GG Bondarenko

Yulia Bondarenko predicted electricity demand for thirty years, calling to the megawatt what a cold snap or a cup final would do to the load, which is applied probability practised daily. She keeps plants along the top of the metal cupboards and has outlasted eleven directors. The board came from a colleague, Vera, who died in 2019; she still uses it. In the last week of December she sits down with a year of her own doubling decisions and works through the ones she got wrong, and has never described this to anybody as anything but housekeeping. Thirty years of load curves left her a habit she cannot switch off. She knows what a public holiday does to the number of members in the lobby, and what a televised final does, and picks her evenings out of that.