Assoc. Prof
@CUEngineering
. Formerly
@NREL
. Energy, grids, optimization, metal, fitness, cats, video games.
@CMU_ECE
Alum. Views are mine and not my employers'.
LMPs can be modeled as DC circuit voltages.
In new work with
@gjharsha
, we show that price behavior can be interpreted and modeled using DC circuits, meaning you don't have to understand Lagrangian duality to understand LMPs - you just have to remember high school physics.
🧵
@KellyOSheaMPH
@SusannaLHarris
I literally once said "I'm not going to turn on my camera because I didn't have time to put on a bra" and that shut down the conversation.
@clairezagorski
Literally me. “I’m a dog person”/grew up with dogs / found these two trash gremlins and ever since then…500% would take a bullet for these perfect baby angels and am now a certified cat lady. Cats are so weird, needy, snuggly, and continually fascinating.
@ellle_em
Found these two last survivors of their litter. Had to take them in. They were covered with fleas and terribly sick but they pulled through and now they’re total lovebugs!
@moveablejaw
My cat found the bacon grease jar recently and I caught her licking the solidified grease 😩🤭 she tries to open the cupboard periodically ever since she discovered it
@JonathanMalloy
@TimHenke9
This also happened once in the academic circles I run in, except it was a student giving a talk in front of a room full of people, and a well known professor criticized the work and said “who is your advisor???” And the student meekly said “…you are” - kinda unbelievable
@gotonura
Disagree. I think you should always OFFER to pay, but you should take it seriously if they say they decline. The power dynamic might make some students feel uncomfortable, like they would owe you something. Take it seriously when someone says they're not comfortable. "Exception"
@SusannaLHarris
asking a class of 40 to have cameras on is full-blown chaotic. I can't see that many moving little thumbnails and stay focused on my lecture. And if a cat comes in one of the frames the entire lecture will be off track for at least five minutes
Update: I don't have to do it again! My NSF CAREER was awarded from EPCN early this morning. Very grateful and honored to turn my "learning for AC OPF" endeavors from a weekend/night effort into having the resources to have a student on this exciting topic!
I found out last week that I received The John and Mercedes Peebles Innovation in Education Award, which is a teaching award that the the
@CUBoulder
College of Engineering gives each year based on nominations by students. I'm so honored and humbled 🥹❤️
*reaches a fork in the trail*
Me: “which way do you want to go?”
My wife: “hmm, let’s go this way. I think there are more power lines on this part and I know you like that.”
Me: *holding back tears* “that’s a really sweet thing to say” 😭
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it’s 2021, you can order bacon from your phone, cars can drive themselves, and AI models can write books with near perfect grammar, but we’re still requesting DR over Twitter
My mom is turning 60 and is still the most badass woman I know. After a traumatic childhood, she came to the US at 17 knowing 0 English, got a computer science degree and continued to work while raising kids, got into fitness, and has now won a ton of Senior Games medals.
#badass
I haven’t watched Don’t Look Up yet but the premise sounds like it’s comparing a discrete disaster (comet touching down) to a continuous disaster (climate change) thus the allegory already bothers me. Should I get over this and watch it anyway?
@JesseJenkins
You know what’s crazy? One company plops down a 600 MW bitcoin mine in Texas (~1% of ERCOT’s peak) and that number probably cancels out years of work in residential energy efficiency efforts in Texas (ofc, there are other benefits to EE)..
h/t
@agelston
@TheWorldWatch
@AndyGrewal
Trying to explain to my immigrant mom why there are items for sale in the mall that have Mao’s face on them when she grew up extreme poverty and had her parents literally ripped apart from her as a child because misinformed kids now think communism is cool physically hurts me
Just putting this out there:
If any game developers want an energy consultant to make sure their depiction of energy infrastructure/ power plants / dystopian future building devices are realistic, my rates are VERY reasonable (free for this important purpose)
What can demand response and overbooked flights possibly have in common?
Airlines like Delta have the option to allow customers to submit bids to be bumped to later flights. Last week this resulted in $10,000 offered to customers on an overbooked flight to give up their seats.
I didn’t join Twitter to win arguments against strangers; I joined it to meet people, expand my knowledge, and be exposed to new ideas so I can become more confident about my opinions and present students with more nuanced viewpoints when I teach.
Oh, and also all the cat pics.
Starting to learn drums has been one of the best life decisions I’ve ever made. It’s such a satisfying stress reliever, it lets you experience music in a new way, and generally as long as you’re on beat you can reasonably play along with a lot of popular songs which is super fun!
Wait so you’re telling me the “delay” button on dishwashers was never for time of use pricing but instead so people could avoid hearing the noise from the dishwashers until a certain time??? Being in energy has ruined me
While useful to invoke the imagery of "electrons flow from power plants to your house", because our brains can relate it to more understandable things like water flowing through pipes, recently the technical inaccuracy has been bothering me more and more.
No electrons from the
My early birthday present from my wife just came in the mail - waaaay too excited to start submonitoring all of my home circuits and needing out! Also it’s a local company which is cool (Littleton, CO)
@emporia_energy
You love to see it: I've noticed definitions of Demand Response are now shifting to explicitly include
1) Demand increase as a form of DR
2) Environmental, not just economic and reliability, benefits
DR is "demand responding," not just "load reduction" and I'll die on this hill
I disagree with the definition of demand response here only including load decrease and shifting (). The concept of DR also encompasses load increase; those needs just aren't as commonly seen today. But mark my words *wags finger*
I realized that my winter breaks as a prof aren’t that different from when I was a student. I got up at 1 pm, I have no idea what day of the week it is, and I’m eating meals at weird hours. I also just got a new video game. You would think I would have matured more by now
Alright
@XcelEnergyCO
I’m a DR proponent, but $25/YEAR for multiple, multi-hour discomfort events is just going to result in people hating these programs en masse.
More $ plus rebranding - texts can say “we’ll pay you $10 for today” rather than an abstract “per year” could help
@drmansfeldt
so if I wanna charge a Nissan Leaf (0.31 kWh/mi) to go 30 miles, it'll be ~$1.50. Filling up an Elantra (33 mpg city) would be ~$4 and about 5-8 min of my time. if they only have a level-2 charger, i'd have to wait around >1 hour. If they have a 50 kW charger, it'd be ~11 min
@nas_pari
Seeing this pic on a seminar flyer would make me feel MORE comfortable, as it's a successful person who is showing their down-to-earth side. It would make me feel like the speaker is approachable and relatable.
@queerdievalist
I’ve never had the guts to mention my wife in class and just generally dodge questions when students ask about personal things. (I’m a lot more open with my research group because I know them better, though). But reading this gave me a smidge more confidence to eventually do so.
I was gonna cook dinner from scratch
But then I got Thai
It was gonna be really healthy and stuff
Until I got Thai
The food in the fridge is going bad, and I know why (why, Kyri?)
Because I got Thai
Because I got Thai
Because I got Thaaaaiii
Crazy the electric Ford-150 can be around 50% heavier than its ICE counterpart (~6000 vs ~4000 lbs). Knowing nothing about how bridges are designed, is mass EV adoption going to be a problem / surpass design conditions in some areas?
Tweets like this are misleading and tbh kind of harmful to helping decarbonization efforts. First of all, you gotta look at lifecycle emissions. Second of all, EVs (in the US, at least) have MUCH. lower carbon footprints than ICE vehicles. And this is rapidly getting better.
My first conference, PESGM 2012 in San Diego, exactly 10 years ago…and PESGM Denver, today 🤗 I had the same skirt, but I threw away the top a few years ago unfortunately
So happy to now share this experience with my students as a prof; it makes me a little emotional 😭
Frequently when I go on Twitter I feel guilty for liking my job. Can we stop with the broad generalizations of “aCaDeMiA Is sTuPiD” and recognize that everyone’s experiences are unique? I don’t like everything about my job, but who does?
you hear things like "oh it's so cool to be able to grow a human" and it makes sense in theory, but I didn't fully understand how phenomenal the concept was until I began experiencing it myself.
Like, I'm 40% through the process of growing a new family member??! That's crazy
Got booted out of the theater for repeatedly shouting “there’s a singularity in the matrix!” Every time something crazy happened. When they rudely asked me to leave I shouted “do you people even have any eigenvalues??” No response. People these days are so ill conditioned smh
@clhubes
Once I got a flat tire in middle of nowhere Alaska and at the nearest house we found the guy was like “stick a $20 bill in the tire and roll it into this shack off the side of the road and in the morning it’ll be patched” and when we came back in the morning it was fixed
I know Twitter is full of bots and spam now, but every time a woman who looks like a model likes one of my tweets about reactive power my confidence goes up a teeny tiny bit. Even if I know she’s not real. 🙏🏼
my wife wants the opinion of energy twitter on this idea:
modular batteries, like in GM's Ultium platform, but you can physically remove modules from the car when you're only planning on short trips. By knocking out 500+ lbs, many benefits arise.
"We’re in the Motorola Razr stage of the smart grid transition right now," Baker said. Having the ability to see changes in real time and incorporate clean energy and microgrids into the American grid would be like upgrading from an old-school Razr flip phone to an iPhone 13."
Was in the mountains today. Tesla was at 74% charge when we left. By the time we made it back down, drove through town a bit, and arrived to get beer and fried chicken, it was at 75% charge.
So cool
It’s my 7th time teaching a circuits for non-majors class. I keep expecting myself to feel apathetic because I’ve done it so many times - like blah blah, SSDD, you know?
But no. Each year the feeling surprises me again: how excited I get to see the students learn and comprehend
@kadavy
@david_perell
This. Me as a teen: "OMG they like the same obscure band as me WE MUST BE SOULMATES" and after countless failed relationships I realized "nope, it was life philosophy and internal values all along". Also, having different tastes just means you get exposed to more stuff.
I'm pretty numb to paper/proposal rejections at this point, but this one hurt. On Saturday night, get the email that our NSF proposal under review for a YEAR was rejected. Not saying the criticism wasn't fair, but it took up part of my headspace for an entire year and that sucked
spotted a Nissan Leaf plugged into random outlet outside a restaurant
me to friend: "looks like someone's getting free power"
guy behind me: "I'm paying for it."
me, skeptical b/c it looks like a non-individually metered outlet, "really?"
guy: "I own this restaurant."
oop 🫥
Happy
#LGBTQSTEMDay
! I am an Assistant Professor studying renewable energy integration and power grid optimization. My wife is a mathematician and data scientist. Our cats are precious except for when they’re too hyper (first pic).
Hot take: Relaxations used for optimization problems which represent the control/operation of physical systems are somewhat dangerous.
Feasibility should be pursued over optimality. If the solution can't be physically implemented, who cares how close it is to optimality?
"She researches how to incorporate renewable energy into the grid, make the grid more robust to weather and demand fluctuations, make buildings respond to energy availability, and operate the grid with fewer losses." - my wife (pretty good!)
Ok hold up utility what’s this bill from?
Oh lol no, there’s been a mistake, my electric furnace was not consuming energy, it was just generating heat.
What do you mean “consume” is a connotation for energy conversion? What is this *first law of thermodynamics* you speak of?
Previously I posted an example of how negative prices can occur w/JUST congestion. Since transmission is in the spotlight recently, I thought I'd give another interesting example where power flow can't solve without *adding* load.
Left: Infeasible.
Right: Add load - feasible.
Negative LMPs can happen without renewables (or start up/shut down costs). Here's a simple example I came up with to illustrate how transmission congestion causes negative LMPs (and thus a benefit to increasing load!).
Left: $7600
Right, increased load at bus 1 by 70 MWh: $3400
Much exciting work has been done using machine learning to solve AC Optimal Power Flow (OPF). However, it's nearly impossible to compare results across research groups - we are all using different datasets, and some of the datasets don't span a wide variety of system loadings.
Things I’ve said in circuits class this week:
- “New voltage just dropped”
- “This circuit is spicy”
- *10 minutes on the CONAIR 1875, it’s amperage, how hair dryers work, conductor ratings, and NEC requirements*
I’m sure they make fun of me but as long as they’re learning😌
@ellorysmith
@jesse_sumpter
Plz help Jesse, my wife and I keep asking each other who is the husband and having a hard time functioning not knowing this and have absolutely no idea who to vote for because we do not exist with independent thought and also do not know how to breathe please help us we are dying
Broke: electric resistance stoves (unity power factor)
Woke: electric induction stoves (lagging power factor)
Bespoke: electric capacitance stoves (leading power factor)
So hot. So fast
(Plz don’t do this)
I may be 33 but the first day of school still gets me excited. There's energy in the air, you get to seeing people you haven't seen in a while...it's just nice 😊
Except trying to get your syllabi and courses ready in time, that's stressful and I'm procrastinating by tweeting
Today before our final, my circuits students surprised me with presents and a meme booklet they created for me. I love my job 🥰😭🥺 (meme thread incoming)
Update: our area is cleared to go back and our home is fine! The cats have been really good sports. Although Alex was trilling for an hour straight in the middle of the night walking over us and asking when we were going home (his trills always sound like he’s asking a question!)
Negative LMPs can happen without renewables (or start up/shut down costs). Here's a simple example I came up with to illustrate how transmission congestion causes negative LMPs (and thus a benefit to increasing load!).
Left: $7600
Right, increased load at bus 1 by 70 MWh: $3400
me showing someone Google analytics today: "yeah it's so cool, you can often see what search terms people use to get to your website. Let me show you"
*this pops up*
I'm giving a speech at the college graduation next month and it's literally one of the hardest things I've ever had to write. I've changed it like 20 times. But I just changed the opening line to this and I'm cracking myself up
Since we’re nitpicking the beer analogy again, I’m going to discuss my favorite kW/kVaR/kVA analogy that y’all will hate: the spicy cheetos bag.
Cheetos = active power
Air in bag = reactive power
Bag = conductor or transformer
This is wild. Wholesale power prices have spiked in the Houston region, north of $317 per megawatt hour. But less than three hours away in Calhoun County (where there's a lot of wind power), prices are NEGATIVE $883
Really digging into capacity markets since one of my PhD students wants to study them. First thought: Plz show me equations? Second: Is this just a series of heuristic fudge factors and buffers? Third: How is this not adding MASSIVE amts of unused MW for most of the year? (it is)