The Bullet with Butterfly Wings: Electrical Grids and YOU

The electrical grid is one of the largest and most complex systems on the planet. What manages it? Software. Yikes.

In this workshop you’ll learn how Virtual Power Plants (VPPs) combine thousands of distributed energy devices—including rooftop solar, home batteries, heat pumps, and EV chargers—into a single coordinated system.

This is not an electrical engineering overview, it’s about how root level planet wide support systems function from the perspective of modern software development. 

You may learn about distributed systems, IoT devices, cloud architecture, event-driven design, and the markets that make Virtual Power Plants economically viable, but nothing is certain in these chaotic times.

Participants will:

• Simulate an electrical grid using physical tokens and role-playing
• Build a simple software model of a Virtual Power Plant
• Respond to "grid emergencies" like clouds, heat waves, and football matches
• Experiment with the concepts of batteries, EV charging, and solar production
• Discover why distributed systems are similar to distributed energy

No prior knowledge of energy systems or programming is required.
Laptop recommended for following along with demonstrations.