Intelligent Buildings

A Caffeinated view of Aging Energy Infrastructure

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The local coffee shop, The OpenEye Cafe, has an outsized role in thinking about smart buildings and the smart grid. Each day when I leave the gym, I go to the OpenEye to caffeinate myself out of my post exercise torpor and to write.

The OpenEye is a great college town coffee shop, even if it is in Carrboro, the town next door to the college town. Its main room is huge for a coffee shop, fitted out with as many old couches and comfy chairs as it has little tables surrounded by mismatched chairs. It has numerous small side rooms, a patio in the back, more sidewalk seating in the front.

This size gives it a wonderful variety of subcultures, as there is the construction contractor corner, klatches of endurance runners, and every college town’s PWDIBs (people who dress in black). On weekends, the Men Who Run in Kilts...

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The Impulse to Run Around Naked

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We were discussing the proposed Energy Market Information Exchange (EMIE) Technical Committee last week when a participant asked "What’s wrong with having devices communicate in their own native languages and over their most optimal media?"

At its heart, this query is a request to let first costs equipment trump all other concerns. It ignores cost of ownership. It ignores the costs of security. It even ignores initial integration costs. It is a naïve plea for a simpler world.

When they were young, I remember my children regularly escaping after the evening bath and scampering through the house.

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Cyborg Beetles, Cyber-security, Smart Buildings, and the Smart Grid

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Cyber beetles provide an interesting glimpse into agent based interactions. Smart grids and smart buildings are integrated today using deep, integration, and complete control of the underlying processes. As more and more nodes are added to any system, the overhead of maintaining all interactions at a central point becomes more significant. In grid-scale systems, system designers have managed complexity by limiting diversity; a system may be managing ten thousand substations, but at least they are identical systems. A current DARPA project dramatically demonstrates a better approach....

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Energy Interoperability Standards: Smart Buildings, Smart Grid

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Earlier this month, Bill Cox of Cox Software Architects proposed the formation of standard committee for Energy Interoperability at OASIS. The core of the proposed work is the definition of XML and Web services interactions for so-called Automated Demand Response, growing out of work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Demand Response Research Center. The proposal comes from the context of many discussions in and related to the OpenADR Technical Advisory Group, GridWise Architecture Council, Grid-Interop, the NIST Smart Grid project, and GridEcon (an upcoming conference on the economics of the Smart Grid).

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