Operator Desk
Screens, one-line diagrams, and the operator who keeps the network balanced in real time. The human end of the grid: a reminder that behind the automation, someone is always watching the grid.
The grid, in one line
The operator desk let me use some very specific parts, the little screens, alongside some very generic ones for the big mapboard behind the desk. The board is the main thing: the colored lines are the system's one-line diagram, with green for 500 kV, red for 230, and blue for 115, so the wall is basically a simplified map of the network the operator is watching. The hard part was building a one-line diagram out of pieces this big. You end up trading real detail for symbols, which is more or less what an actual one-line does too.
This is the last piece in the Grid of the Future collection, from the same sprint and the same low-cost requirement as the others. It is the only one that isn't equipment at all, just the person running everything, which seemed like a good way to close out the set. It is also the one I cut back the most. What I first built had a bigger wrap-around screen and a second desk, basically a whole control room, until the cost target sent me back to one desk and one board. I was sorry to lose the second desk at the time, but the smaller version actually works better.
The human in the loop
For all the hardware in the collection, the grid still comes down to a person at a desk. Everything else here (the transformers, the breakers, the towers marching out to sea) eventually reports to this one, as lights and numbers on a screen, and to whoever is on shift to read them. The Company's records are frank that the automation has grown clever enough to run most of it alone, and equally frank that no one has yet been willing to leave it to. Its Instruction Booklet describes the desk down to the last screen but the job not at all; the rest, by the Company's own admission, is only ever learned on shift.