Other People’s Money and Poor Decisions

I always read the local paper when I am travelling. I may rely on the national papers for consistent use, but they cannot give you the flavor of the local town. I always get a fresh perspective on something from the local paper.

While driving up to drop my daughter off at College, we stopped overnight in Wilmington, Delaware. One of the top stories was the local electric utility’s industrial policy. The town proposed to give reduced rates to new industry moving into the area for a period of years. The details were still being hashed out, and I may misunderstand them. There was some discussion as to how to determine who was eligible, i.e., how many employees, were they really “new industries, and so on.

This sort of meddling with markets is wrong in nearly every way. It encourages continued poor decision making by companies. It is deceptive to the citizens while setting them up for disappointment. It leads to a misallocation of power within the market.

The company that takes up this offer is relying on subsidized energy costs to support processes that are not sustainable economically. It has decided not to re-engineer its work to acknowledge current and future energy costs. It has made this decision despite recognizing itself as unusually sensitive to energy costs to stay in business. When the subsidies end, the company will fail or move on to the next sucker. The local town council is paying them to continue to make bad decisions; corporate executives are accepting the bribe to meet short term revenue goals.

The true costs of this policy will remain unknown. City officials will never reveal information damaging to their self image as enlightened and beneficent. Local reporters lack the financial training to wade through the creative accounting that will cover up internal cross-subsidies and cost over-runs. The charge to each family, rich or poor, will never be itemized. The largest beneficiary will be the corporate officer, far away from the community.

This sets up a direct dollar transfer from efficient users of energy to the inefficient. Long term local industry will not get these rates to stay in the community. Homes will cut back or conserve to pay the inflated bills of the most inefficient industries. Local programs to encourage upgrades and insulation will be cut back. The community ends up with an economy bases around inefficient companies poorly positioned for the future.

Only economically unaware, who have been given control of other people’s money make decisions this bad. No one would ever make this decision with money pulled from his own wallet. When public officials decide to design policies to limit transparency in decision making, the public always loses. The public always does when systems are established primarily so that the decision makers never have to tell the funding citizens any numbers.

And the nation loses because Wilmington is paying companies to use more energy.

Ausable Chasm and Personal Action

After dropping my youngest daughter off in the dorm at NYU, my wife and I drove north for some simple no-one-on-the-back-seat together time. We headed up to a place I dimly remembered from my childhood, the Ausable Chasm. We stayed overnight in the tiny motel at the chasm’s rim, built in 1953. In the morning, we hiked into the Chasm, followed by a rafting trip to the Chasm’s end. The short trip was delightful, and set me to meditating on mindfulness and environment, and on information gathering and choice.

The Ausable Chasm is at the Northeast corner of New York, between the Adirondacks and Lake Champlain. A still active earthquake fault spit the sandstone mountain an eon ago, just where the run-off from the highest peak in the Adirondacks formed the Au Sable River. As the River was confined in the resulting gorge, it sped up and cut deeper. Steep cliffs rise as high as 170 feet above the water. The river runs swift and furious, at one point a reported 70 feet deep while less than 30 feet wide. Millions of years of sandstone lamina are on prominent display.

I vividly remember visiting the Chasm when I was 10. Severe floods have ripped out the man-made structures I climbed on then, and their replacements, in the intervening years, but the vivid memories triggered by the sights were amazing. In the late summer, now as then, the woods above are filled brambles, and berries, and edible lichens; the views into the Chasm are stunning. I had always remembered and mispronounced the word Ausable as a cognate of “awesome”, a feeling that still applies to the gorge.

As you hike into the Chasm, the sounds of the river block out all noise from beyond the rim. Reverberating off the damp sandstone, the sounds from up and down river occasionally meet and cancel each other out, creating the silence of a cathedral, a more profound silence than the mere absence of noise. The silence intensifies the wonder of the physical geology on display. The cracks caused by the collision of North America with Africa stand in stark contrast to the wrenchings of the walls by earthquakes.

The Chasm is the perfect scale to introduce children to the natural world. It has a diverse ecosystem. You can see the bounty of nature in the numerous wildflowers and the abundance of raspberries and other brambleberries crowding the path. The torn metal frames of earlier paths ripped by floods speak eloquently of nature’s power and disregard for our works. Hundreds of millions of years of sediments and fossils stand clearly revealed on the walls.

I know families who introduce their children to nature at extreme locations. They learn the botany of foul smelling jungle plants they may never see in school. They leave the cocoon of school and soccer only for eco-tourism to the rain forest in Costa Rica. They travel directly to the Grand Canyon. I think they learn the wrong things. The first nature they see is so big, that there is hardly any point in seeing more. They learn that the natural world is far away. I believe it is harder for them to take responsibility for what is going on here and now.

Issues such as power and carbon will not be solved by proxy. They will by fixed by people taking an interest in and responsibility for local solutions. They will not be fixed through by carbon indulgences to plant a tree in a faraway land. They will be fixed, if they are fixed, here and now.

And it starts with appreciating how wonderful, how complex, and how beautiful things are here, in our own back yard.

Changes in State

It is a wistful Sunday morning. It is a cool 60 degrees on the porch, down from the punishing 90-100 degree days of late. Rusty the semi-Beagle has quieted down from the morning walk to get the paper. The roosters down the hill are performing their morning call and response. An orange glow, hinting that fall will come suffuses the yard.

This week will be a flurry of last minute activities, all unplanned. On Friday, we will leave early to drive north. On Sunday morning Katy, my youngest, will move into her dorm at NYU. The years of nurturing and cajoling, or hectoring and applauding are just about over – now I will sit back and watch what I have done.

This year a second transition begins. Josh is all seriousness and purpose. He tells me he can just squeeze an economics minor into his last semester at Case Western. He is wrestling with a few years as a practicing engineer in industry or continuing right on to another degree. We have already completed the personal transition, his graduation will be a mere formality, one that will consume me and that he will barely notice.

Margot, always in a rush, may graduate before him. She has always been a second child, always wanting to show up her older brother, always unhappy with the inequity of not being recognized as first. She has always worked the hardest, at everything from school to track to work. She has always accepted the least; our relationship has always been prickly. She seemed to have found peace during the week she was home this summer. In two weeks she is off to Vienna for a semester abroad from Chicago. She has always stood on her own, and I know she will do fine.

By Christmas, depending on how their appeals of various academic injustices go, I may be down to one kid still on the dole, and by the end of the week, none at home. And so opens the third act.

I plan to drive slowly from New York City to Cleveland next week, hiking, and visiting wine country, and simply talking with my Maggie. For the first time in decades, there will be no kids to roust, no fights to referee, but just two people resuming a journey together after some distraction. We will visit Josh in Cleveland for his birthday and then drive back to Carolina to resume something like normal life. It is a celebration of an inflexion point.

Where does the arc of my life go from here? In September, I will take some days off for a retreat at my brother’s ranch on Colorado’s western slope; there I will ponder what other changes to make, what opportunities lie ahead. What does the next act look like? What shall I do with more time, and fewer constraints?

I have some ideas I want to put into play. I love thinking about them, love writing about them. I think they are important, and can have a big effect on our future, and the future of how our civilization sits on the planet. I enjoy working with the people who share the vision as we develop paths to implementation.

But today it is a quiet, cool morning on the porch. I am enjoying the sweet melancholy of putting one phase to rest, even as I look forward what comes next. I recognize that I don’t know how I will engage the challenges ahead. But for now, I am enjoying the shade of the old oak and the orange glow of morning sun on the magnolia, as the roosters settle down and the crickets hum.

How far off are Self Maintaining, Self-Repairing Facilities

It is easy to fall into thinking that Energy and its twin Sustainability are the only benefits of the new-style of intelligent buildings we are starting to call Buildings 2.0. A significant benefit of these new approaches will be a reduced cost of ownership, and in particular a reduced cost of maintenance while providing higher levels of service.

FIATECH (see side bar) has called this the Self Maintaining, Self Repairing facility. This does not yet mean that buildings will have internal nanobots responding to structural stress sensors by reinforcing beams. For now, it aims at the humbler goal of each building being able to recognize the needs of its systems and prepare timely and accurate requests for their upkeep.

This starts with improved life-cycle data management for each building. Today, it is hard for the facility operator to find even the recommended maintenance and spare parts for all the equipment in a newly built or renovated building. Such information as there is is in a large bookshelf in a locked room in the basement. Spare parts requirements must be carefully copied out of the books – assuming there are no mistakes made.

More recently, some hand-over and commissioning firms have begun scanning these big books and delivering them to the owner on a CD full of PDF (Adobe’s Portable Document Format) files. This does improve accessibility, to the extent that documents held by both maintenance and procurement are more accessible. I am not convinced that a CD with several hundred PDF’s is really a usable library. Even if you do find the correct PDF, there is still the problem of transcribing information into other systems.

The life cycle data standard for buildings (NBIMS) which holds all information for a building includes specifying how to hand over this information (COBIE) from the contractor to the owner in a machine readable format. Ready access to that information alone, it is estimated, can reduce lifetime Operations and Maintenance costs by up to 20%.

But that is still not the yet the Intelligent Building, that is just Building Intelligence.

In Buildings 2.0, systems will know their name, because they were named in the initial design. Systems will know their target performance characteristics because the design intents and energy models are part of the design history in NBIMS. When a system needs maintenance, the system will request it, using the name assigned to that system during design. Maintenance personnel will be able to find the requesting system because the name will be the one in the searchable on-line plans.

How far out is this? Not very. Today most routine maintenance is schedules on a time schedule, whether it is not yet needed or is overdue. Think of this as always changing oil every three months, whether you have kept the car in the garage or driven great distances. If this results in maintenance too soon, it is wasted. If this maintenance is performed too late, the equipment has already been damaged. Systems that know only how long they have run, and have that information accessible over the network, will already be a big step in this direction.

If the systems get just a little smarter, or make their information accessible to other systems for remote analytics, they can move beyond failure detection to failure prediction. Add in some energy cost awareness, and the maintenance organization will receive notification of problems before tenants are aware, complete with instructions as to what needs to be done, and the estimated cost per month of failing make the repair.

For now, that will have to count as a self-maintaining, self repairing facility. Even without nanobots, that will be a substantial improvement in operational cost and quality.