19
Oct
2019

New job!

I know, it’s not very long since the last time I said that. But part of the nature of a postdoc is that it’s temporary, and insecure, and you’re looking for something better… and I’m lucky enough that something better came along, and I applied for what I thought was a long shot, and I got it, and…

…in about a month I’m going to be starting as Lecturer in Renewable Energy[1] at the University of Hull! I’m joining the Energy and Environment Institute, which is a multidisciplinary group with a specific mission that speaks to me. It sits outside of any department, but works with a number of them, and feels like it should be a good fit.

My feelings are complicated. I had planned to be in the US for more than the ~7 months that I will have spent here. I’m sad to be leaving without having had much time to really get to know a city that I was starting to like, or the country beyond its boundaries. At the same time, living here is feeling less and less comfortable politically, and I’m also happy to be moving “home”. There’s a certain amount of guilt in leaving a postdoc after six months at relatively short notice, because it always has an impact on projects when that happens; but it’s a great career move, and I’m so happy to have the opportunity! The jump to a first faculty post is a big one. I’m a little daunted, but also excited, and really looking forward to getting into it.

Right now I’m buried in organising my second intercontinental move in a calendar year, while also working full-time and trying to keep track of what’s happening with Brexit. It’s stressful. In a few weeks I should be out the other side of that, with a new place to live in (for me) a new city, whether or not that city is still in the EU… keep watching this space for (very) occasional updates, and get in touch if you’d like us to work together!

[1] For the benefit of any Americans here, Lecturer in the UK is approximately equivalent to Assistant Professor on tenure track in the US – although tenure track is not a thing in Britain.

Posted by simon in Professional updates, Reflective
12
Oct
2019

That UK power cut in August

You probably all remember that power cut earlier in the year? There was all sorts of unfounded speculation about the causes. The initial report into the causes is out; it’s actually been out for a week or two, but I just got around to reading it. You can read it here if you want to – it’s not overwhelmingly technical – but here’s a brief summary, as I understand things:

First off, this was not because of any inherent problem with wind power – although it did involve a wind farm – and nor was it because we don’t have enough generation capacity in the UK (that’s a scare story that arises every winter, but this happened in summer in any case). The timeline went as follows,

  1. Lighting struck a 400kV power line in Cambridgeshire. That’s a fairly normal occurrence, and protective systems are designed for it. Those systems worked, and the transmission line was back to normal operation in a tenth of a second.
  2. Less than a half second later, as a direct or indirect result of the lightning strike, a large offshore wind farm stopped supplying the grid. This should not have happened, and the wind farm operators are investigating why it did. At the same time (within a second), part of a nearby gas power station also disconnected. It is not clear why that happened either, and that’s also being investigated.
  3. The grid was operating with enough reserve generating capacity to cover the loss of the single largest generator that was in use. This equated to a reserve of about 1GW. Losing two generators at the same time is not something that is normally allowed for, but as it happened the loss of generation from those two combined was a little under 1GW. The automatic systems detected the loss of generation and compensated with reserve generation 20 seconds later. So far, so good.
  4. About a minute after the initial event, another chunk of the same gas power station tripped. Again, it’s not yet clear why.
  5. This additional loss of generation was more than could be compensated for by the immediately available reserve. With demand greater than supply, an automatic system triggered the disconnection of about 5% of electricity users across England and Wales, in order to bring the two back into balance. This is the power cut that people noticed, and it is exactly what is supposed to happen in this scenario.
  6. In disconnecting 900MW of demand, the automatic system also caused about 600MW of embedded generation (mostly small-scale renewables) to be disconnected, so the net loss in demand was only 300MW. This is a problem in principal, but in this case dropping 300MW of demand was sufficient to stabilise the situation.
  7. Over the next four minutes, additional generation was brought online to return things to a normal operating condition.
  8. Customers disconnected in step 6 started being reconnected a few minutes later, and all were back to normal within 45 minutes of the initial event. Except for the railways, but that’s a separate question about how the railways respond to loss of power, rather than why the power was lost.

So, by and large things worked as they are meant to. The system carries enough reserve for any one generator to disconnect unexpectedly, but in this case two generators did so at the same time. Hence, the power cut.

There are three outstanding questions, which are being investigated further: (a) Why did the wind farm trip after the lightning strike? (b) Why did the gas power station trip after the lightning strike? and (c) How should embedded generation on the distribution system be handled when parts of that system are automatically disconnected?

The first two of those questions are purely technical ones: something happened that shouldn’t have happened, so the engineers need to know why so that it can be fixed. The third one is a bit more interesting, and is the only potential area in which the shift towards renewables is involved (although it’s important to note that in this particular case, it made no difference). It’s not clear to me at present, because I’m not a grid expert, whether there is supposed to be a mechanism by which distribution-connected consumers get dropped while distribution-connected generators stay online – in which case that system failed – or whether the issue is more that the generators are going to be dropped, and that the amount of the distribution grid that is automatically disconnected needs to be adjusted to account for that generation, so that the correct amount of net demand is removed.

Perhaps the final report in November will tell us more.

Posted by simon in The wider world
25
Jul
2019

Publication : Future policy implications of tidal energy array interactions

This is an unusual one for me so far, in that it contains no new science. Instead, it explores some of the policy implications of what we already know about how tidal farms will affect the flow in their channels, and affect each other, if they are deployed at large scales.

There are two main points that we’ve tried to get across:

  • Firstly, that if we are to achieve the greatest possible energy yield for a given level of environmental impact, we’ll need to strategically plan tidal developments for a whole region – not do them piecemeal.
  • Secondly, that tidal farms will interact. If they’re upstream and downstream of each other that interaction is detrimental, but if they’re side by side then they can have mutually beneficial effects. We think it’s a problem unique to tidal power that if one array stops working, its “rival” neighbor can lose power… and that raises a number of fun and interesting questions about management and liability.

After looking at the physics and the resulting policy issues, we discuss some ways of dealing with them. We argue that if we want to get the most that we can out of our seas we will need some form of interventionist, centrally planned, approach to managing tidal power; the free market will not deliver. The arrangements that we have at the moment are just fine while we’re only putting a few turbines in the water. But as we scale up – and we must scale up, if tidal energy is going to be significant at grid level – this stuff will start to matter, and it’d be really nice if the necessary policy frameworks were in place before they’re needed.

Diagram showing interactions between tidal farms in series and in parallel
Diagram summarizing some possible inter-array interactions. See my figure-making skills! The version in the paper doesn’t include the faces, which I added for a presentation, but in hindsight I wish it did!

I’m proud of this one, for two reasons: Firstly that I think it’s important, in that it asks some questions that I don’t think anybody in the marine spatial planning, policy or governance spaces has been thinking about much as yet (although I gather they have been grappling with similar issues around wind). Secondly because it’s been a genuine multidisciplinary, collaborative, process. I had the original idea for the paper a couple of years ago, and after discussion with one of the other authors we tried to flesh it out, but we realised that we needed people with policy expertise. We brought them on board – including Steph Weir, a former PhD officemate of mine who wrote major chunks and taught me about unitization – and the result is a pleasingly short paper that really couldn’t have existed without all five of its authors.

If you want to read the whole thing yourself – it’s only five pages long, and it’s written for a non-specialist audience – then you can get the official version here with a subscription to Marine Policy, or the unformatted, post-review, version here for free.

Posted by simon in Explaining my work, Publications
11
Mar
2019

What could we do with $10-20bn?

A few weeks ago, Vanessa Harris asked an interesting question on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/technologypoet/status/1100102749541167104

I think that’s close to what Elon Musk thinks he’s doing, though I’m not personally convinced that most of his solutions are the ones we need. But naturally, it got me thinking about energy, and where private investment of that order – provided with a long-term view rather than the VC approach that’s caused so much trouble – might make a difference.

Let me caveat this by saying that this post goes waaaay beyond my actual areas of expertise. Consider it the idle musings of a slightly informed layperson. But here are some ideas:

  • Fusion: Too expensive, in the traditional big-project approach. And too far off to address the urgency that we feel at the moment.
  • Small / cheap innovative fusion: Still too far off, if we include time for rollout. And it’s already happening privately.
  • Traditional fission: Nope. This is mature, and the new ideas that are out there (Gen IV reactors, thorium reactors, etc) are too expensive for this sort of investment. Demonstrating uranium extraction from seawater would be interesting, but it’s unnecessary unless we have a massive nuclear rollout going on.
  • Small “modular” fission reactors: Maybe. I don’t know a lot about this, and how feasible and/or useful it would be… but I can imagine that $1-10bn might be the order of magnitude of the investment that’d be needed to make it work (or to show that it doesn’t).
  • Marine renewables: No individual idea needs this much cash; we’re used to “big” announcements in the $10m range. A few hundred million could do a lot in pushing a nascent technology to either being ready for commercial rollout or turning out not to work. For billions, we could adopt a scattergun approach of funding plenty of ideas, knowing that some would fail. There’s a chance of turning a profit, too!
  • Other renewables… don’t really need it any more, so far as I’m aware?
  • Energy storage: Maybe. Musk is already doing good things with batteries, but perhaps other routes.
  • Demand response: Difficult to see how cash would help; as I understand it, the difficult challenges here are social, regulatory, and to do with system integration – not technical in a way that money will necessarily help. Maybe I’m wrong, though?
  • Negative emissions technology: Yes. This feels as though it’s probably the right order of magnitude to develop CCS, and other techniques are probably worth a shot as well. Realistically, some way of pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere is going to be necessary when we overshoot the targets that the politicians are talking about.
  • Transport: One of the big questions in my mind is how to decarbonise things that batteries probably won’t be suitable for (many ships, most planes, IMHO). Hydrogen and fuel cells? Maybe. Some other fuel synthesised with electricity? Maybe. Crop-sourced biofuel? Maybe. Most of the specific projects I can think of are either too cheap or too expensive, but it’s not my field, and making significant progress in figuring out how to decarbonise transport would be a worthy use of the cash.
  • Reducing agricultural or industrial emissions? I’m not convinced that that this is something that it’s useful to throw money at (except for CCS for some industries).

Most of the ideas above are about getting necessary technologies ready to go. Many of them would need either large corporate or state-level support in place to make them actually happen at a commercial scale; but if the development is done, then the big-money investment is relatively low-risk.

I can’t help feeling that I’m being blinkered, though. Energy is what I do, so energy is what I think about… would there be better bang-for-the-buck, in terms of effect on climate change, to invest in something completely different? For example, how much impact could this sort of money have on women’s health and education – the improvement of which tends to reduce birth rates? What other interventions might be viable at this sort of scale? Somebody on Twitter suggested that the most effective investment multiplier is to “buy” US senators, but I’m trying to avoid that level of cynicism here…

Posted by simon in The wider world
05
Mar
2019

Time limits in research

Faliure, as illustrated by theAwkwardYeti.com

“So that experiment didn’t go as planned? Congratulations, you are now officially a scientist”

This tweet (which I can’t find again to attribute), as well as many other things, claims that the secret to most scientific work is not genius, but persistence. “Scientists are people who keep going when most of us have given up”. There’s a lot of truth to that. But I can’t help feeling that it’s sabotaged by the way that science is funded these days.

If you get a surprising result, that’s great for science! Well, sometimes. Usually it means you made a mistake. If it’s real, it’s great for science… but it’s awkward if you have to get the work finished and the publication out for a deadline, and you have more things lined up to do after that.

When an experiment or a simulation doesn’t work first time… well, that’s normal, but a huge proportion of the research workforce is on short fixed-term contracts, and when you’re only in the job for a year, you can’t afford to explore too many dead ends. You can’t afford to take the failure and persistence approach that is idolised above.

I’ve just finished a one-year postdoc, and this has made me very anxious from time to time[1]. I’ve started to wonder how much of a correlation there is between people with successful academic careers (at least in STEM), and people whose experiments / models / observations / whatever happened to go right first time during their first postdoc. Obviously there is a strong element of researcher merit involved in whether things work, but there’s also a hell of a lot of luck. And if you need it to work first time in order to have the time to get everything finished and written up[2] before you’re in the next job and busy on something else…

[1] Along with all the other sources of anxiety that result from 1-year postdocs. That’s a much broader topic, but this is just one of the reasons that I’m really looking forward to my next job being a little longer!
[2] Or, just “in a sufficiently complete state that you can write it up in evenings and weekends while working on a different day job”, if you’re privileged enough to be able to do that.

Posted by simon in Reflective

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