Less cool place to work. Very, very noisy. Steps were taken to reduce the noise level but it wasn't enough.
1,216 karma · joined October 22, 2009
The Texas grid is separate due to a combination of just wanting to be independent and geography.
Back in the early days of the grid there was little reason to join the growing national grids because of the remoteness of Texas from the other population centers (transmission is expensive and in the early days inefficient) and abundant natural resources that could be used for generating electricity in the region. Before oil it was coal (and there's still a few plants in Texas using local peat coal, but fewer every year). Then oil, and natural gas. Now wind and solar are the new up and coming sources. Natural gas will be with us for awhile -- it's a handy fuel for generating electricity. It still produces CO2 (but less than coal), but can be spun up and down quickly to meet demand, something coal and nuclear aren't so good at.
We're not totally separate, though -- we have 5 DC ties to the other grids. As I write this looks like we're sending out about 350 MWh. Still, those ties are tiny compared to the current load of 59343 MWh.
Not everywhere. In Texas companies that do transmission are forbidden to own generation and vice versa.
Which causes problems for grid battery storage. Is it generation or transmission?
And non-techies in these places couldn't live without Office. I once got an email with an attached Word document that contained an embedded Excel spreadsheet with exactly two cells -- an IP address and a hostname -- for a DNS entry I needed to update.
https://www.amazon.com/Automatic-Chicken-Coop-Door-Standard/...
It has a solar panel and rechargeable battery and you program in your lat/long and optional + or - times for the door to remain open or close around sunrise and sunset.
It works well. Of course, you could hack something up with a micro-controller to do the same thing rather easily.
We recently just got a few puppies from a local animal shelter that we're acclimating to the chickens. We hope that'll cut down on predator loss.
We have about 100 birds and at any given time two or three will be broody. We collect the eggs everyday so sometimes the broody hen will just sit there on nothing or on one of our "fake" eggs (we put fake eggs in the places we want the hens to lay their eggs). We'll remove the broody hens from the coop several times a day until we break them of the habit. That usually works.
Occasionally we'll have snakes get into the coop and eat eggs. If the snake gets a porcelain fake egg that pretty much the end of that snake eventually. Rattlesnakes are more difficult, but we've gotten pretty good had removing those, too.
Our big problem this year is hawks (our chickens free range). We've lost about 20 birds this year just to hawks. Just this last weekend hawks killed three (flew away with two and mostly maimed a third I had to cull) and one hen got away missing her tail feathers and received some deep cuts our vet stitched up. She got away because our dominate rooster attacked and killed the hawk after her.
[06:00] Wake up when rooster starts crowing. Let dogs out, get wife coffee, shower, dress.
[07.00] Out the door, 30-minute 25-mile commute. I live in the country and the office is in the country so no traffic.
[07:30] At office. Get through security, grab breakfast taco, check email & overnight issues.
[09:00] 30-minute operations meeting to discuss and get awareness of issues and planned work affecting operations.
[09:30] Short standup with on-call team members to discuss any events/actions during past 24hrs.
[10:00 to 04:00] Mix between planned project work and issues. One hour for lunch somewhere in there. Short breaks as needed.
[04:00] Out the door to head home.
[06:00 - dark] After dinner, general work around the ranch, check and feed livestock.
[after hours] I'm on call for general production problems one out of every three weeks. I'm always on call for anything affecting power grid operation.
And you know; 100% of the women engineers I know have similar stories. 100%. That's insane.
These stories need to come out so the guilty companies and their toxic environments are exposed for all to see.
I'd encourage everyone here to pick up a copy of her O'Reilly book -- it's very good. Hopefully she gets all the income and none of it goes to Uber...
We've had some problems with snakes, but we're in the country outside Austin, TX and snakes are just a way of life out here. We even had to remove a rattlesnake from inside the house a few weeks back. Skunks are a big problem this year -- lots of them out and about.
We give and sell fresh eggs to everyone we know. I routinely take them into work and sell them for $5 a dozen. We've had to explain the whole not washing or refrigerating them to most people but after they've had fresh eggs they always want more.
In the meantime hospitals and other facilities with backup gensets will quickly run out of fuel. Those fuel delivery contracts everyone has will go out the window once the entire grid is down and everyone needs fuel.
I don't work in this region, but I work for another ISO that controls one of the other grids doing a cross between DevOps and SRE on the systems that directly control the grid.
I've worked for startups (including my own) and public cloud providers, but this is the most stressful job I've had. If I fail people will quickly start to die as traffic lights and life-support systems fail.
The article touches on the complexity a bit, but it's huge job controlling a deregulated open-market energy grid. You have to scale for peak demand while providing financial incentives to support a mix of generation with widely varying prices. You have to deal with distribution congestion and natural disasters. Even generation disruptions -- a 2-GW nuke plant can shutdown at any moment. You need to deal with that deficit and quickly get something else online to meet demand.
And it all has to work 24/7 without a second of interruption.
It's an eye-opening experience. I'll never complain about paying my electric bill again. ;)
The US has three grids: East, West, and Texas.
Folks ask why Texas has its own grid and we generally say "because Texas", but the real reason is just the way the grid grew in the early 20th century. Texas was isolated from the big industrial centers of the coasts and had abundant internal energy sources (coal and oil) so it just grew into its own grid and stayed that way.
Inside each grid the frequency is internally regulated. Each grid is out of sync with each other so power transfer between grids is limited. A tie between grids requires converting energy to DC and back into AC synchronized to the receiving grid. ERCOT has 5 of these ties and their capacity is a small percentage of the demand. Additionally, there's a few generators at the border of the grid than can operate on two different grids (one grid at a time). They choose where to operate depending on pricing.
Another problem to deal with is transmission capacity. If you have too much generation away from demand transmission gets congested. To deal with this we have nodal markets (http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/training_courses/14/nodal10...).
Nearly all wind and solar farms inject energy into the grid just like any other generator. In an open energy market like ERCOT (where this wind farm is located) there's a market where energy is traded.
If they inject "X" units of energy into the grid and pull out the same "X" units all is good. If not (the usual case since generation and demand need to equal 100% at all times) there are rules to govern the buying and selling of energy all generators ("market participants") follow.
Suffice it to say, grid management in an open energy market is complicated. If you really want to know more about the rules you can read more here: http://ercot.com/mktrules
There's certainly a lot of FUD in that article, but it gets one thing right: critters in the equipment are a major source of failure.
Last year we had a power glitch at our office when a snake climbed up a power pole and shorted across two phases. The snake didn't survive and folks learned to make sure their desktops are plugged into the outlets served by the building UPS.
Gas, coal, and nuke generation goes down for maintenance all the time. But if it can be scheduled so energy demand is met all is good.
As you say, the crime patterns pretty much match the neighborhoods the stores are in and that ain't in a good one.
He writes interesting non-fiction books and reads them for the audio versions.
Just this morning on my drive into work I finished "The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible". Before that was "Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers".
Previous books of his include "The Map That Changed the World" about the first geologic map of Britain", "The Meaning of Everything" about the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, and "Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded". Good listens, all.
I live in the country and my house is about 100-feet off a rural highway with a 65-mph speed limit. Being Texas, most folks are going a bit faster.
One of my neighbors has a Tesla. It's no quieter at these speeds than the numerous diesel pickups that inhabit these parts -- the tire noise is amazingly loud. Luckily this road isn't very heavily traveled or I'd be tempted to build a berm or other noise abatement obstruction.
In the continental US there's three independent grids: East, West, and Texas. There's some interchange of power between the grids with DC ties, but it's pretty minimal capacity-wise.