Gridworks

These days, more and more electrical power is coming from highly variable power sources such as wind and solar. And yet, the number of electrons going into the grid must match the number coming out: at every timescale, and at every geographic scale. Since the days of Tesla and Edison, this balancing job has been accomplished with central control and dispatch over hydrocarbon-burning generators.

GridWorks is a technology ecosystem inspired by the idea of a new role for electric loads on the grid. Why not design our appliances so they are alert to grid conditions, consume lots of energy when it is abundant, and can support grid balancing? This shift in the framework of how loads interact with the grid helps people receive a very specific sort of abundance: low-cost, low-carbon electricity that would otherwise go to waste.

Places to start:

• Most GridWorks information exchange is asynchronous message passing, brokered by RabbitMQ. The first step in learning and developing is to set up a dev rabbit broker with the correct plumbing. Do this by downloading the GridWorks repository and follow the instructions below on RabbitMQ.
• Read the Millinocket Story to understand the natural match between wind power and space heating.
• Go through the partner Millinocket Tutorial to start understanding how GridWorks open-source technology can be used to build economics and physics tools allowing self-organized groups of people -- at many scales -- to connect the gift of low-carbon, low-cost electricity with the need of keeping people warm in the winter.

GridWorks SDKs

• gridworks: package provides basic shared mechanics for communication and GNode structure. It is used as a package in all of our other repos.

• gridworks-atn: package and associated documentation for the GridWorks Python AtomicTNodes SDK. AtomicTNodes are the GridWorks actors that make electrical devices transactive. This SDK is a great place to learn about blockchain mechanics, as it introduces some of the simpler structures (NFTs, stateless contracts, and then some simple stateful smart contracts constructed using beaker ) required for establishing the link between physical reality on the electric grid and the actors that play their avatars in GridWorks.

• gridworks-marketmaker: package and associated documentation for our Python MarketMaker SDK. GridWorks uses distributed actors to balance the electric grid, and MarketMakers are the actors brokering this grid balancing via the markets they run for energy and balancing services.

There are several other open source GridWorks repos to explore on our github page, including the code running on the SCADA systems that Efficiency Maine is deploying in Millinocket this winter. The GNodeFactory currently hosts the demo, and does most of the heavy lifting in terms of identity management and authentication in GridWorks. Finally, since the demo is a distributed simulation, it needs a method of handling time. That's done by a TimeCoordinator GNode.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome. To learn more, see the Contributor Guide.

License

Distributed under the terms of the MIT license, Gridworks is free and open source software.

Issues

If you encounter any problems, please file an issue along with a detailed description.

Credits

This project was generated from @cjolowicz's Hypermodern Python Cookiecutter template.