Category Archives: Uncategorized

This is the result of a survey I conducted for my MBA. Most of the people that took the survey are employees and managers from European TSO’s and North American ISO companies that were involved in power systems planning or simulation. I know that, because I contacted them individually but I did not record theirContinue reading “Power Systems Analysis Tool Adequacy Survey”

How many times have you heard sentences like “if it is not broken, don’t fix it” or “do not reinvent the wheel”? many times for sure. The underlying message is that, if there is something out there that already works, do not waste your time making it your self. This article advocates exactly for theContinue reading “The hidden value of reinventing the wheel”

The Oxford dictionary describes the word model in several ways, but the one that I want to talk about is this: A simplified description, especially a mathematical one, of a system or process, to assist calculations and predictions. i.e.: ‘a statistical model used for predicting the survival rates of endangered species’  A model is a staticContinue reading “A few words on the word “model””

Consultancy is a business based on the sell of expert labour. As such, consultants are expected to be busy as much time as possible at a commercial rate; i.e.: If the commercial rate is 100 €/hour, and the consultant works 1,800 hours/year, the company expects the consultant to produce a number as close to 180,000€/yearContinue reading “Software in consultancy”

After having been working in consultancy in a variety of companies, I have witnessed the following process over and over; Consultancy project “A” is sold to a customer. Software “A” is made to meet the customer requirements. Because of resources restrictions, the software “A” is done as a monolithic block. It is “integrated”. Software “A”Continue reading “Making consultancy scalable”

GridCal is about to hit version 2.0 after three years of development. So I take the opportunity to announce it. After all it is good and it is free. GridCal is an open source power systems calculation software that I started because there was nothing like it. There are other competitive open source software programs, but noneContinue reading “GridCal: Open source ethics”

When we go to school we are taught about the scientific method; Think of a premise, test it, and if the results are not satisfactory, change the premise and test it again. This has led us to an unprecedented level of innovation over the last two centuries. Science is about reproducible evidence. If anyone with comparableContinue reading “Academia and the new science”

In this post I am going to discuss how the market has substituted the power plant dispatch, and which mechanisms have been designed so that the market of electricity can provide a feasible real world solution. (Spoiler: there’s still some dispatch optimization being done) Traditionally, power plants were dispatched so that the overall cost ofContinue reading “The electricity market as opposed to the dispatch optimization”