I will be presenting some of my early results at the World Renewable Energy Congress in Aberdeen next week, focusing on the monitoring aspects of domestic PV. The week after, I will be presenting some of the possible motivations for behavioural responses to PV at the European Council for an Energy Efficient Economy‘s annual Summer Study in southern France. Copies of the papers are available in the results section.
Read more on Conferences…
As I was saying last time, I’ve got quite a bit of configuration data used in the model and I couldn’t figure out a good way to access it quickly and without too much coding. After the EnumMap stuff (which works fine but gets a bit cumbersome if you try and do anything to fancy), I switched to a JDBC connection to Access. Again it works fine but because of how frequently the database needs to be checked, it ends up being really slow.
Read more on HSQLDB…
I’m making good progress on the next version of the model, adding more configuration information for the initialization of household agents. However I’m having difficulty deciding on a common file format so that I can have just one or two methods for reading in files and parsing them into appropriate input. Some of my files have two or three columns, some labelled rows, some just single numeric values. In some ways it would be easier if everything was in a database but I kind of like using text files since it’s very easy to see what’s going on, add comments and share information – everyone’s got Notepad but not everyone has the latest MySQL setup.
Read more on Data storage and manipulation…
Last week I finished the first version of my model and I’m pretty pleased with how it works so far.
There are twp issues worth noting though. JUnit was and is invaluable in developing the model but since my model uses a lot of random numbers it can be tricky to write the assert cases since you don’t know what the outcome of a particular method might be. To get around this, I’ve created dummy input files with binary (0 or 1) input data. Ordinarily these values would be a probability between 0 and 1 but with the test input, I know definitely what the model is doing at any stage.
Read more on Version 0.3 finished…
Members of the UK PV industry are currently being contacted to solicit their opinions on the key issues raised during the recent household interviews. If you have not been contacted but feel you or your firm has something to add to the research, please get in touch using the contact information on the side of this page.
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