Enterprise Interaction

Smart Grid Blood on the Floor in DC (1 of 3)

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Thirty ornery smart grid partisans gathered outside DC last week for a hastily convened review of the customer oriented standards development plans. To one side, the plans developed at the August Standards Development Organization (SDO) was putting critical ongoing deployments of billions of dollars infrastructure upgrades at risk, and throwing long term plans into disarray (Team A). The other side saw keeping the August plans intact necessary to enable new investment and new participation in distributed energy, and to break the iron grip of dinosaur twentieth century processes and organizations that impede new energy (Team B). There was little common ground.

The first morning passed with quiet platitudes, until Dr. David Wolman, technical lead for NIST on its smart grid project, called for "blood on the floor" during the afternoon session...

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Smart buildings are more important than smart grids

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Smart operations in transmission and distribution won’t help us much. An upgrade for utility operations is long overdue, especially if energy distribution gets over its severe case of not-invented-here. This upgrade may be absolutely necessary for the grid to support more dynamic energy markets, ones that will balance electricity supply and demand. The most important smart interactions will come from the grid’s end nodes: industry, commercial buildings and homes. To get the benefits of the smart grid, we must have smart load...

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Data centers are just the start of unsustainable IT

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Lots of people consider data centers, those great energy sucking heat producing resource hogs. Data centers have become the PR battlegrounds for corporate sustainability. Heads of large corporations have been known to charter jets to inspect operations of data centers and declare their interest in reducing carbon footprints. This is somewhat overwrought; that flight may have a larger carbon footprint that savings for a year. Such posturing is well known; today, I am writing of IT’s unsustainable interactions with basic building operations.
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Collaborative Energy—the Smart Grid and the End Node

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A significant goal of the smart grid is to encourage rapid innovation in the end nodes, that is in the commercial buildings, homes, and industrial sites that consume most of the electricity produced. Today’s North American power grid is probably the supreme engineering feat of the twentieth century; it has made possible the greatest life style ever lived. Its reliability, though, is insufficient for the digital world. Every system margin has been pushed too thin. The introduction of any significant portion of intermittent source energy, such as wind and solar, will make things much worse.

It is time to engage the end nodes in supporting system reliability. Today’s buildings have higher requirements for reliability and quality than the grid was ever designed for. Site-based generation and site based storage are part of the solution, but they could make the system even less reliable. It is time to begin the move to collaborative energy...

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