sábado, abril 09, 2011

Institute For The Future’s J. Dunagan Announced the Winners of the Smart Grid 2025 Game

By José Antonio Vanderhorst-Silverio, Ph.D.
Systemic Consultant: Electricity
IEEE Life Member
April 9th, 2011

An initiative of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has given two professionals of the Dominican Republic to have the right to their strong ideas about the future. With that in mind, I am very happy to report, that it happened in the podcast interview, Examining the Results of the Smart Grid 2025 Game: Here's what game players like you predict for our electricity future, available on the IEEE spectrum website to the global audience, in the section “This Week in Technology,” hosted by Steven Cherry.

In the podcast, Jake Dunagan mentioned the strong participation of Rommel Vicini, at the time a Ph.D. student at the Monterrey Technological Institute of Technology and Higher Education, Mexico, and I, the EWPC-AF_Creator, now exercising my bragging rights. Mr. Dunagan is the project leader of the IEEE Spectrum Smart Grid 2025 game, which is a very serious game about the uncertain future we are facing.

Coming into a key issue of the podcast, in response to Steven’s question about "electronic converter prices," Jake said that Rommel's play led into two conversations. In fact, Rommel played the Positive Imagination Card, “Power electronics converters prices will become more attractive and cheaper as fossil fuel prices scale up. Good news for solar/wind energy.”

Then, on one hand, AnuKowli played the Investigation Card “How does this solve the issue of intermittent renewable generation?” and, in the other, EWPC-AF_Creator played the Investigation Card, “Which benefits do you anticipate for the market at the Bottom of the Pyramid? How many years?” To see the play by play action, please look at the Excel Worksheet Engagement Started by Rommel Vicini.

Getting into the other key issue, Steven Cherry said “in the end, the Smart Grid 2025 was a game." Then he asked "... who won?" Jake Dunagan said, “... well, it often gets complex. A player named Raul V.R. won by the bulk point that we had, which tends to reward longer conversations…” He then explains the inconsistencies of that system.

Inmediately, Jake added that, “One of the players came up with an alternative system of scoring and a proposal to declare different winners for the Smart Grid game.” In this person’s model the player EWPC-AF_Creator won, with secretengineer in second, mathpunk in third, Raul V.R. came in fourth and ligtvoet in fifth. Jake continue saying that it was a "... player reimagining the scoring system to find something more fair. To which Steven remarked “That’s very cool!”

I am also happy to report that I received a message from Raúl van Ree (Raul V.R.) saying “I am happy to hear that Jake [h]as mentioned and so given validity to your alternative winners proposal.” Still the important remaining question that is left is: what’s next?

So, “After listening to the interview of Jake Dunagan by Steven Cherry, I guess he was ending the project as is, due to the strong pressure he must have received during this past three weeks. I just don't see anyone in the IEEE completing his job.” That quote comes after digesting the whole process to give a balance view about what’s next, when I used dark imagination to come up with the blog post Was Jake Dunagan's Interview the END of the IEEE Spectrum Smart Grid 2025 Game? As the first big step into the future, the post starts with my quote that says:

In order to do what we need to do today to create the best possible future plausible scenario for the smart grid, the emergent, inclusive, holistic, simple, and minimalist, Electricity Without Price Controls Architecture Framework (EWPC-AF) was shown to have what it takes, in at least four of the ten engagements, that mutually reinforced each other, initiated by the EWPC-AF_Creator. For that outlier performance, it deserves to be given an opportunity to be widely known all over the whole world. Denying it such opportunity I humbly understand would be unfair to humanity.