Energy

Transactive Energy and Little White Lies

in , ,

As I head off to the second smart grid interim roadmap workshop (whew – that’s a lot of pairs) I think back to one of the participants in the Business and Policy track that I led with Lynne Kiesling. Several members, bunched together in the participants, were from the Edison Electric Institute, the association of share holder owned utilities. They peppered us with detailed questions and countered transactive smart grid scenarios with valid objections. It was on the second day, however, that I recognized the thought behind many of their concerns. They feel that they are asked to subsidize pretend transactions...

Read More

New Energy and Legacy Buildings

in , ,

Building systems used to be fully compatible and interoperable. Prior to digital controls, the best systems were built with pneumatic controllers. Electric signals are complicated. There’s voltage. There’s there is binary packing of data. There’s non-standardized xml vocabularies. Pneumatics were simple. Pressure was everything.

Many institutional owners of buildings resisted the new-fangled digital controls...

Read More

Cargo Cult Energy

in , , ,

I spent last week in Chicago and by of Silicon Valley, talking about new energy. In Chicago, we were talking about the smart grid, and how it enables new markets in energy. Out by San Francisco Bay, the conversation was, of course, about ventures and new businesses and high tech. There were exciting conversations in Chicago, ones that may lead getting the underlying structures of smart energy markets right. There were innovative projects in California, ones that are beginning to answer "What would your stuff do, if it knew the price of energy, now.?" In both locations, there was a tendency to fall into a trap that I call Cargo Cult Energy...

Read More

What if the Smart Grid had Reliable Generation

in ,

Most of today’s conversations about smart energy have at their core recognition that new energy is inherently unreliable. That unreliability will flow throughout the grid, and those that rely on the grid (homes, buildings, industry, vehicles) will need to consider that unreliability. The requirements reach beyond the operation of transmission and distribution (T&D) to intelligent end-points, able to adjust energy requirements, store energy locally, and even supply energy back to the grid. This requires two-way symmetric communications.

But what if new technology provides us with rock solid reliable power? A couple reports this week have turned my thoughts to the problems of the smart grid given perfect reliability of generation...

Read More