Power, heat, and related inconveniences¶
Unseen University Power & Light Co. (UU P&L) is Ankh-Morpork’s quietly indispensable utility and loudly inexplicable liability. Established to provide reliable electricity, hot water, and other strictly necessary phenomena to the city, it occupies the uneasy intersection between modern industrial engineering and the Unseen University’s long tradition of things working eventually.
The company operates out of a series of repurposed university basements, annexes, and one building that insists it was never meant to be a building at all. Over decades, incremental upgrades have been layered onto original installations with the enthusiasm of grant-funded optimism and the budgetary discipline of a wizard who has discovered procurement. The result is a sprawling, hybrid infrastructure where 1970s-era industrial control systems coexist with experimental magical automation, all held together by duct tape, runes, and institutional inertia.
UU P&L’s Hex Steam Turbine Control System forms the mechanical heart of the operation. Designed in an era when PLCs were expected to outlive their designers, it still governs massive steam turbines through hardwired logic and polling loops that have never heard of cybersecurity and are deeply suspicious of it. These systems are stable, predictable, and utterly unforgiving of modern assumptions.
Adjacent to this is the Bursar’s Automated Alchemical Reactor Controls, a system that technically counts as “process control” if one is generous with definitions. It regulates volatile alchemical reactions that convert raw thaumic input into usable energy, provided the Bursar is not having a bad day. Control logic must account for both chemical states and metaphysical side effects, which has led to an impressive uptime record and an equally impressive incident log.
The Library Environmental Management System is treated with the reverence usually reserved for unexploded ordnance. It maintains temperature, humidity, and ambient magical stability within the University Library, where even minor fluctuations can destabilise L-space, rearrange shelving across dimensions, or summon things that insist they were only browsing. Changes to this system require approvals, rituals, and at least one librarian standing very still.
Finally, the City-Wide Distribution SCADA ties everything together, managing power and heat delivery across Ankh-Morpork. It interfaces with substations, pumping stations, and civic infrastructure that predate the concept of “the grid” but have been grandfathered into it anyway. The SCADA system is continuously monitored, occasionally understood, and absolutely not to be rebooted during business hours.
From a testing perspective, UU P&L represents a perfect storm of legacy technology, operational fragility, undocumented behaviour, and city-level consequences. Every probe must be deliberate, every assumption questioned, and every “small test” treated as if it might cause a blackout, a flood, or a minor magical anomaly. Sometimes all three.
In short, UU P&L keeps Ankh-Morpork running. Most days.