Headroom

Disaster power allocation

Who gets power when there isn't enough?

Headroom keeps a power line under its heat limit, sends batteries and generators where they buy the most safety, and sheds load in a strict order: hospitals, then fire and 911, then homes with medical devices, then everyone else. It pays for every resource it uses and accounts for it after the storm.

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The town Headroom protects: a substation feeding two streets, with a hospital, homes, a medical-device home and a cooling hub on one line, and 911 dispatch, homes and the fire station on the other.
The town in every simulation: one substation, two feeders, seven sites in strict priority order.

One storm, start to finish

Each visitor gets a private, simulated town and a 72-hour storm: a heat wave that turns into a wildfire power shutoff. You can push it harder at any point.

Day 1 · Heat wave

The line runs out of room

Heat lowers how much current the line can carry. Headroom pre-cools homes in the morning and trims them at the peak, so the line never overheats. Try the heat slider.

Day 2 · Shutoff

The utility cuts the line

Generators and the battery truck were reserved and placed hours earlier, where they buy the most safety. The hospital runs on its own generator. Press "Cut the line now".

Day 3 · Restore

Power returns in order

Buildings move back onto the grid only as fast as the line has room, so it does not overload the moment it comes back. Headroom then settles every payment against metered data and writes the cost report.

Priority is a rule, not a weight

A higher tier is never cut to keep a lower one on. The optimizer enforces it as a hard constraint, and a separate safety check repeats it before any switch moves.

  1. T1Hospitalown generator
  2. T2Fire station and 911backup power
  3. T3Homes with medical devicesdevice batteries
  4. T4Cooling hubpublic shelter
  5. T6Other homespaid when shed
  6. T7Shopspaid when shed

Fast loop: who is on right now

Every 15 simulated minutes, it plans 2 hours ahead: which sites are connected, which run on backup, and how hard homes cool, all under the line's live heat limit.

15 min steps · 2 h horizon · hard priority

Slow loop: what to prepare

Every simulated hour, it plans 48 hours ahead over several possible versions of the storm: which generators to reserve, where to send the battery truck, and how much energy to hold back.

48 h horizon · weather and shutoff scenarios

The money

It weighs reserving resources early against buying them late, pays homes and shops for the power they give up, and reconciles every payment after the storm.

double-entry ledger · reconciliation · cost report

Same storms, five policies

Each policy runs on the same sampled storms. Lower is better in every column, and each bar shows a value against the worst policy in that column.

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The Headroom demo table: a 90 by 60 cm model town with a hospital, fire station, homes and a cooling hub along a road, a power line strung between two poles, and a laptop showing the dashboard.
The physical demo table at Cal Hacks. This website runs the same controller on a simulated copy of it.
Close-up of the demo power line: a fan blowing on the cable, a motion sensor clipped under it, a servo pulling a thread to show sag, and a clearance scale with a red danger zone.
On the table, a fan, a hair dryer and a flashlight change the weather the line sees.

What is real here

Every decision on this site comes from the real controller: the line heat model (IEEE 738), both planning loops and the finance layer. The town, its meters and the weather are simulated. The sliders stand in for the table's hair dryer, fan and flashlight.

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