Energy

The Path to Smart Energy

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For the last two years I have been so immersed in smart energy that I sometimes lose track of the big picture myself. This post goes back to basics.

The power industry of North America has provided its customers with the greatest life style that any civilization has ever had. The old service model assumes an ever-present supply of power that is predictable, abundant, and inexpensive. World-wide, our plans are to reduce the power supplied by predictable an inexpensive power sources, to replace them with power sources that are intermittent and less predictable, and that are widely distributed across the grid, including within homes, businesses, and neighborhoods. The old service model will not survive...

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Forget Efficiency and Demand Response, Load Bank for the Grid

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All the Smart Grid attention is on Demand Response, that is, on the half dozen times a year when the grid runs out of energy or has to turn to expensive energy sources. All the building attention is on efficiency, using the least energy inside the building possible. Neither approach supports renewables, or distributed energy resources. Efficiency may reduce the ability to respond to Demand Response signals. Buildings should turn to...

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Ready for the BSI

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I want to get back to buildings soon. Smart grids are engaging, but I think our goals for the future will be met by buildings. For months, all my writing has been about smart grids. More particularly, for November, it has all been about smart grid standards. As I write this, the essential market interfaces of the grid are in review. A common communication of schedule and interval, suitable for sharing schedules between grid and enterprise and building and finance...
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Smart Buildings & Smart Energy: the Integration Challenge

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Last week, twenty of us gathered in DC for a two-day charrette on the standards needed to apply BIM to the problems of dynamic energy management. The work-shop, entitled “Smart Buildings, Smart Energy”, was put on by the Corps of Engineers Research Lab (CERL) at the National Insitute for Building Science (NIBS). The meeting was a fascinating, and occasionally heated conversation that brought together academic and government researchers, building system practitioners from industry leading companies, and participants in standards committees from ASHRAE to OASIS. It was a fascinating meeting, filled with bright, deeply focused individuals who as a group had not yet recognized the profound changes in their goals required by smart energy...

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