Some years ago here on WattClarity® we started collating short articles (reminders, really) of some of the core Analytical Challenges we saw being encountered (and experienced ourselves) in aspects of what we’d seen or read elsewhere, or had posted here on this set.

 

We fell out of the practice of posting these short reminders (well before we completed a comprehensive list), but circumstances today mean that I’m prompted to post a short reminder about one other challenge today:

1)  Which I’ve (perhaps too brazenly) titled ‘the Heis-energy-burger Uncertainty Principle’*

*  with humble apologies to any serious physicists amongst our readership, because I really have contorted the principle here.

2)  But perhaps might also be thought of as the ‘Have-Schrödinger’s-Cake-and-Eat-It-Too Principle’.

… because it surely falls into the same family of concerns as determining ‘what might have otherwise been?’.

 

The (real) Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle

Understanding that my memory’s no longer as good as I remember it had been in the past …

1)  My recollections from the limited undergraduate physics classes I attended during university years was that this principle:

(a)  becomes significant at sub-atomic level;

(b)  whereby one can’t know with certainty all aspects of the state of a sub-atomic particle (position, velocity, etc);

2)  With my vague recollection of the explanation way-back-then being that the energy expended to measure/observe one has the inevitable consequence of changing the other.

 

Now, I freely admit that I might have made a meal of the above understanding … so let’s turn it into a full 9-course disgust-ation meal with the following additional transgression…

 

My (grossly bastardised) Heis-energy-burger Uncertainty Principle

Over the ~26 years that we (at Global-Roam Pty Ltd) have been involved in the NEM, we’ve seen an ongoing stream of analysts performing simplified analysis that assumes that one participant might have changed behaviour (say, bid differently):

1)  in order to secure some positive outcome that they might have hypothesised based on realised prices in the ‘real’ world (but not in the ‘hypothetical other’) world.

2)  or avoid some negative outcome that did actually occur in the ‘real’ world.

 

But, of course, any hypothetical change in historical (or future) course of action will deliver a different (e.g. price and co-optimised dispatch) outcome than the ‘base’ case outcome occurred in the past (or is implied in the main predispatch run).

 

Scenario #1)  In many cases the analyst will qualify the simplified analysis by noting that the price (and perhaps dispatch) would have been different than in the simplified modelling … in which case it’s ‘reader beware’!

Scenario #2)  However sometimes that context (i.e. caveat) is lost, or not delivered, wherein lies the Analytical Challenge.