As I wrote earlier this month, the Powers household is now generating some of its own electricity, via photovoltaic panels on the roof.  Soon after the installation, our local utility PG&E installed a spiffy new digital meter and certified the system for use.  I turned it on last Thursday afternoon.  Yesterday afternoon (one week later) I played around with the power inverter to see the cumulative energy production since the system was turned on.

In exactly one week of long, sunny days, the system of 18 panels produced 154 kWh — or 22 kWh per day.  In that same period (which included some nice days and some very hot days — it was over 100 degrees F at our house yesterday), the new meter tells me that our house used all that plus 151 kWh more from the grid.  So even with the pool filter running and above-normal air conditioner usage, the solar panels produced almost exactly half the electricity used by our large-ish suburban California home.  Not bad, given that we could only put solar panels on a relatively small fraction of the roof (too much shade on the rest of it).

More economic analysis to follow after I get a bill or two.

Tags: photovoltaics, roof, Solar power, utility

Emil Sit has an excellent post on his recent experience with SunGrid, charitably titled “Observations on SunGrid Customer Care.”  He begins with:

I  haven’t used the SunGrid this week. In fact, no one has: there was a four day outage from last Saturday morning through this morning.

His post is quite illuminating about Sun, customer care, individuals involved in support services, communication philosophy, and related issues.  His conclusion:

As an idea, the SunGrid is a fast and easy way to get parallelism and performance flexibly. But Sun has to continue to improve the user interface (e.g., beyond the clever hack for job monitoring suggested to me by a Sun engineer) and relability of their infrastructure. Unless they do, people without CPU grants are going to start looking at alternatives like using Amazon’s hosted EC2 or running their own DigiPede.

Emil is, sadly, more than right.  Sun has to improve a lot of things, not just the UI, and not just reliability, because most people ARE ALREADY looking at (and using) alternatives (and — thanks for mentioning us!).  The problem isn’t UI — the problem is getting way, way ahead of the market, technology, and Sun’s own skill set.

Let me confess that I spent 20 years in or near the electric utility industry, and I know  A LOT about utilities.  SunGrid is not a utility.  The “utility computing” analogy bothers me in general, and I don’t have nearly the time or energy to break it down fully, but the standards, reliability, infrastructure, training, and commitment are not there (anywhere in the IT industry, including Sun) to run a utility.    

I almost wrote “not there YET” in that last sentence, but I remain unconvinced that a utility model will ever (or should ever) apply very well to computing.  Let’s be clear — I think outsourced computing in several forms can be viable, and that there are things you may want to compute on someone else’s computing infrastructure.  That doesn’t make it a utility.  And that’s probably OK.

The electric utility industry is boring.  Yes, I still have many fine friends there, and they are not, mostly, boring, but the industry as a whole does best when it changes slowly or not at all — and with good reason.  Appliances built in 1910 still run just fine when plugged into a socket — a socket whose voltage and frequency standards have not changed in a century.  Inventions since Edison, Tesla and Westinghouse have been largely incremental — in generation, transmission, and distribution.  Ways to USE electricity have changed radically over time, but even these are constrained (dramatically) by unchanging standards for voltage, frequency, and a handful of other key parameters. 

The tech industry has very few of the constraints (or benefits) of standards like these.  (Again, I don’t have time to elaborate fully (stay tuned for future posts), but if anyone wants to debate me on whether a Web Services standard compares to the 60-Hertz standard, I warn you — you’re going to lose.)  The tech industry delights in overthrowing standards, and as a result has made some pretty phenomenal progress — but as a result, use and generation of computing power have remained very closely coupled. 

Is this good or bad?  The jury is out (more on this another day).  But is it fact?  Yes.  The tech culture is not the utility culture (again, watch out if you want to debate me on this).  So even as we all root for SunGrid (even me), the deck is stacked against them. 

Tags: Digipede, Electricity, grid-computing, Sun, SunGrid, utility, utility-computing

There is a stirring moment in the movie version of the Return of the King in which Aragorn rallies his troops in the face of nearly impossible odds.  As the hordes of Mordor pour out of the black gate, he roars: 

“A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down, but it is not this day. This day we fight!”

Facing similarly impossible odds during closing arguments, Ken Lay’s defense attourney Michael Ramsey borrowed from Aragorn’s playbook as he addressed the jury:

“There may be a court in America that bends to political pressure but it’s not this court! There may come a day when an American jury yields to a media mob, but it’s not this jury.”

Rhetorical similarities aside, the difference here, in my opinion, is that Mr. Ramsey’s impossible odds have been brought on by the actions of his own client.  Hey Mr. Ramsey — you’re defending the bad guys.  Don’t steal the good guys’ lines.

Now of course, my charge that Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling are “the bad guys” is just my opinion, but my opinion is backed up by considerable personal experience.  As many of you may know, I worked in the utility industry for many years.  I have heard the claim that Enron was made up primarily of honest, hard-working folks trying to earn a living, and I have no doubt there’s some truth to that — I met many at Enron who met this description.  But there were also many who did not. 

A few years ago I had the privilige of working on projects that helped to unravel certain aspects of the California electricity crisis of 2000-2001.  Enron’s part in that disaster is now a matter of public record, and some of the most directly involved plead guilty to wire fraud.  I got to see records of Enron’s trading practices firsthand.  I got to listen to recorded phone conversations of Enron traders firsthand (although I never heard this one; I’ll have to go hunt it down.  You used to be able to get much of the whole zillion-hour set at the FERC Web site; some of it is still here, but I thought there was more…). 

I still have friends at Portland General Electric — acquired by Enron when Enron’s market cap was soaring — who saw their 401Ks evaporate as Ken Lay extolled the virtues of Enron stock.  When I worked at PGE for three years in the early 80s, the company was a fine example of the type of ordinary, basically functional and professional organization that ran the utility industry for many decades.  In a period of less than 90 days in 2001, life savings were essentially wiped out. (You can read this and many other references for this sad story.) 

I am not following the trial of Mr. Skilling and Mr. Lay in enough detail to have much of an opinion of their guilt or innocence of the specific charges involved; the feds have made their choices about what charges to bring and how to prosecute them.  But make no mistake — these two men led an organization that brought enormous harm to a very large number of people.  They set the tone for their many underlings, including Fastow and Causey and Belden and Richter and Forney and Boyle and the rest. 

The buck stops with Lay and Skilling.  A day may come when Mr. Ramsey can convince an audience otherwise, but it is not this day.

Tags: California-electricity-crisis, Electricity, Enron, Lay, Portland-General-Electric, Skilling, utility