Category Archives: Technica

A Power Grid for the Hydrogen Economy

[div class=attrib]From Scientific American:[end-div]

On the afternoon of August 14, 2003, electricity failed to arrive in New York City, plunging the eight million inhabitants of the Big Apple–along with 40 million other people throughout the northeastern U.S. and Ontario–into a tense night of darkness. After one power plant in Ohio had shut down, elevated power loads overheated high-voltage lines, which sagged into trees and short-circuited. Like toppling dominoes, the failures cascaded through the electrical grid, knocking 265 power plants offline and darkening 24,000 square kilometers.

That incident–and an even more extensive blackout that affected 56 million people in Italy and Switzerland a month later–called attention to pervasive problems with modern civilization’s vital equivalent of a biological circulatory system, its interconnected electrical networks. In North America the electrical grid has evolved in piecemeal fashion over the past 100 years. Today the more than $1-trillion infrastructure spans the continent with millions of kilometers of wire operating at up to 765,000 volts. Despite its importance, no single organization has control over the operation, maintenance or protection of the grid; the same is true in Europe. Dozens of utilities must cooperate even as they compete to generate and deliver, every second, exactly as much power as customers demand–and no more. The 2003 blackouts raised calls for greater government oversight and spurred the industry to move more quickly, through its Intelli-Grid Consortium and the Grid-Wise program of the U.S. Department of Energy, to create self-healing systems for the grid that may prevent some kinds of outages from cascading. But reliability is not the only challenge–and arguably not even the most important challenge–that the grid faces in the decades ahead.

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]

Dependable Software by Design

[div class=attrib]From Scientific American:[end-div]

Computers fly our airliners and run most of the world’s banking, communications, retail and manufacturing systems. Now powerful analysis tools will at last help software engineers ensure the reliability of their designs.

An architectural marvel when it opened 11 years ago, the new Denver International Airport’s high-tech jewel was to be its automated baggage handler. It would autonomously route luggage around 26 miles of conveyors for rapid, seamless delivery to planes and passengers. But software problems dogged the system, delaying the airport’s opening by 16 months and adding hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns. Despite years of tweaking, it never ran reliably. Last summer airport managers finally pulled the plug–reverting to traditional manually loaded baggage carts and tugs with human drivers. The mechanized handler’s designer, BAE Automated Systems, was liquidated, and United Airlines, its principal user, slipped into bankruptcy, in part because of the mess.

The high price of poor software design is paid daily by millions of frustrated users. Other notorious cases include costly debacles at the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (a failed $4-billion modernization effort in 1997, followed by an equally troubled $8-billion updating project); the Federal Bureau of Investigation (a $170-million virtual case-file management system was scrapped in 2005); and the Federal Aviation Administration (a lingering and still unsuccessful attempt to renovate its aging air-traffic control system).

[div class=attrib]More from theSource here.[end-div]