Week 09 — Who Gets Turned Off?

Load shedding as an allocation problem, once the technical options have run out.

Week 09 · allocation · 21 September 2026

When supply is short, load shedding stops being a control problem and becomes an allocation decision.

Property

allocation

Stance

Challenges it

How

A rotating outage schedule.

Studio activity

Fixed available generation, competing loads. Choose. The record keeps what you sacrificed.

Up to this point every shortfall has had a technical answer. This week there is not enough, no further technical move exists, and the question becomes who goes without.

How this challenges the thesis#

The thesis asks a design to state what it survives. Week 9 asks who “it” refers to. A system that stays within its frequency limits by shedding a suburb has survived in one sense and failed in another, and the engineering description of the event does not settle which. Load shedding is where the design’s values stop being implicit.

In the session#

Fixed available generation, more load than generation, and a set of competing demands. You allocate. The board records what you chose to sacrifice, and the discussion afterwards is about the ordering you used and whether you would defend it in public.

What next week needs#

Every choice this week was made with perfect knowledge of the shortfall. Real operators act on forecasts, which is week 10.