The best restaurants are seasonal, and know where ingredients come from.
Locavory is dedicated to the proposition that the best food is not only
seasonal, but local, served at its absolute freshest. Energy, too has its
seasons, and they can be tied to the way we live our lives, and they can bind
our things to our pursuits. One of the most intriguing agreements in the
standards development organization (SDO) smart grid conference last month, may
change how we coordinate our lives and our things.
Read MoreIntelligent Buildings
Collaborative Energy: Smart Grids and Intelligent Buildings together
Intelligent energy use acquires energy at the right time at the right price for the right reason. Intelligent buildings provide customer amenities and customer services at the right time. Collaborative energy works with the smart grid to minimize the incompatibilities of these two problem sets. Systems on the grid and in the building need to do a better job of sharing information to improve the performance of these functions.
Smart buildings are more important than smart grids
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...
Data centers are just the start of unsustainable IT
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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