Caveman_Coder

After living in SV for most of my life, I decided to move to the Southwest to work in an industry that, in my opinion, is actually a public good (utility industry). It's a bit slower paced, but the engineering problems are the same and the community is much better.

> "I view smoking as a kind of break from life. It has a calming effect. Many people smoked during my deployments to Iraq for the same reason - it calms you and allows a simple break otherwise not found. .."

I found this to be the same reason why many of my fellow shipmates smoked during my time in the Navy. It was a kind of pre-watch "bonding" session of sorts...We'd smoke our cigs, grab a quick bite from the galley, then relieve the watch...our pre-watch smoke was a kind of "shoot-the-shit" before we had to be serious and formal operators.

Great article, thanks for sharing.

> "...1) We like them, 2) The biosphere provides trillions of dollars to the global economy, 3) Loss of species impacts ecological systems and puts us at risk as we depend on them for survival."

Is there a non-selfish reason, that is morally justifiable, for preventing species extinction?

> "...The question is whether we should let humans hunt species to extinction."

Why is this the question? Why is "extinction" so important? The fate of most species is extinction anyway.

> "...but they also have a lot of value in disaster recovery scenarios."

How so?

I'd imagine that you'd need a pretty large capacity battery storage system in order for it to reliably act as a blackstart generation source.

EDIT: I did some quick research, found this recent article about IID's blackstart battery testing - https://www.energy-storage.news/news/california-batterys-bla...

I thought this was an interesting recommendation...

"Memory-safe languages can eliminate or substantially reduce the likelihood of many classes of coding errors that have often led to exploitable vulnerabilities. These include buffer overflows, null pointer dereferences, use-after-free errors, and references to uninitialized memory. Rust and Go are relatively recent memory-safe languages; others include F#, C#, Python, and Haskell. Developers who select other common languages (e.g., C, C++) that don’t provide memory safety need to provide evidence that their implementations avoid these problems." (pg. 12)

> "...and contractor businesses of the military-industrial complex gleefully take advantage of that."

And that is why a lot of my former shipmates got out after their initial enlistment and went into the contracting business.

That is correct. The 6 hour on-watch period is based on maintaining full awareness. With a 3 watch-section crew and "18hr days," you'll have round the clock coverage for all watch stations. Like you said, we'd wake up, eat, go on watch for 6hrs, get relieved by the next watch section, eat, do maintenance/training/etc. for the next 6hrs, and then sleep for the final 3rd of our "day."

No worries. Excellent resources BTW, they made for a great weekend morning read.

My perception when I was in was that the Navy was very "top heavy," staffed with useless academy grads that did little and stayed in for the cushy shore-duty [1]. My views are definitely biased (and anecdotal), since I was "lowly blue-shirt," but there was always at least one unfilled billet in my rate yet there never seemed to be an unfilled role for the officers.

[1] http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/5/ash-carter-sa...

> "The guy cleaning toilets does not need two more guys backing him up for the 2nd and 3rd shift. Dirty toilets wait until he rolls out of his bunk, or until the captain eats a volatile burrito, and someone wakes the toilets guy up to deal with that specific problem outside of regular duty hours."

That isn't how it works.

So there are all kinds of functional roles in the Navy (and I'm going off of submarines since that it was my experience was in), roles having to do with operating the sonar equipment, IT/comms equipment, torpedoes, and the engine room. So these people will be on watch (hourly logs, monitoring system conditions, etc.) and then after they are relieved they'll do whatever maintenance and cleaning they are assigned to. There is not a "clean-the-toilets" job role.

That is correct. It is also a pipeline issue. The Navy has to recruit, train, and certify a certain number of nuclear trained personnel to account for shore-duty rotations and personnel leaving the Navy altogether. On a couple of occasions, our engineering team was short a few personnel in each of the three nuclear-trained jobs. We were able to pull from some of the other boats at the base, but they were not qualified (a.k.a. useless) so the workload wasn't distributed any better with the additional personnel.

When I was in, we had a 6-on 12-off schedule to allow for 24hr coverage with only three watches. Effectively, each of our "days" was an 18hr day, with 6 being on-watch, 6 being used for maintenance/drills/training, and 6 being for sleep. Rarely did we get a full 6hrs of sleep per 18hr "day."

> "No, they are there to break people and get them to rebond as a temp family."

- I'm not sure if this is the primary point of the 100hr+ work-weeks. In my case, our submarine was going through an Engineering Refueling Overhaul in Norfolk so we were just incredibly busy.

The problem is that increasing manning doesn't really contribute to the military industrial complex...so there isn't a real incentive to make room in the budget for additional personnel. When I was in the Navy we routinely had 100hr+ workweeks while in port and the older guys said it was the same back in the day.

> "The U.S. Department of Energy will explore whether artificial intelligence could help electric grids handle power fluctuations, avoid failures, resist damage, and recover faster from major storms, cyberattacks, solar flares and other disruptions."

- Power fluctuations are currently handled via AGC and automatic load shed software (Hz control) and a mixture of automatic and operator-controlled capacitors/reactors (Voltage control). I think the current solutions have these problems "handled," but perhaps AI will help utilities better predict when such grid disturbing events are about to occur.

> "GRIP's first year is devoted to anticipating grid problems. Predictive analytics will help identify places where the electric grid is vulnerable to disruption so it can be reinforced, Kiliccote says."

- Predictive analytics is already heavily used. We have Real-Time Contingency Analysis, Security Analysis, and Power Flow.

> "The second year will aim to help grids absorb disruptions. For instance, a grid can be divided into virtual "islands," or micro-grids, that can be isolated to prevent a power disruption from spreading and taking down the entire grid"

- This is already done via selective tripping with the industry standard SEL relays.

> "The third year will focus on helping grids recover from events. 'Ultimately, we'd like to see a grid that can run on its own, an autonomous grid like an autonomous car,' Kiliccote says. 'However, unlike autonomous cars, an autonomous grid will need to be able to handle additional components added to it while it is still running.'"

- I think autonomous grids sound nice, but from a safety perspective, I'm not so sure. I think you'd want to have a lineman patrol the suspect power line before the line is test-energized.

I'd love to hear from those more well-versed in AI about the application of AI for the electric grid.

[1] http://charm.cs.illinois.edu/newPapers/11-40/contingency_201...

> "With so much of the electric grid literally wiped out, wouldn't it be cool to see them rebuild in a more future-looking fashion with many of the ideas around solar & community batteries, rather than a traditional grid?"

I'd like to see a combination of both, a robust public T&D system with local distributed generation would be a great starting design in my opinion.

The last I remember hearing about it was that there is active research in a new Hastelloy-N plus Titanium alloy combo that supposedly eliminates corrosion and neutron embrittlement.

http://moltensalt.org.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ref...

"Bloomberg reports that Tesla is sending hundreds of its Powerwall battery systems to be paired with solar panels. The joint systems will help the battered island territory restore electric power."

At least people won't have to wait for the PR electric grid, both the transmission and distribution systems, to be rebuilt. This should have a definite positive impact and hopefully save some lives.

TerraPower is interesting, especially since it recycles previously enriched uranium. On a side note, as far as the future of nuclear power goes, I'm more interested in LFTR designs and I think Flibe Energy is going to someone to watch here in the near future.

http://flibe-energy.com/

"In our work at PingThings, we have seen the original, deterministic models of the electric power industry not getting replaced, but subsumed by a stochastic world filled with increasing uncertainty. Many such industries built by engineering are undergo‐ing this fundamental change—evolving from a deterministic machine to a larger, more unpredictable entity that exists in a world filled with randomness—a probabilistic system."

My interpretation of his main point is that we now have the tools to account for system variability in real-time, as opposed to previous times when some variability had to be accounted for beforehand.

The whole crypto-currency scene is increasingly seeming like a huge Ponzi scheme. I really wonder at what point popular opinion will no longer support wasting electrical power on mining a digital currency.

"In this O’Reilly report, Sean Patrick Murphy, Chief Data Scientist at PingThings, describes how data science is helping electric utilities make sense of a stochastic world filled with increasing uncertainty—including fundamental changes to the energy market and random phenomena such as weather and solar activity."

"There are many people working on storage—batteries are a form of storage, and there’s a few others, like compressed air, hot metals. But it’s not at all clear that we will get grid-scale economic storage."

Grid-scale storage is the key. Duke Energy is one of the leaders in this effort, at least among the major utilities [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15307767

> "...a series of bigoted Constitutional amendments."

Any specific amendments you'd care to share? I haven't heard of any such plans.

Some additional news stories on the subject...

- CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/27/media/facebook-black-lives-m...

- Washington Post: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/russian-o...

- CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/25/russian-facebook-ads-targete...

- The Hill: http://thehill.com/news-by-subject/technology/352780-russian...

> "Another nation interfering in our elections shouldnt be a partisan issue."

When you say "interfering," are you talking about buying ads?

Duplicate of the following...

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15297922

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15134949

EDIT: Not sure why my comment is being downvoted for pointing out that this exact hobby project has been continually posted in the last couple of months.

> "...exciting tech"

That's debatable. Here are some of the Startup Alley companies:

- Stemless Co (buying weed)

- Mycroft AI (another freaking voice assistant...with AI)

- Topology Eyewear (custom glasses using 3D face models)

- Reely (Sports hightlights...with AI)

- WeTravel (disrupting the dead travel planner industry)

- Teuko (lunchboxes and tech?)

- Switchit (uh...business cards)

- GamerLink (Facebook, but for gamers)

https://techcrunch.com/event-info/disrupt-sf-2017/startup-al...

TLDR:

CAISO will pay energy storage companies so they can reduce curtailing solar power plants during peak generation hours.