As mentioned in previous missives, my favorite engineering instructor back at Auburn was Dr. Dyer. For us, his students, he was something of a Dumbledore figure - if Dumbledore was balding, clean-shaven, and spoke with a country accent. Along with the necessary theory, he interspersed his lectures with hard-won wisdom from a lifetime in the field. He didn't just educate engineers, he trained them, showing time and again with case studies from his own experience that book knowledge will only get you so far, and that the real world rarely obeyed the clean-cut theoretical constructs presented by our textbooks.
He told us about a job he was called in to do in Moss Point, Mississippi. A company down there wanted him to validate a claim made by a third party contractor. The contractor in question was hired to update and modernize the company powerplant, and they would receive a hefty bonus for every percentage point over 90% efficiency the new system attained. At the end of the project, they presented a final report claiming 99% efficiency had been achieved.
Dr. Dyer arrived at the site and went straight to the exhaust stack for the plant. After crawling around the equipment for 30 minutes, he had his answer. The contractor had indeed delivered on their claim. However, he spent the rest of the day inspecting the boilers, tracing steam pipes around the plant, interviewing the engineers, reading their operational procedures, and taking a crap ton of extraneous measurements.
We had to ask, "Why'd you stick around all day if you knew the answer in 30 minutes?"
"Well, you see, this company hired me for the day. If I gave them the results after only 30 minutes, it would have left a bad taste in their mouth, and they might even try to cut my fee. You always need to consider your client's threshold of comfort." Everyone nodded, tucking that intel away for later in life.
The good professor always strived to prepare us for a world that thumbed its nose at seemingly well-planned projects.
He and his business partner once started a business evaluating the efficiencies of wood stoves. They cleared the land on some property and set up a highly insulated shed with a high capacity cooling system. When their first client brought in a stove for analysis, they placed it on their test platform, loaded it with fuel, and lit a fire. For a week, the cooling system and stove fought a thermal tug of war as temperatures and fuel consumption were recorded. At the end of the week, Dr. Dyer and partner delivered the results of their examination in exchange for a $1000 fee.
When the $300 power bill arrived, they still had a nice chunk of change to divide between them. But clouds loomed on the horizon. The two engineering gurus failed to take into account Alabama Power's "ratchet clause".
As you go about your daily activities at home, you set a threshold of electrical usage, and this becomes your household's baseline. If your usage spikes above this baseline, like running your AC excessively in a heatwave - or running an industrial chiller 24 hours a day for a week 20 feet from a wood stove roaring full tilt, you trigger the ratchet clause.
In the power company's view, they had to bring extra capacity online in order to meet your unexpected electric demand. This extra capacity costs them, and they readily pass this cost along to you. They do this by charging you as much as 80% of your new peak for as long as the next 11 months - even if your actual usage is well below this new reset peak.
A few months later, someone asked Dr. Dyer in class how his latest venture was going. With a wry smirk, he replied, "You know, when that first ol' boy showed up with his stove, we should've just given him $1000 and told him to be on his way."
He was fairly nonchalant about it, reminding me of a passage from Rudyard Kipling's poem, If:
In his poem, Kipling described his defining character traits of manhood. Not placing an inordinate amount of your energy in the defining power of wealth was one of them.If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss
Tailored suits, chauffeured cars
Fine hotels and big cigars
Up for grabs, up for a price
Come on, come on, love me for the money
Come on, come on, listen to the money talk
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