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Michael Hammersley

Research Scientist / AbstractionLab

Education

MSc in Materials Science and Engineering, 2012

Stanford University

BSc in Materials Science and Engineering, 2011

Stanford University

Michael is a Materials Engineer by training – he helped develop a polymeric touchscreen with buttons that rise out of the surface at Tactus, and then ran failure analyses on the computers and electronic components for the Avionics department at SpaceX. He’s currently researching how to decentralize the energy grid. In his spare time, he enjoys tinkering with small art projects.

Areas of Expertise

Materials Science

Publications

2020-12-09 / Conference paper
Improving system resilience through formal verification of transactive energy controls
Formal verification tools such as TLA+ allow errors to be uncovered through exhaustive exploration of reachable states, and are the gold standard for ensuring resilience in software systems. In particular, these methods can be used to identify error states emerging from precise interactions between multiple subsystems that would occur only after long periods of testing, operation, or stacked error conditions.
IEEE PES Transactive Energy Systems Conference (TESC) / 2020.12.09
Michael Hammersley , Francis M. O’Sullivan, Alan Ransil
2019-09-03 / Report
U.S. energy policy and market design
The U.S. bulk power system has an enormous number of actors: regulatory agencies (local, state, and federal), utilities (investor-owned, municipal, cooperatives, and power marketing administrations), operators (ISOs and RTOs), and customers.
2019-07-09 / Conference paper
A computable multilayer system stack for future-proof interoperability
The future decarbonized power grid will make increasing use of distributed energy resources (DERs) controlled using data collected at an extremely granular level compared to today’s coarse bulk power system models.
IEEE PES Transactive Energy Systems Conference (TESC) / 2019.07.09 / Minneapolis, MN
Alan Ransil , Edwin Fonkwe Fongang, Michael Hammersley , Ivan Celanovic, Francis O’Sullivan
2018-10-15 / Report
Smart grid pilot projects
There are thousands of smart grid pilot projects all around the world, having begun largely in the early 2000s. With the introduction of blockchain, and with the grid becoming more unpredictable and decentralized, several use cases are becoming apparent for blockchain.

Blog posts

2021-04-26 / Blog
Decentralized Energy Project recap
Three years ago, we set out to apply the decentralization ethos to the power grid — a complex, sprawling network with some parts dating back over a century. That was the beginning of the Decentralized Energy Project, an effort within AbstractionLab.
2020-05-04 / Blog
Hello from the Decentralized Energy Project!
We’re two materials scientists here at Protocol Labs, and we’re working to improve the electricity grid. Why, you may be thinking, does a distributed file storage company have a project related to the energy grid?