Elon/Tesla has announced new hardware/software for it's cars. While I won't pretend to technically understand such systems as they are, or will be, I do think it is a significant business model ie. on the fly upgrades after-sale ( this is not new ). It is/will-be a market disruptor of first order.
[ WARNING : DETOUR, POLEMIC AHEAD ]
What I will confidently profess is that human neurological processing has always been well behind the play for decades, in capacity to safely anticipate outcomes during automotive control. We just haven't got the biological pathway speed & complexity to do that. Until, say, last century or so there was no need to have that develop while we typically moved about at maybe 20km/h max ( horseback ). It has been repeatedly shown - mainly in trauma statistics - that going above around 60 km/h and also expecting even reasonable safety performance is unjustified. Overall we have socially normalised the gap by insurances, outcome mitigation, intense behavioural regulation and other mechanisms. Why? Well, we love cars and the personal flexibility/autonomy they grant. What has grown is a myth that we can control these ~ 1000+ kg devices with confidence. I am thoroughly sick of too many 'if only .....' narratives after the tragedy. So the cars get faster, handle better, roads improve, traffic management is enhanced, and systems even become more energy efficient. But our neurology has not adapted in such a short time ( approx ten generations have enjoyed motorised transport of some form ).
Detractors of autonomous systems rightly point out deficiencies, exception scenarios and the like. Many are well meaning in their criticism and more power to them. There needs to be such scrutiny. For instance there has been a well publicised/analysed fatality in a vehicle with an earlier version of such a system, that was literally blindsided by a truck. From my research on that case it appears unclear what, short of future prediction of human intent, would have altered the outcome given the circumstances of that day. Sad. But it seems the people at Telsa were genuinely upset about that ( ie. the actual fatality & not merely the adverse publicity ) which spurred further refinement. I really like the idea of shortening the loop on improvements by after sale optimisation.
[/ WARNING : DETOUR, POLEMIC AHEAD ]
I'm now in an 'inquiry queue' for a Tesla Powerwall purchase. The Aussie distributor is inundated with interest after the recent storm trail across several southern states. So I'll have to wait my turn. At this stage I have decided to get ( ~ $11K AUD ):
- 24 to 36 hours of off-grid power storage.
- a ( protected ) generator input to power a full house via the usual wall plugs.
- several switching/inversion gadgets useful for the above but absolutely required for later solar upon the roof.
- hardware monitors/controllers and their software ( on your own PC ! ) to twiddle all of the above via a bog standard Ethernet cable.
For me at least the amenity, or 'what is my time worth?', aspect is gnarly. I practice medicine acutely, of the moment as it were, and so communication is key. With the recent storm we lost use-of/access-to the the local cellular towers for two days. The copper network went down but only briefly. Of course nothing is perfect, but I want options.
Interestingly, investigation into South Australia's total power out ( because of the storm ) has revealed the problem was quite unrelated to the mode of generation ( they have 40% capacity as wind generation ). The truth was rather more boring and less suitable as twitter-feed ( Twitter is legendary for context-less and content-less statements which alas is making nonsense of any virtue of 'citizen journalism' ). The trouble was the re-connection retry threshold ( a software preset ) during low/dropping voltage scenarios, which then propagates distribution components opting out ie. the dominoes fall. The presets are under review. I don't think anything suspicious is happening here : the engineers were merely caught out with an un-anticipated instance, so let's not be unkind to them. There is an asset protection aspect to this and so can be difficult to make sweeping generalisations about ideal tactics for when things fall over in high winds. So specifically it was not due to the turbines over-rotating in the strong wind, nor forced to free-wheel off grid as a response. A single turbine was knocked over and has revealed an under-specification mounting as the cause, and so some dodgy contractor is going to be sued I expect.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Cascade failures of the power grid are rather common, unfortunately.
Line 139A goes down and overvolts upstream. Interconnect 139NG2 senses the overvolt and disconnects. Generator GN39W overspeeds and shuts down. Undervolt detected at station 44CRIT and it drops line 44GOV to compensate. And so it propagates faster than the humans can stop. Soon nearly every interconnection point has tripped out, most of the generators are in standby and the humans have to come in and carefully begin to connect generators to load and ramp the generators up to capacity in small steps so they don't cause another cascade failure. Mind you that is if some major interconnection point hasn't fried when it all tripped off. If that happens a couple of days to fix the interconnect before the system can be brought back. Oh and if the internet to all those places didn't go down with the power or someone has to drive there and switch it manually!
The trouble was the re-connection retry threshold ( a software preset ) during low/dropping voltage scenarios, which then propagates distribution components opting out ie. the dominoes fall. The presets are under review.
We had a nasty power abnormality here in Albuquerque a dozen or more years ago. I think the initiating event was something ordinary such as a tree limb drooping onto a power line taking it out of service, but however it got there, the "protracted bad system state" was that much of the distribution system sat at something like 2/3 of spec voltage for about twenty minutes. (I measured 80 volts at a socket in my house--nominal here is 120). The shocking thing is how much damage that did. Many, many PCs died, including not a few sitting under the "protection" of the usual sort of UPS. At my place of employment, then perhaps the world's highest value-added per day factory (we did the primary fabrication step for the dollar majority of Intel's microprocessor chips) a major electrical panel turned into a twisted mess of overheated former conductors. While we had a few machine casualties, nothing of higher significance. But another wafer fab in town had a major fire which ruined all the equipment in a bay by smoke contamination. Their chips were needed by our customers to finish systems using our chips, so to protect our own sales we ran a few process steps for them for months.
On a less rarified level someone I know was in a tire shop at the time, and watched the despair of the manager as some of the machinery went up in smoke.
So some equipment in that case was too willing to stay connected. Had load-shedding worked properly the remaining load would have gotten intended voltage. Getting the system dynamics right when most of the low-level actions are simply "on or off" is surprisingly complicated. And the best you can do is seriously going to harm someone in some cases.
Good luck with the Powerwall. You seem a better candidate owner than most people.
Our ( very ) local supply systems will try three times to come back up before closing down. After that a human decision is required. The reason is pretty straightforward : persistent absolute ground pathways are as common as ....... trees ....... and so most outages aren't simply recoverable ( you need to dismantle a tree or put another line/pole up or whatever ), plus there is only one alternate route which often suffers an identical problem on the day.
archae86 wrote:
So some equipment in that case was too willing to stay connected. Had load-shedding worked properly the remaining load would have gotten intended voltage. Getting the system dynamics right when most of the low-level actions are simply "on or off" is surprisingly complicated. And the best you can do is seriously going to harm someone in some cases.
That's the key conundrum. Very context dependent, almost impossible to simply proclaim.
archae86 wrote:
Good luck with the Powerwall. You seem a better candidate owner than most people.
Thank you. Funnily enough, that's pretty well what I thought : for me the case is sound ( the costs have been dropping and the benefits rising ) and so it's time to put my money where my mouth is ! :-))
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Good luck with the Powerwall. You seem a better candidate owner than most people.
Thank you. Funnily enough, that's pretty well what I thought : for me the case is sound ( the costs have been dropping and the benefits rising ) and so it's time to put my money where my mouth is ! :-))
Cheers, Mike.
That's funny I was just researching that myself the other day, the back of my house faces the West so any solar panels could easily be 'hidden' from the street. I was looking for an alternative to running a generator as they can be noisy and running one 24/7 for several days may not make the neighbors very happy. I would be happy in my own home, but without any power they would have their windows open and listening to my generator may not make for 'good' neighbors.
Ah, a cold front is moving into the area this Friday. It will be the first hint of Fall. Temps will go into the 60s at night and the 70 during the day. It will however be short lived. But not to worry another front will arrive to lower the temps again. We are entering the fall/winter weather patterns which are controlled by cold fronts sweeping down from the north. After this summer's heat I welcome the cooler weather and the silence of an idle A/C unit.
David S wrote:What's so good
What's so good about it is you could be getting Lost in HERE.
Seems to be not far from your Location.
David S wrote:mikey
Are you seeing roots or flowers?
Eating lunch fast.
Eating lunch fast.
David
Miserable old git
Patiently waiting for the asteroid with my name on it.
Elon/Tesla has announced new
Elon/Tesla has announced new hardware/software for it's cars. While I won't pretend to technically understand such systems as they are, or will be, I do think it is a significant business model ie. on the fly upgrades after-sale ( this is not new ). It is/will-be a market disruptor of first order.
[ WARNING : DETOUR, POLEMIC AHEAD ]
What I will confidently profess is that human neurological processing has always been well behind the play for decades, in capacity to safely anticipate outcomes during automotive control. We just haven't got the biological pathway speed & complexity to do that. Until, say, last century or so there was no need to have that develop while we typically moved about at maybe 20km/h max ( horseback ). It has been repeatedly shown - mainly in trauma statistics - that going above around 60 km/h and also expecting even reasonable safety performance is unjustified. Overall we have socially normalised the gap by insurances, outcome mitigation, intense behavioural regulation and other mechanisms. Why? Well, we love cars and the personal flexibility/autonomy they grant. What has grown is a myth that we can control these ~ 1000+ kg devices with confidence. I am thoroughly sick of too many 'if only .....' narratives after the tragedy. So the cars get faster, handle better, roads improve, traffic management is enhanced, and systems even become more energy efficient. But our neurology has not adapted in such a short time ( approx ten generations have enjoyed motorised transport of some form ).
Detractors of autonomous systems rightly point out deficiencies, exception scenarios and the like. Many are well meaning in their criticism and more power to them. There needs to be such scrutiny. For instance there has been a well publicised/analysed fatality in a vehicle with an earlier version of such a system, that was literally blindsided by a truck. From my research on that case it appears unclear what, short of future prediction of human intent, would have altered the outcome given the circumstances of that day. Sad. But it seems the people at Telsa were genuinely upset about that ( ie. the actual fatality & not merely the adverse publicity ) which spurred further refinement. I really like the idea of shortening the loop on improvements by after sale optimisation.
[/ WARNING : DETOUR, POLEMIC AHEAD ]
I'm now in an 'inquiry queue' for a Tesla Powerwall purchase. The Aussie distributor is inundated with interest after the recent storm trail across several southern states. So I'll have to wait my turn. At this stage I have decided to get ( ~ $11K AUD ):
- 24 to 36 hours of off-grid power storage.
- a ( protected ) generator input to power a full house via the usual wall plugs.
- several switching/inversion gadgets useful for the above but absolutely required for later solar upon the roof.
- hardware monitors/controllers and their software ( on your own PC ! ) to twiddle all of the above via a bog standard Ethernet cable.
For me at least the amenity, or 'what is my time worth?', aspect is gnarly. I practice medicine acutely, of the moment as it were, and so communication is key. With the recent storm we lost use-of/access-to the the local cellular towers for two days. The copper network went down but only briefly. Of course nothing is perfect, but I want options.
Interestingly, investigation into South Australia's total power out ( because of the storm ) has revealed the problem was quite unrelated to the mode of generation ( they have 40% capacity as wind generation ). The truth was rather more boring and less suitable as twitter-feed ( Twitter is legendary for context-less and content-less statements which alas is making nonsense of any virtue of 'citizen journalism' ). The trouble was the re-connection retry threshold ( a software preset ) during low/dropping voltage scenarios, which then propagates distribution components opting out ie. the dominoes fall. The presets are under review. I don't think anything suspicious is happening here : the engineers were merely caught out with an un-anticipated instance, so let's not be unkind to them. There is an asset protection aspect to this and so can be difficult to make sweeping generalisations about ideal tactics for when things fall over in high winds. So specifically it was not due to the turbines over-rotating in the strong wind, nor forced to free-wheel off grid as a response. A single turbine was knocked over and has revealed an under-specification mounting as the cause, and so some dodgy contractor is going to be sued I expect.
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Cascade failures of the power
Cascade failures of the power grid are rather common, unfortunately.
Line 139A goes down and overvolts upstream. Interconnect 139NG2 senses the overvolt and disconnects. Generator GN39W overspeeds and shuts down. Undervolt detected at station 44CRIT and it drops line 44GOV to compensate. And so it propagates faster than the humans can stop. Soon nearly every interconnection point has tripped out, most of the generators are in standby and the humans have to come in and carefully begin to connect generators to load and ramp the generators up to capacity in small steps so they don't cause another cascade failure. Mind you that is if some major interconnection point hasn't fried when it all tripped off. If that happens a couple of days to fix the interconnect before the system can be brought back. Oh and if the internet to all those places didn't go down with the power or someone has to drive there and switch it manually!
Mike Hewson wrote:The trouble
We had a nasty power abnormality here in Albuquerque a dozen or more years ago. I think the initiating event was something ordinary such as a tree limb drooping onto a power line taking it out of service, but however it got there, the "protracted bad system state" was that much of the distribution system sat at something like 2/3 of spec voltage for about twenty minutes. (I measured 80 volts at a socket in my house--nominal here is 120). The shocking thing is how much damage that did. Many, many PCs died, including not a few sitting under the "protection" of the usual sort of UPS. At my place of employment, then perhaps the world's highest value-added per day factory (we did the primary fabrication step for the dollar majority of Intel's microprocessor chips) a major electrical panel turned into a twisted mess of overheated former conductors. While we had a few machine casualties, nothing of higher significance. But another wafer fab in town had a major fire which ruined all the equipment in a bay by smoke contamination. Their chips were needed by our customers to finish systems using our chips, so to protect our own sales we ran a few process steps for them for months.
On a less rarified level someone I know was in a tire shop at the time, and watched the despair of the manager as some of the machinery went up in smoke.
So some equipment in that case was too willing to stay connected. Had load-shedding worked properly the remaining load would have gotten intended voltage. Getting the system dynamics right when most of the low-level actions are simply "on or off" is surprisingly complicated. And the best you can do is seriously going to harm someone in some cases.
Good luck with the Powerwall. You seem a better candidate owner than most people.
archae86 wrote:So some
Our ( very ) local supply systems will try three times to come back up before closing down. After that a human decision is required. The reason is pretty straightforward : persistent absolute ground pathways are as common as ....... trees ....... and so most outages aren't simply recoverable ( you need to dismantle a tree or put another line/pole up or whatever ), plus there is only one alternate route which often suffers an identical problem on the day.
That's the key conundrum. Very context dependent, almost impossible to simply proclaim.
Thank you. Funnily enough, that's pretty well what I thought : for me the case is sound ( the costs have been dropping and the benefits rising ) and so it's time to put my money where my mouth is ! :-))
Cheers, Mike.
I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter ...
... and my other CPU is a Ryzen 5950X :-) Blaise Pascal
Mike Hewson wrote: archae86
That's funny I was just researching that myself the other day, the back of my house faces the West so any solar panels could easily be 'hidden' from the street. I was looking for an alternative to running a generator as they can be noisy and running one 24/7 for several days may not make the neighbors very happy. I would be happy in my own home, but without any power they would have their windows open and listening to my generator may not make for 'good' neighbors.
Gary Charpentier
Properly designed SCADA systems can compensate/correct for such conditions.
Ah, a cold front is moving
Ah, a cold front is moving into the area this Friday. It will be the first hint of Fall. Temps will go into the 60s at night and the 70 during the day. It will however be short lived. But not to worry another front will arrive to lower the temps again. We are entering the fall/winter weather patterns which are controlled by cold fronts sweeping down from the north. After this summer's heat I welcome the cooler weather and the silence of an idle A/C unit.