Energy

Distributed Energy Grids can use Diverse Energy Storage

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But there’s no way to store energy, he said. What he should have said is that there are few ways to store energy at grid scale. Grids, and microgrids, have two approaches to storing energy. They can store it in something that produces electricity, or they can store it in any format that provides a service to its customers. The closer we get to the end users of energy, the more options we have to store energy. The most critical short term goal of smart grids might be to transfer as many incentives for energy storage to the end nodes of the grid as possible as soon as possible.

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Small standards for small things

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We were discussing standards upon which to build standards today. Before systems can communicate, there is a lot of work building the platform they communicate from. So much of the small work that will be needed for the internet of things is based upon constrained communications between resource-constrained devices. I found myself spitting out acronyms right and left - a veritable techno-glossolalia
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Standards for energy engagement and autonomous response (3b of 3)

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The fourth of three planned posts on revisiting the smart grid priority action plans ran over long. The first post discussed semantic issues. The next addressed the conflict between the business models for Managed and Collaborative Energy. In this one, I discuss the architecturally significant interfaces of the smart grid, updating my earlier musing on SGIX.
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Two Paths to Smart Energy in DC (2 of 3)

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Standards can seem dry and uninteresting, but they find vital expression in the business models they support or prevent. One of the underlying issues in the initially contentious smart grid meeting last week was the conflict of business models. This can be resolved, but only by talking clearly about the purposes and motivations behind each model. A good first start would be to give them good names.

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