how realistic it is, what the numbers mean, what the features are, etc.

Edit: I say this in particular because I FIND THIS PROJECT INTERESTING! I WANNA KNOW WHAT IT DOES!!

Menu >> Explore >> Start Here ??

Poke at it and explore! Things on the internet do not owe anyone anything.

What?!

No. You are supposed to get your AI to explain it to you.

What I thought this would be:

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/five_minutes

(Not a comment on the quality of the submission - it's also fascinating).

Neat site, I thought it was going to be https://openinframap.org/

Interesting. I vibe coded something similar in order to understand how a particular database works.

It's like Claude contains all these ideas and we only have to mine them.

https://adamsohn.com/sixty-hertz/

A cool site my former employer put together to help map out the US power grid (related to their command and control analytics platform for Smart energy devices).

https://commongrid.info/explore

Whoa this looks like it could be a game.

Is there a game like this??

It's called Factorio.

https://www.factorio.com/

Factorio isn't really relevant, its electricity simulation subsystem is pretty bland.

indeed, it's literally just total consumption divided by total production

I've thought of a Factorio mod idea where the grid is based on real life values. Would be interesting to see how much energy you actually need. Maybe it would require some new buildings though, probably better as its own game.

I developed one around two years ago, you can try it out at https://electrobillion.evrim.zone/

It's a fictionalised version of the grid, but teaches some of the basics well!

CircuitJs, but you have to draw your own grid first.

https://www.falstad.com/circuit/circuitjs.html

Steam engine simulator kinda

I've been working on adding energy mechanics to Microlandia. right now i have added solar, wind, nuclear and coal power and houses, datacenters, factories etc use real-world usage. there is power selling and power buying and a score for carbon footprint. There's still a lot I want to do and I will add it gradually, like: rooftop solar panels, different regions with different sun/wind resources, grid and station failures, and still finishing the fact checking of energy usage for all the buildings.

https://microlandia.city

https://microlandia.city/docs/energy

Power Network Tycoon: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2429930/Power_Network_Tyc...

There's a board game with this theme: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Grid

I've played it and enjoyed it.

Watching the prices fluctuate here, it's very annoying that we don't have a way to buy power when it's cheap, store it, and sell it back when it's expensive, as consumers.

The incentive to place storage into your house would be so much better if this were possible. It feels like people have been writing papers about this for years but no one has made it happen. I think people would be willing to self fund new meters themselves to participate.

Exactly that is happening here in Australia.

People buy solar and batteries and hook up with Amber[0] who charges a static monthly fee but provides access to wholesale prices. When you give/take from the grid is for you to manage.

So, now you have kind of a non-scaling side hustle when you really just wanted to have cheap energy without having to think about it.

I've heard various people say good/bad things about Amber. People who say it works automatically, some say it doesn't sell to the grid at times it should etc etc.

But I think it is an interesting world when households can be used to support the local grid. And maybe more interesting because now there are more hackable targets on the internet relating to the local grid....

[0] https://www.amber.com.au/

In the UK there's a number of people doing that with smart meters.

in reality, that solar field needs to be 80x the size of the nuclear plant. so about 30 LCD displays worth of area to produce that amount.

I thought this was about the actual US Power Grid, which is hilariously vulnerable. Right now you could ask your agent to crawl Shodan and trivially shut down a small power plant in Puerto Rico if you wanted.

Why are there 5 different animations for switching between light mode and dark mode. I guess whoever made this is very interested in the big dark mode button in the top right corner.

Because it's vibe-coded, and the "whoever" is really a "whatever."

"Data centers run flat out around the clock", a statement that is not true, has never been true, has been advanced by know-nothing writers in non-technical outlets, and I guess is now encoded in Claude or whatever slop cannon created this site.

AI and hyperscaler datacenters run at such a high usage rate that they have to coordinate with generating facilities regarding outages. The difference between their actual duty levels and "flat out around the clock" is so small to be negligible when considering grid operations. Not all datacenters fit this category, but the ones that don't are not worth considering in terms of grid planning, either, so again this is a difference worth ignoring.

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