Energy Demand Management and Generators

The NSW Department of Energy, Utilities and Sustainability has an interesting report [PDF Warning] on using generator testing at peak times to contribute to handling peak demand.

From the report;

One of the many aspects of DM [Demand Management] that has been effectively employed overseas is to coordinate the use of standby generators to reduce the net demand on the electricity supply system at times of peak load. These generators are idle for most of the time, but need to be tested (typically about once a month) to ensure their reliability.

In principle, offering incentives to owners of standby generators to co-ordinate the testing of some standby generators during a few hours of peak demand each year could improve supply reliability.

Unsurprisingly the telecommunications sector had the most generators that could be included in such a program.

Much of the Generator work is outsourced these days, so coordinating it to peak times may be an issue there. Even so it is a good example of systems thinking and trying to effectively use a distributed network of power generators.

On PDFs and Government

A final word. This PDF has security protections on it, one of them being Content Copying or Extraction . The paragraph above that I blockquoted was typed out by me. As was the data in the unordered list. It annoyed me that I could not cut and paste the information, but the security settings were not an obstacle to me copying the information in the PDF.

Government needs to get wise. Firstly, public information should be easily cut and paste. It is for public dissemination. They should be wrapped that someone is talking about their study, not trying to hide it or protect it from being used at all.

Secondly, PDFs are hostile to the internet. They are ugly to use, impossible to read, and by-pass all the normal browser methods of reading, finding and parsing information. They are bad. Very bad.

Note to government; stop using them. The native format on the web is HTML. Publish in that format.
Permalink, Energy Demand Management and Generators, Mar 2006, cam
Lee Malatesta: PDFs hostile to the internet?: You\'re off your rocker on that one. Properly used, such as proper reports, PDFs on the web are best thing since sliced bread. No implementation of HTML handles tabular data, mathematical formulas, footnotes, endnotes, or storing information in printer ready formats as nicely as PDFs.
cam: Printer ready: Great for printing, not for viewing data/information. That is what a browser is for. The PDFs buttons are in an application inside the browser, suddenly the buttons in the browsers dont work. Safari opens it as a new document.

I agree with this fellow.

cam
Lee Malatesta: summary: PDF isn\'t the web: That\'s all the linked article amounts to saying.

And you\'ll get no argument from me against that. But the internet is more than web browsing and, IMO, most people that complain about PDFs are those who expect the entire web to act like the WWW.

But let\'s return to the main point of my argument. Which widely used web browsers have better faculties than PDF for both mathematical formulas and tabular data? Tables in HTML are pants.
cam: the aph website gives you an option to view as: html or pdf, the NSW site doesnt. It only offers pdf. For the NSW site, it is the web. The web is pretty much the browser which is why dhtml and ajax have overtaken flash, applets, activex and whatever other external to the browser experience tech companies have tried to make stick.

Tables are fine, they look garroulous in html source but handle elastic layout better than css. Just about every css site ends up with fixed widths. In that respect css has taken us backwards.

cam
cam: I also rate HTML tables higher than: FOP tables. FOP tables require their widths to be set ahead of the transform, so you have to know how much data is in them to set the appropriate width. Not much use for transforming an HTML page to a printable PDF document on the fly. For less complex pages it is easier to knock out some divs with css when printing to make the page look good when printing.

PDF is only good IMO when you create the document in PDF first. Which means it isnt created for the web anyway.

cam
avocadia: Pants?: In exactly what way are HTML tables pants?
avocadia: Fixed width:

I put it to you that it is not the css that makes the sites fixed width, but the design. The design companies I have worked with here in Sydney uniformly churn out designs with fixed widths. There is method to their madness - their designs don\'t play well with too much, or not enough, width.

Even when I do do liquid layouts, it isn\'t css itself that gives me problems, it is implementations of css. Two implementations in particular, I\'m looking at you IE5.x and IE6.
cam: Magazine design converted to the web: I know white space is important for the eye and guiding it through information quickly and easily. And I can understand why people do it in their designs, if you have a look at all the sites in this list , the vast majority are fixed width.

I reckon it is because of css\'s design. Table cells are autonomous and won\'t write outside of their boundaries. Whereas css\'s layer structure means blocks can write over the top of others. CSS is pretty complex too, so it is easier just to doa fixed width design as the designer knows where the blocks start and finish.

I got that site from your delicious feed btw. I also agree with the IE remark, so much market share and it is a worthless exception when it comes to css (or standards) implementation.

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avocadia: Layer structure?: I assume you mean z-index. Absolute or fixed positioning would do the same thing as well.

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