Managing a distributed grid
In this episode, Astrid Atkinson, co-founder of Camus Energy, talks about her company’s “grid orchestration” work of helping utilities see, track, and coordinate the distributed energy resources in their territories.
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Text transcript:
David Roberts
One of my favorite things I ever wrote was a 2018 piece for Vox on grid architecture — the basic structure of the electricity transmission and distribution networks. It was about how a top-down system, with one-way power delivery from big power plants to passive consumers, might evolve into a bottom-up system, driven by local distributed energy resources.
Thanks to all-star illustrator Javier Zarracina, it even has awesome animated illustrations.
One person who read that piece was Astrid Atkinson, who at the time was a senior software engineer at Google. She had managed a team that shifted Google search from a top-down system to a massively distributed system, back before the term “the cloud” existed and there was no template available. She and her team had to develop the principles and best practices of getting reliable performance out of millions of unreliable, loosely coordinated machines. By doing so, they radically expanded the scale and speed of what search could do.
She thought, wouldn’t it be cool if the power grid could make the same shift? Unlike some people, though, she didn’t just blog about it — in 2019, she left Google to co-found and run Camus Energy, a software company that helps utilities see, track, and coordinate the distributed energy resources in their territories. The company calls what it does “grid orchestration.”
Atkinson has been a thought leader in pushing for a new grid architecture. (See Camus’ white-paper series on “the rise of local grid management.”) So I was super-excited to geek out with her on this stuff. We talked about the conceptual shift from centralized to distributed and the drivers making that shift inevitable, plus getting more out of the grid we’ve already built through coordination and efficiency, and how the utility sector can evolve to better manage local resources. I really loved this one.
Okay, then. Astrid Atkinson. Welcome to Volts. Thank you so much for coming.
Astrid Atkinson
Thank you so much. I'm really excited to be here.
David Roberts
I'm so excited for this. Astrid, I have to tell you just by way of preface that I had a weirdly difficult time preparing for today's pod because I'm just so excited by this whole area, and I'm so jazzed. I have so many things to ask you about, so many things I want to say about all this stuff, and I'm kind of overwhelmed and fried my circuits. But let's start here: Let me describe for listeners what you did at Google and tell me if this is an accurate description. So you were part of a team, I think, leading a team that was shifting the way Google did things away from a model where computing was done on a relatively limited set of high-quality, extremely reliable data centers, tightly centrally controlled, to a model where computing is done not on a small set, but on thousands, millions of distributed computers living all over the place, any one of which might be unreliably connected or off periodically or weak or otherwise glitchy.
So basically, moving from a model of tightly coordinated, central control, limited number of entities, to loosely coordinated millions of entities, somehow getting aggregate reliability out of massively distributed, individually unreliable machines. Is
