Development and assessment of a robust optimization metric for WAMPAC modeling

A PMU based WAMS is to be placed on a weakly coupled section of distribution grid, with high levels of distributed generation. In anticipation of PMU data a Siemens PSS/E model of the electrical environment has been used to return similar data to that expected from the WAMS. This data is then used to create a metric that reflects optimization, control and protection in the region. System states are iterated through with the most desirable one returning the lowest optimization metric, this state is assessed against the one returned by PSS/E under normal circumstances. This paper investigates the circumstances that trigger SPS in the region, through varying generation between 0 and 110% and compromising the network through line loss under summer minimum and winter maximum conditions. It is found that the optimized state can generally tolerate an additional 2 MW of generation (3% of total) before encroaching the same thresholds and in one instance moves the triggering to 100% of generation output.

Infrastructure and the Architectures of Modernity in Ireland 1916-2016

At the formation of the new Republic of Ireland, the construction of new infrastructures was seen as an essential element in the building of the new nation, just as the adoption of international style modernism in architecture was perceived as a way to escape the colonial past. Accordingly, infrastructure became the physical manifestation, the concrete identity of these objectives and architecture formed an integral part of this narrative. Moving between scales and from artefact to context, Infrastructure and the Architectures of Modernity in Ireland 1916-2016 provides critical insights and narratives on what is a complex and hitherto overlooked landscape, one which is often as much international as it is Irish. In doing so, it explores the interaction between the universalising and globalising tendencies of modernisation on one hand and the textures of local architectures on the other.

The book shows how the nature of technology and infrastructure is inherently cosmopolitan. Beginning with the building of the heroic Shannon hydro-electric facility at Ardnacrusha by the German firm of Siemens-Schuckert in the first decade of independence, Ireland became a point of varying types of intersection between imported international expertise and local need. Meanwhile, at the other end of the century, by the year 2000, Ireland had become one of the most globalized countries in the world, site of the European headquarters of multinationals such as Google and Microsoft. Climatically and economically expedient to the storing and harvesting of data, Ireland has subsequently become a repository of digital information farmed in large, single-storey sheds absorbed into anonymous suburbs. In 2013, it became the preferred site for Intel to design and develop its new microprocessor chip: the Galileo. The story of the decades in between, of shifts made manifest in architecture and infrastructure from the policies of economic protectionism, to the opening up of the country to direct foreign investment and the embracing of the EU, is one of the influx of technologies and cultural references into a small country on the edges of Europe as Ireland became both a launch-pad and testing ground for a series of aspects of designed modernity.

Infra-Éireann: Making Ireland Modern - Irish Pavilion for the 14th Architectural biennale, Venice 2014.

After an open competition, we were selected to commission, curate and design the Irish pavilion for the Venice biennale 2014. Our proposal engage with the role of infrastructure and architecture in the cultural development of the new Irish state 1914-2014. This curatorial programme was realised in a demountable, open matrix pavilion measuring 12 x 5 x 6 metres.

How modernity is absorbed into national cultures usually presupposes an attachment to previous conditions and a desire to reconcile the two. In an Irish context, due to the processes of de-colonisation and political independence, this relationship is more complicated.

In 1914, Ireland was largely agricultural and lacked any significant industrial complex. The construction of new infrastructures after independence in 1921 became central to the cultural imagining of the new nation. The adoption of modernist architecture was perceived as a way to escape the colonial past. As the desire to reconcile cultural and technological aims developed, these infrastructures became both the physical manifestation and concrete identity of the new nation with architecture an essential element in this construct.

Technology and infrastructure are inherently cosmopolitan. Beginning with the Shannon hydro-electric facility at Ardnacrusha (1929) involving the German firm of Siemens-Schuckert, Ireland became a point of various intersections between imported international expertise and local need. By the turn of the last century, it had become one of the most globalised countries in the world, site of the European headquarters of multinationals such as Google and Microsoft. Climatically and economically expedient to the storing and harvesting of data, Ireland has subsequently become an important repository of digital information farmed in large, single-storey sheds absorbed into dispersed suburbs. In 2013, it became the preferred site for Intel to design and develop its new microprocessor board, the Galileo, a building block for the internet of things.

The story of the decades in between, of shifts made manifest in architecture and infrastructure, from the policies of economic protectionism to the embracing of the EU is one of the influx of technologies and cultural references into a small country on the edges of Europe: Ireland as both a launch-pad and testing ground for a series of aspects of designed modernity.