Design for the Worst Week
The final rung — build a system you are willing to defend, and state the event that still defeats it.
Stage 4 of 4 · Weeks 11–12, and everything before them
- Due
- 16 October 2026
- Weight
- 40% of the course
- Takes as input
- a dispatch log and a counterfactual
- Produces
- a defended system, and the declared event that beats it
What you are producing#
A system — generation, storage, reserve, and the operating rules that go with it — plus two statements. The event it survives. The event that beats it.
The second statement carries the most weight in this course.
What earlier work this uses#
All of it. The definition from A1, the portfolio from A2, the dispatch log and counterfactual from A3. This is the rung where the chain has to hold together: if your dispatch exposed a weakness in your siting, the final design should show that you noticed.
How the canonical definition constrains this#
Your declared failure boundary has to be expressed in the same vocabulary as your event — a threshold, a duration, a recovery rule, a scope. “A worse event” is not a boundary. “An event of the same depth lasting 96 hours, or one of 60 hours arriving with storage already at 30%” is.
What counts as a defensible answer#
A design whose limits are stated as precisely as its capabilities. There is deliberately no correct system here, and a submission claiming to survive everything has either misunderstood the course or is not telling you about the event it cannot survive.
Naming what defeats your design is not a weakness in the submission. It is the submission.
The spec
The brief poses the problem and leaves room for a response. The spec is the fixed part: what a marker checks. Some lines can be checked mechanically; the rest call for judgement.
- the system is specified well enough for someone else to operate it
- the event it survives is stated in the parameters of your own definition
- the event that defeats it is named, bounded, and not dismissed
How it is marked
Judged as one argument. A submission is strong when the system, the event it survives and the event that defeats it are all stated precisely enough to be checked against each other, and when the declared failure boundary is a real limit rather than a token concession.