Enterprise Interaction

To Market, To Market to Buy a Fat Watt

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There is a strong tug of war, not only in the buildings to grid (B2G) arena, but in all others, about whether GridWise is about controlling gizmos or about interactions between economic agents. One is paving interstates along the old cow-paths, and one is laying out a city. When you lay out a city, you never know what markets and neighborhoods will actually develop.

Those who have worked long in utilities or in building systems have a deep impulse toward the perfecting old models of control rather than laying out the market rules for transacted energy. Like a dog to his vomit...

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An Evolutionary Composite Services Framework for Energy

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Future energy systems must not only support interoperability on operational, e-commerce, and security levels, but they must do so against a background of innovation. New technologies will arrive from innovators who are not traditional energy participants; it must be easy for these innovators to introduce their products and easy to integrate these products into the intelligent grid.

New business models, especially support for distributed generation and the hybrid technologies such as the zero net energy building, will demand new interfaces. These business models require...

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Thomas Friedman and "The End of Green"

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In a recent blog post titled "The End of Green", Thomas Friedman ponders whether the current troubles in the financial markets will end investments in sustainable technology, particularly in energy. In his conclusion, he writes:

What we are seeing in this crisis is the need for a whole new financial architecture-and people are recognizing that some problems are just too big to solve unless we approach them systematically. As it is with our economy, so it is with our ecosystem: we need a new system, and we are going to have to think things through very carefully and make some hard choices to get it right.

Although Friedman describes the risks and the opportunities better than anyone, in this point I think while his aim is true, his target selection is off...

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Buildings, Emergency Response, and Situation Awareness

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This week twenty of us met at NIST to discuss situation awareness during emergencies. The centerpiece of the conversation was the NG911 system, or Next Generation 911. NG911 supports better interaction between call centers, and uses policy-based security to let other local call centers, or even centers in other regions take calls as circumstances and policy require. Private call centers, run by alarm services, can be full peers if local policy allows. Even buildings, and building systems, might act as 911 operators. The conveners asked me to lead an effort to develop a security model for these systems.

Interoperability at this level requires standardization of security, of policy management, and even of building semantics. 911 centers will...

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