What does the power outage on 9 August 2019 tell us about GB power system

The power outage on 9th August 2019 affected over 1 million customers in England and Wales and caused a major disruption to other critical infrastructures. While the power system responded exactly how it was designed to in response to an unsecured (N-2) event, it has uncovered important fault lines which may significantly affect reliability of the system in a near future. Over the last 10 years or so the GB power system has changed quite rapidly due to the decarbonisation drive and penetration of smart grids technologies. Hence it is increasingly difficult for the ESO to fully monitor, model and control the whole system and therefore the probability of hidden common modes of failures has increased. This would suggest that it might be prudent to strengthen the old (N-1) security standard by providing extra security margin. There were also other issues highlighted by the outage. Embedded generation reached such a high penetration level that it cannot be treated any longer as negative demand. Traditional under-frequency load shedding disconnects indiscriminately all customers on the disconnected feeders, including embedded generation and frequency response units, hence reducing its effectiveness. The ability of critical infrastructures and services to ride through the disturbances has to be closely monitored and tested. Finally, we have concluded that, in GB at least, power outages matter only if they affect critical infrastructures, especially transport, in London and the surrounding areas

Spin-wave coupling to electromagnetic cavity fields in dysposium ferrite

Coupling of spin-waves with electromagnetic cavity field is demonstrated in an antiferromagnet, dysprosium ferrite (DyFeO3). By measuring transmission at 0.2-0.35 THz and sweeping sample temperature, magnon-photon coupling signatures were found at crossings of spin-wave resonances with Fabry-Perot cavity modes formed in samples. The obtained spectra are explained in terms of classical electrodynamics and a microscopic model.Comment: 3 pages, 2 figure

A Tracing Method for Pricing Inter-Area Electricity Trades

In the context of liberalisation of electricity markets world wide, the need for agreed protocols for electricity trades between systems with different charges poses a special challenge. System operators need to know how much a given trade uses the network, in order to allocate an appropriate portion of their costs to that trade. This paper discusses a technique, tracing, for determining how much each of a number of trades uses different parts of the electricity network. The scheme is based on the assumption that at any network node, inflows are shared proportionally between outflows (and vice versa). The paper outlines the technique and shows how it could be applied to the problem of charging cross-border trades. The paper goes on to demonstrate that the technique has a game theoretic rationale, in that it produces the Shapley value solution to a game equivalent to this allocation problem

Hydrodynamic simulations of correlation and scatter in galaxy cluster maps

The two dimensional structure of hot gas in galaxy clusters contains information about the hydrodynamical state of the cluster, which can be used to understand the origin of scatter in the thermodynamical properties of the gas, and to improve the use of clusters to probe cosmology. Using a set of hydrodynamical simulations, we provide a comparison between various maps currently employed in the X-ray analysis of merging clusters and those cluster maps anticipated from forthcoming observations of the thermal Sunyaev-Zel'dovich effect. We show the following: 1) an X-ray pseudo-pressure, defined as square root of the soft band X-ray image times the temperature map is a good proxy for the SZ map; 2) we find that clumpiness is the main reason for deviation between X-ray pseudo-pressure and SZ maps; 3) the level of clumpiness can be well characterized by X-ray pseudo-entropy maps. 4) We describe the frequency of deviation in various maps of clusters as a function of the amplitude of the deviation. This enables both a comparison to observations and a comparison to effects of introduction of complex physical processes into simulation.Comment: 7 pages, A&A in pres

An information theoretic approach to the functional classification of neurons

A population of neurons typically exhibits a broad diversity of responses to sensory inputs. The intuitive notion of functional classification is that cells can be clustered so that most of the diversity is captured in the identity of the clusters rather than by individuals within clusters. We show how this intuition can be made precise using information theory, without any need to introduce a metric on the space of stimuli or responses. Applied to the retinal ganglion cells of the salamander, this approach recovers classical results, but also provides clear evidence for subclasses beyond those identified previously. Further, we find that each of the ganglion cells is functionally unique, and that even within the same subclass only a few spikes are needed to reliably distinguish between cells.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figures. To appear in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) 1

Predictability and hierarchy in Drosophila behavior

Even the simplest of animals exhibit behavioral sequences with complex temporal dynamics. Prominent amongst the proposed organizing principles for these dynamics has been the idea of a hierarchy, wherein the movements an animal makes can be understood as a set of nested sub-clusters. Although this type of organization holds potential advantages in terms of motion control and neural circuitry, measurements demonstrating this for an animal's entire behavioral repertoire have been limited in scope and temporal complexity. Here, we use a recently developed unsupervised technique to discover and track the occurrence of all stereotyped behaviors performed by fruit flies moving in a shallow arena. Calculating the optimally predictive representation of the fly's future behaviors, we show that fly behavior exhibits multiple time scales and is organized into a hierarchical structure that is indicative of its underlying behavioral programs and its changing internal states

Do stringent environmental policies deter FDI? M&A versus Greenfi eld

This study examines how environmental stringency affects the location decision of foreign direct investments. We analyze a fi rm-level data set on German outbound FDI and innovate on previous studies by controlling for the mode of entry and applying a mixed-logit analysis. The results show that Greenfi eld projects react to environmental regulation in a strongly different way than M&As. We fi nd robust support for pollution haven hypothesis for polluting Green fields. M&A investments in low polluting industries, on the other hand, seem to be attracted by stricter environmental regulation. We introduce a novel instrumental variable for environmental stringency and apply it to verify the results