Power

D24

Cell Lead: Ice Cream
Cell Members: Wifi, Watchtower, Tejawe
Disorient Discord: power channel
Power Log will be added here

D23

Cell Lead: Ice Cream
Cell Members: Wifi, Watchtower, Tejawe
Disorient Discord: power channel
Power Log by Wifi here

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Post-D23 Notes

CES was a good vendor to work with, Hell deliveries were constant, and overall reliability of operations were high. We had some downtime, but there was no set of recurring issues with gear or fuel delivery. This was the year of Raining Man, so we ran into new situations with water & camp needs in a wet playa environment that should be accounted for going into the future.

Operational & Safety Improvements

• Tag generators with Hell immediately after generators are dropped down. This can be done by the camp project lead, the fuel lead, or the fuel payments lead. Once the request is made at Hell, tagging will occur within the next day or two, with fueling occurring the day after tagging. These items are external dependencies, so they need to be covered with urgency.
• Hellco asks for 4 ft unobstructed from the fuel door of each generator. We moved our generators this year after placing them once they told us that.
• Let's do a liveness check on boxes we connect. The ammeter has this capability and it works. We had an incident that could have been avoided here.
• We need to use electrical tape to color label each cable we run if it’s camlocks so we don’t plug wires into the wrong ports (Phase into a Neutral, for example).
• Aim to have some extra cable next year. An extra 50 ft of cable would have served as a nice buffer for Watchtower and Tejawe on the first day of setup.
• Raise Edison plugs above ground as good practice in case of future rain. This was problematic if puddles formed around plugs.
• Watch out for loosely connected extension cables. Slight hazard, moreso in the rain.

Cost

Power was $34k this year. Two gensets were $22.3k, distro was $11.5k.

Detailed Notes

At full run during burn week, we seemed to have been going at about 120 gallons a day. If we didn't have the rain and equivalent cooldown, this probably would've been an extra 300+ gallons over what we ended up using towards the back half of the week. Hard to tell what the exact draw overnight ends up being, mostly because Hell did a great job of fueling us up early in the morning and erasing what we could find out. That and we seem to have a jump in power draw during sunrise before people wake up, most likely due to air conditioners.

If we were to do an asymmetric kit to run a small generator overnight, I think we'd have to do swaps at very unfortunate times (7am or so). Highest peak does seem to be around 12-4pm on the hottest days. Syncs well with solar. High draw seems to ballpark around 800A total while low is around 250A total.

We had two 125 kVa gensets, rated continuous, but told we should keep below 80% due to playa temp derating. 125kVa Genset can do 1050 amps, so running at <200A at the end we were in terrible efficiency territory. The general lack of heat (and heat being placed on build Saturday and first Sunday) this burn was not on our list of expectations.

We had one generator go down last year because it needed an oil change + servicing. This happened as we started passing 500A out of the unit and did not happen again after the oil change. Total downtime was only a few hours for the unit.

General arrangement between phases was fairly even. The lowest was about 65% of the highest at greatest distance. L2 and L3 shared the highest load, but this seems to be a general product of where we put the RVs for each phase.

On the fuel side of things, we probably had enough between the two generators to run at full heat for 3 days straight. This was a good number to hit after last year, but may be overkill on what we want for the future. We were well covered for this year's rain as well (4 days of run, with probably an extra 1.5 days banked still). Hellco didn't fully fuel us all the time. Our second generator was lower than our first for two days because they didn't top us off on Thursday. Friday didn't get us fully topped off on that generator either.

Larger generators carrying more fuel is a significant benefit to us since deliveries tend to be often problematic. The ideal case is to have smaller generators and separate storage, but the depot requirements make it so that the best way to get more capacity is to get it with the generator itself.

We had a delay on fuel delivery because we requested generator tagging late on Friday. Because our generators were less than 4 feet apart, we were delayed an extra day to rectify the issue before getting tagged. Overall, it took 3 days for a 2 day process to start fueling on Monday morning. If we ask for tagging on Wednesday, we can have fueling start by Friday.

D22

Cell Lead: Ice Cream
Cell Members: Wifi, Watchtower, Tejawe

Post-D22 Notes

Some thoughts to start D23 power rethink by Ice Cream

1. We might ask Aggreko for a discount considering the 300kW was not delivered, the 200kW back up had a circuit breaker failure until replaced Sunday w/300kW whose low oil pressure was not solved until Monday of burn week.

2. I'll reach out to the other seven OSS providers for quotes based on the equipment we needed this year. I'll assume same footprint w/208 campers.
- FYI, CES & Amergen both provided fuel to their gensets when Hell imploded
- Amergen estimated $15k for 125kW genset and distro for 300 people

3. Key next year is two 100-125kW or three 75-100kW gensets, that will reduce fuel use and give us redundancy. We should allow all loads to run (a/c when folks away), but have a plan IF we run into trouble, such as a big board by front egress for announcements and using meal time to share such messages.

4. Primary wish is to provide our own diesel. Maybe we rent a truck, or even easier a tank we put on the back of a truck. I'm sourcing double walled solutions (like below) in case we get permission:
- https://hartfueling.com/services/fuel-tank-rental/
- https://dieseldirect.com/fuel-storage-tanks
- https://www.sunbeltrentals.com/equipment-rental/generators-and-accessories/fuel-tanks/

Please share the diesel bill when you have it.

Notes by Watchtower

The main genset was supposed to be installed Tuesday of build, it fell off a truck(!) we got one labeled “spare” installed late afternoon weds. That’s the one that had repeated failures unrelated to fuel. Eventually we got the bigger replacement Sunday, the worked well except when it was out of diesel.

Notes by WiFi

1. First 300kW generator falls off a truck on the way to the burn by Aggreko. Diesel everywhere on that highway, can't really recover it. We are delivered their spare 200kW generator instead.
2. 200kW generator had a bad controller, but it wasn't exhibiting it obviously. We originally thought it was an issue with the triple phase balance... so you saw us basically shifting RV loads and yelling at each other in the dust. We get about 2-4 generator shutdowns a day as we voodoo this and limp along on power.
3. Aggreko get an extra 300kW generator but they're not allowed to deliver it since they're under forklift restriction from org due to dropping one earlier. They get it to us at Sunday 8/28 around 5pm after a day.
4. New generator hasn't had maintenance on it. Oil pressure goes low, the generator shuts itself down, and we get back online with an oil change.
5. Rolling cases of running out of fuel: Hell doesn't deliver the full amount because they think we have 150 gal when we need 250 gal. This eventually is fixed.
6. Watchtower makes a ton of trips to Hell as they don't get us deliveries regularly. The man takes an injury for us here going to Hell too, but this is how we get gas.
7. Whiteout on burn day means no deliveries again. So we shut down for burn night since there's not enough fuel.
8. Delivery on Sunday is late because there's not enough fuel delivery people with mobile ops.

Power requiem by Ice Cream

1. Stringers have 3x20A circuits, each circuit has four Edison plugs which should support two small wall a/cs per circuit: 5000 BTU = ~5Amps. In future, we should "rate" the a/cs and keep large ones on separate circuits.
2. If we could rent a 2000 gallon diesel fuel truck and tuck away in camp, we'd have ALL our fuel at $4/gallon instead of $8/gallon... It's radical self reliance solution that we should push.
3. In future we'll do two 125-150 kW or three 75-100kW gensets in parallel. When load goes up, 2nd/3rd kicks on, and we pay less for lower duty cycle on 2nd/3rd while also having them as back up.
4. Fuel use on 300kW was high... night low 30kW used 4 gal/hr, while day peak 163 kW used 10 gal/hr.. smaller gensets at 80% capacity will be more efficient.
5. We should audit all small gensets available and have them ready for kitchen, lasers, lights & sound at night in case we want to shut down to conserve fuel, or have a failure.
6. Everyone should label their extension cords w/name on tape to help us know what goes where, and we should do audit of what we have to layout some extensions in stringer gaps.
7. With more accurate camp loads in future, we will place more plugs where they need to be... this was our first year, and next year will be better.
8. Please if you have specific feedback about your situation, post it in Disorient Discord power channel so we address it next year. Power is expensive, and we don't want any hiccups next year while we continue to tighten the belt for more firewood budget!

D17