Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Month: October 2024

Solar Farm data-collection begins!

You might think that collecting data on how much energy your solar farm has generated would be a simple matter, where you have an app on your phone, or a website, with a single figure that was just easy to rely on and so on… Ha no. Obviously not. Everything is a billion times more complex when you go from the rooftop kilowatt-hour level to the grid-scale megawatt level.

There are THREE systems (oh yes) that are reporting the output data from the farm. We can call them the Solis, Orsis and Meter systems. Right now, I have data from two of them (although patchy) and the third one remains a mystery that I think I get access to through a third party, or maybe they just show up in the final invoices I get when I get the payment for the energy. Why are there three systems? surely its all one level right?

There are ten inverters on the site, each with up to 20 strings of solar panels. They are all made by Solis, but are different capacities, ranging from 80kw to 110kw in output. All of these inverters report their data, which as I recall is connected by actual physical cabling, running alongside the actual power cables, and all of that then gets connected to the big old wide interwebs using a router thats in our switchgear building. This means I can log into a portal either on my phone or a webpage on my desktop and read off the output of the whole site, or each inverter. The basic view looks like this:

This is the data so far today, which is actually looking pretty good. Total output today is 1.154MWH. For those not familiar with the terms, that’s 1,154kwh. For perspective, a high-end electric car has a battery size of 80 kwh. You probably use between 10 and 20 kwh a day in a house this time of year in the UK, assuming no EV or heat pump. Late October in the UK is bad weather, and very far below peak output, so seeing these numbers is encouraging. We have been connected for about 3 weeks, but have had 2 days complete downtime, and a lot of rain, so 40.7MWH in that time is fairly good I think. You can look at stuff in much more technical detail:

The yield figures differ for each inverter mostly because their capacities are different. I know people imagine a nice flat square field full of panels with a nice round 200 panels per inverter, all of which are identical…and oh how I wish this was the case for my farm too, but pretty much everything is slightly unusual about this site. (I was told by the developer that this was the hardest site they had done in ten years…just my luck!). Anyway, if you want to waste even more hours of your life, you can stare at stats for each inverter, which is pretty much there for fault-finding purposes but also kinda cool:

This is the screen where my geeky interest runs into the brick wall of me not being an electrician, but luckily other people also check this stuff, and the system will trigger alarms if something unusual happens, which would represent a cable breaking or a connector failing, or worst case, an inverter actually failing. Obviously right now it all works great :D.

Anyway…all of that is the inverter-level reporting, but thats not the ‘real’ output figure. There is also a site reporting system through a different portal (orsis) that is as far as I know, oblivious to the individual inverters and just looks at the combined power flowing out of the system. Thats also got a web portal. It might have an app too, I have not searched for that yet. Already most of my phone home screen is various solar/battery/farm/ev reporting apps :D. Here is the basic orsis view:

In comparison this reporting seems kinda rubbish, and it seems to not show the current day at all. It relies on a modem (WTF is a modem these days?) to send out data. TBH the whole UI for this system has a sort of ‘coded in 1990’ vibe to it. Maybe they need to hire a game designer with extensive experience of flashy data-visualization to do a new front end :D.

But hold on, I mentioned three systems right? Well there is a meter on the site that is remotely read by a special company, which is called a meter operator. It might seem ridiculous to need yet another service to just read a simple string of digits, but its worse. You also need to have a data collector and a data aggregator. These three different names for basically the same thing (reading about 1k of data a day) are how the insane fees that get charged are justified. In a sane world, some big tech company like Microsoft or Google would handle this sort of thing for a flat fee of $9.99 a year. Unfortunately this is not the case…

So anyway, as I understand it, that meter gets read remotely and the data from it passed by the Meter Operator (MO)/Data Collector(DC)/Data Aggregator(DA) to the buyer set out in the Power Purchase Agreement (PPA), and then I get sent some money.

Eventually.

Hopefully.

If I had £1 for every energy company acronym I have encountered I wouldn’t need a solar farm. There is then all the excitement of applying for, and getting accredited for the REGOs (Renewable Energy Guarantee of Origin), which always takes MONTHS and has a level of bureaucracy that would make a Tax collector blush. I hope to have all the information I need to finalize my application for that within a few weeks at most. Obviously you cannot pre-apply, because that would be efficient.

Anyway, I am currently in solar-stats-heaven. I was musing about buying some nano-leaf programmable RGB light blocks for my office wall to connect to the solar output from the farm. It seems like an SDK for the blocks is all very easy, but I would need to learn how to code some system to log into the web portals and periodically scrape the data. I probably cannot be bothered :D.

An autistic introduction to the stock market

A long time ago (about 25 years!) I worked for about 2 years for a company called Datastream/ICV. They were an IT company for stock market trading floors, both real-time and research. I worked in ‘the city’ in London. I had to catch the same awful train each morning all the stockbrokers caught while they tried futilely to read the financial times. The train only went one stop, and it was so bad it had its own nickname: The Drain.

As part of my job, because we supported real-time and historical trading software, my work PC had the complete suite of trading analysis software that the company provided. We were expected to be vaguely familiar with what it looked like, so we could check it worked ok. We were not expected to know anything about actual markets and trading, but just by being in that world 8 hours a day you cant avoid picking up a lot of tips and information.

If you think ‘oh I bet the real atmosphere was nothing like I’ve seen in the movies’ you would be wrong. They seem pretty accurate to me. My favorite of the bunch is ‘The Big Short‘ but I also enjoy ‘Margin Call‘, and even, for all its horrors, ‘Wolf of Wall St‘. I have definitely interacted with people like the traders in all those movies.

The full suite of trading software normally costs a staggering amount on a monthly basis, but we had it for free. One bank at one point kept missing their payments, so our company just switched off all the data and their screens went blank, for the whole bank. I’m not sure how long it took for them to make the missing payment but it was definitely just counted in minutes. The company charged a fortune, but they had to provide insane service. If your ICV screen had issues, we would fix it within 20 minutes. We were not even in the same building. We had cars full of replacement kit, and would run to them, drive as fast as possible to the bank, run up stairs with a new PC and swap them out without even saying hello. The actual faulty PC would be looked at later. Also, if there was a problem it would be fixed by the people who showed up, in one visit. Guaranteed, or the world would explode. We would not go home and come back to work on it tomorrow. Nobody goes home. It didn’t matter if it was 4AM, you were not leaving until it was fixed. It was a fascinating place to work.

Anyway… it gave me a big interest in the stock market which I already had dabbled in from when I studied for a degree in Economics. I had *some* cash when I worked there, and made a few trades. Our software was so comprehensive I could see my personal trade scroll through on the ticker and know it was me. These days, High-frequency trades and dark pools make that sort of thing academic. Oh well.

Anyway, this blog post is about autism (thats clearly me) and the markets. I think they are a match made in heaven. Trading stocks has a lot of attributes that really scare people off (or means they suck at it), but which seem perfectly fitted to my particular level of autism…

Firstly trading stocks is completely and utterly impersonal. I don’t speak to anybody about my trading, ever. There is no dealer to speak to, and I flat-out-ignore all the emails from my stockbroker for ‘a chat’. All trading is electronic (well…99% of it is), and you can trade all day long without having to talk to anybody. Bliss.

Secondly, trading well requires doing a lot of analysis that is mostly based on numbers. All the information is freely available, and its all in electronic form. If you enjoy making spreadsheets that compare things, this is heaven. Most of all, the numbers are TRUE. Apart from the super-rare cases of outright fraud, we can all know for definite how much revenue Netflix made in the last quarter, and how much their stock has risen or fallen or been diluted. The facts of the matter are never in dispute, the data is absolutely true.

Thirdly, being emotional regarding stocks is a DISADVANTAGE. The more clinical, and analytical you can be, the better. This is an occupation when a cold logical vulcan approach is absolutely beneficial. You do not need the stocks to like you, or make them laugh, or make small talk with them. In fact any kind of emotional reaction to a stock is a negative. The best traders are very very detached from the decisions they are making. Its ideal for people who prefer facts over feelings.

Now saying that is easy. DOING it is staggeringly hard. Humans are vulnerable to so many cognitive biases and stupid emotional outbursts that its amazing we invented the wheel. However you can narrow it down to a few common mistakes people make regarding trading stocks:

  • When you buy a stock and it rockets up, people want to SELL so they can ‘lock in their gains’.
  • When you buy a stock and it steadily drops over a long period, you hold it anyway to avoid ‘crystalizing a loss’.
  • If you really like a product, you sometimes buy a stock thinking that makes it a good stock to buy.
  • You want to feel like a hotshot trader so you buy and sell all the time, to feel like you are doing something.
  • A stock you buy is up 500%. You sell, because otherwise you are ‘tempting fate’ or ‘being greedy’.
  • A stock you want to buy has recently gone up 500%. You don’t buy because ‘you are too late’.

All of this is emotional bullshit. The actual way to trade is simple to describe, staggeringly hard to do. You look at companies that seem like good companies according to your analysis of their product, their leadership, their future plans, the competition. You look at the data regarding their financials, and then you calculate how much their market cap SHOULD be. You can then work out if they are a bargain *at this price*. If so, you buy. And theoretically every day, you do the same analysis. If they ever stop being a bargain you sell.

Sounds easy-peasy (but maybe a lot of analysis)

It’s STAGGERINGLY hard if you get emotional. The very hardest thing is loss-aversion. People HATE selling a stock at a loss as this means they have definitely lost money. Even though its clearly dying and dragging you down with it, people cling on like its some sort of pet. This is how most people lose money.

Oh…options…

In the UK, most people don’t trade options. Most individuals do not have access to the full range of options that are traded elsewhere in the EU or US/Canada. I cant find anywhere that sells a lot of LEAPs. Options trading is something that I do not do, although I have done it in the past. The reason I do not do it is that I have learned my lesson. I used to trade options quite a lot, sometimes trading the same option 4 or 5 times a day. I did stocks and also currency options. I thought I got quite good at it, and it seems like easy money.

Then one day I lost a staggering amount of money. I actually don’t want to look up what it was, but I know it was at least 10 years work as a boatbuilder. How long did it take to lose it? About 5 minutes. I could not sleep that night. I was distraught.

To be fair, I was not short of money, and have since easily made it back on normal buy & hold stock trading. I have not traded options since. Options are like nuclear weapons. They all seem like fun and games until Hiroshima is vaporized, where Hiroshima is your life’s savings. Do not do it. No ifs and buts, just do not do it.

What I DO dabble in (quite often) is leveraged commodity ETFs. This is very risky stuff. Its the riskiest thing I do. I only do it with about 1% of my investments. Its been hilariously profitable, but its risky, and I don’t recommend it. What I recommend is doing a LOT of reading, a lot of analysis and buying and holding stocks of companies that seem undervalued, and having the patience to see the investment come good. This could be *any* company. Over the years I have done well out of companies that make customizable teddy bears, sporting goods, software, cars, electrical equipment, pharmaceuticals and tons of other things.

Oh and one last tip: The financial news (CNBC, Bloomberg, Yahoo finance etc) is all absolute garbage. Complete trash. Do not believe anything you read in the ‘financial news’. They are not selling information or analysis, they are selling ad-space, and the clickbait is designed to maximize that. This is why you can see headlines that say ‘Tesla SOARS!’ and ‘Tesla in freefall!’ within 2 hours of each other on the same site. The ‘journalists’ cranking out ‘market coverage’ are ad-salespeople. They have no idea what they are actually writing about.

So anyway, I write this not as specific stock advice (thats for you to research), but to point out that if you are someone like me, who finds personal interactions hard, who has problems working in teams, or for other people, then if you can find a way to make income through investments, you might find it perfectly suited to you. The reality is that a lot of very successful investors are quiet solo geeks sat at a laptop, not loud alpha-males screaming at each other wearing designer suits. Frankly the alpha-males are not very good at it. (but they like to play the role until it goes wrong, thats for sure).

Do not use liquidweb web hosting. Ever.

I recently bought a new domain, to point to a folder on my server. Sounds simple right? But SIX PEOPLE over the course of four days at my host (Liquidweb) clearly had absolutely no clue how domains worked (despite selling me one), and totally failed to achieve this trivial, laughably simple task for which I pay them monthly. I got about a dozen emails to suggest various ways in which they didn’t understand, or had no idea, or couldn’t do it. They wasted hours of my time.

I fixed it myself in 40 minutes, giving up all hope that anybody at liquidweb had a clue on how to do their job.

And today I discover that 9 months ago they just put my price up 50% without bothering to email me. What utter assholes. I do not understand how people running businesses think that this is the way to treat your customers.

I am actually considering shutting down this blog, my forums and website and just only being on X.

Do not, under any circumstances, ever, ever consider using liquidweb. They are a complete trainwreck.

Solar Farm Update: ENERGIZATION!

So yesterday was the big day and we finally switched on our solar farm! The site is not 100% finished, with a lot of tidying up to do, but for the first time ever, the 3,024 solar panels on the site are finally generating power and feeding it into the national grid. Overall, it will provide power for 300 homes, which is pretty good. That might sound a lot if you are reading this in the US, but UK per-household electricity consumption is actually quite low. Yesterday was a big big milestone, but not the total end of the project. We do not have the monitoring logins set up yet (but the power is being logged by the meter), and we do not have the final construction bill, soi I cannot tell you if/how profitable it might be yet. But here are the switch-on day details:

Annoyingly, I live hundreds of miles away from the site, so we have a four hour drive to get there (including a short breakfast/coffee stop where I recharge the EV). Because switch-on was booked in for 9.30AM, that meant a very early start, and then a long drive in darkness and eventual sunrise. That did mean that the project manager was onsite at sunrise and got some really nice pictures:

Because you have to arrange someone from the distribution network operator (DNO) to come and ‘witness’ the site energization, you have a hard deadline, because they are busy and not flexible. My wife had to come back from holiday a day early to make the date. It also meant that this was a HARD deadline, and everything had to be ready. I had assumed we would comfortably meet that, but when we arrived on site there were about 9 vans and a bunch of people still running cables and connecting stuff. This was pretty scary because the DNO will not wait all day, and there is every chance some initial test fails, or something is wrong. There was a lot of pacing up and down. Also the site manager was beyond stressed. Obviously a good time to just take photos :D.

Because everything was being tested, it was a good time to poke around and look at how everything works. The DNO substation was open and being worked on, which is a rare chance to see inside it. We will probably never see inside this box again, as it is owned by the DNO, and is their responsibility, and only they have the key! The insides are basically some big fuses and switching stuff and a transformer. This is where the power gets converted from about 400v to 11,000 volts to go out into the grid. This box is also where the (now underground) cable that connects the farm comes into the site. You can see that a lot of cabling goes down through the floor and then runs underground out to where it eventually goes back up above ground onto power poles away from the site. There is other, much thicker cabling on the LHS that goes to our big green switchgear box.

Here is the big green box I’m talking about with both doors open:

The left hand door goes into the main room that has all the switchgear and is where all of the phat cables from the inverters enter (from under the floor into that concrete trench, yet to be filled in with earth. Thats the bit that has the fire suppression system in it, and the big cooper bars which are live when energized (see previous blog post). The room on the right hand side is basically the meter and CCTV room. Its got the incoming supply meter (to measure how much power we have imported to site overnight to power minor stuff like CCTV etc) and the outgoing meter, which is the one I care about, and is remotely read to work out how much power we are generating. It also has the wifi router for the CCTV and other CCTV related equipment. Here is the meter stuff:

As I recall LHS is the power supply (import) meter, middle bit is CCTV related and RHS is the important export-tracking meter. I guess what most people are interested in, including me, is where is the big button with ACTIVATE SOLAR FARM written on it, with klaxons and so on. The answer to this seemed pretty vague, and thats in part because we connect each of our inverters through to the DNO substation, rather than there being a single cable or a single switch. The closest we get to it seems to be this button, and ironically this isn’t even my finger, its the project manager pointing at it :D

Also you would imagine there is some big ceremonial ‘moment’ when its activated, but I think such things are only really staged for TV. Basically each inverter got switched on, and then the DNO people check that nothing trips or goes wrong, and then they switch everything on, then switch the power TO the site off, just to check that when that happens, the site correctly switches itself off in reaction (just like home inverters do).

In practice this means there is a lot of nervous pacing while DNO people and ‘my’ people switch things on and off and then give the thumbs up to each other, and then eventually they come over and get you to sign a piece of paper, and declare that its all approved and energized. Any disappointment at the lack of champagne and fireworks is just matched by relief that it happened.

What I do NOT have yet is live (or indeed delayed) monitoring of the site. That should be set up at the start of next week, at which point I will exhaustively investigate all the options and data and write long blog posts about it :D. I definitely felt extremely relieved at the point at which everything was declared live, although frankly the site manager seemed even more relieved than me. I thought he might feint/explode. It was also cool that the landowners were taking a break from looking after their 1,200 sheep (OMG) to come witness the final energization of the site.

It feels almost surreal that its connected. There is other stuff to do, but no matter what, I now own (entirely! no financing!) my own solar farm. It has a peak output of 1,243 kwh (output capped at 900kw), will supply 300 houses, and has over three thousand solar panels. It is the ultimate geek toy. My stupid-ass DJI drone failed me (software awfulness for which I blame google 100%) on the day, so no decent drone pics, but it was untidy and a bit cloudy anyway. As a result I may well frame one of the sunrise pictures to sit above my monitor in my office :D.

I hope you enjoyed following this epic saga of many years. Its not 100% over yet, but this is a huge milestone. I celebrated after the 4 hour drive home with a glass of bubbly, and luckily my celebration-purchase (a chunky watch) arrived as I was typing this blog post. I feel much less stressed, but the true smugness of owning a solar farm has not kicked in yet :D.