Intelligent Buildings

Lord of the HAN: One Agent to Rule them All

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The National Institute for Standards and Technology has divided the users of the power grid into workgroups for each different area. Industry to grid (I2G), Commercial Building to grid (B2G), Home 2 grid (H2G) and even Vehicle to grid (V2G). Clearly there is a lot of overlap. The large home may have more sophisticated responses than the small office. When we are all done, I hope we have one common set of interfaces for all of them.

Each have their strengths. I2G hosts the most advanced conversations relevant for distributed generation (DG), with its long experience of local steam plants and of cogeneration. B2G, sometime called Business to grid by its members, has the most advanced expectations...

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Working with the Wind in Chicago

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Chicago has long been known as the windy city, for its promises of its politicians and the quantity of its conventions and conferences. Next week, there will be a lot of wind surrounding the AHR Expo, the largest conference anywhere dedicated to the efficient movement of air, and thereby the biggest energy-related conference of the year. Numerous engineering and energy related conferences and meetings will be in town to take advantage of the more than 50,000 attendees. I, too, will be blowing into town, giving some talks, participating in some meetings, and planning still others. This may be the last time I am in Chicago until March, so drop me a line to schedule a meeting if you want to discuss plans or alignment while I am there.

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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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