Enterprise Interaction

IP Everywhere, or Just About

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In February, a new administration official stated that the smart grid requires "IP everywhere", stirring considerable concern among the dumbest (in terms of grid smarts) of the smart grid players. Earlier this month, as I wrote of in The Impulse to Run Around Naked, a maker of building systems asked why we don’t just build systems with their own native languages and their own "most optimal" media. The operators of the big distribution systems (SCADA) for electricity, water, sewage, and natural gas are all a-twitter over the proposed national cyber-security directorate. This agitation in those that manage the actions of the built world is based upon misunderstandings based upon poor definitions as much as anything else.

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A pricing Service for Electricity

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What price structures are necessary to enable fully symmetric negotiations over power purchase and sale? Over at the NIST TWIKI, Marty Burns, Bill Cox, and I ironed out the requirements for a pricing service for electricity. Comments are welcome.

What are the requirements for communicating price across the smart grid? What pricing structures are in use or under development now? How do we move to a common information element, common whatever else needed for prices?

Note: It is important to emphasize that these are requirements for a solution set for pricing services. Therefore all the following requirements are not necessarily simultaneously applied to any particular single service based on the ensuing model.

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Gamboling through the Clouds

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Some months ago, I wrote about how Software as a Service (SaaS) was going to be used in building controls. The UNC Enterprise Building Management System (EBMS) and Hosted Controls already use that model for monitoring and operations of building systems. Others like Sensus offer building analytics and knowledge-based maintenance from their own data center. Now Harrah’s Entertainment, the largest of the casino operators is moving into the clouds, and the outcome may change building systems again.

It has been best practice for a while now to interface building systems to hotel customer operations. The check-in process can...

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EBMS Takes its First Steps

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I have written before of UNC’s Enterprise Building Management System (EBMS). EBMS talks to legacy systems in more than a 100 buildings on the UNC campus. EBMS uses a half dozen variants of web services to monitor and operate building systems using nearly every brand and every internal protocol. All data is normalized and brought into an industry standard database, currently we are adding 42 million transactions a day to that database.

Phase II of EBMS is finishing up before the end of the year. The system is going through...

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