1.9 release candidate is deployed

[John Collins]

Today I deployed a release candidate for this year's competition server. It includes a new customer model that represents 10,000 EV chargers serving residential areas. The data we used to build the demand generator comes from a firm in Norway that operates chargers in a number of multi-family housing areas, so most vehicles are plugged in during early evening hours and unplugged in the morning. But most vehicles are plugged in much longer than needed to charge them, so this model will more than double the amount of demand flexibility available in the tariff market during those hours.

We normally try to get releases out in April or May, and we apologize for the delay this year. The new EV Charger module is the first scalable population model we've added since the original factored-customer model (Brookside Homes, Centerville Homes, Solar Leasing, Downtown Offices, etc.). Unfortunately, after much study and a few prototype attempts, we decided that the factored-customer model was just not designed to deal with storage in a reasonable way. So the new model is based around a StorageState structure that keeps track of the number of vehicles that will disconnect in a given future timeslot and the amount of energy they still need.

If you run the 1.9.0-SNAPSHOT server, you will see the new model. If you run from the current server-distribution with the CLI or WEB profile, you will see a message in your terminal window that says
                  Building Power TAC distribution 1.9.0-SNAPSHOT

If you don't see that, please download it from github -- the green "Code" button gives you several options for download format.

We plan to run next week's trial with 1.9.0-SNAPSHOT, and release 1.9.0 after that and after dealing with any issues that arise between now and then.

As always, please let us know if you have questions or concerns. We look forward to an interesting 2022 competition next month.

John and Wolf

[John Collins]

Dear colleagues -

Today I pushed and deployed what I expect will be the last update to the 1.9.0-SNAPSHOT server. We discovered that tariff evaluation for the new EvCharger model was not handling TOU rates correctly, and that is now fixed. If you are using it and see anything unexpected, please let me know quickly. If no other problems crop up, I plan to release on Friday this week.

Cheers -

John