Markets and Innovation

General Relativity and Control Systems Standards

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I suspect most of my readers can just about remember light speed, the 100 foot barn, and the 110 foot log from learning about relativity. The barn had doors at each end, and one set would close the instant the other doors opened. The challenge was to transport the log through the barn. The answer had to do with light speed and collapsing space, so that as one got close enough to light speed, the log shortened, and it could fit through the barn. It was a simple enough calculation as to how fast one could go to make the log shrink how much. When each of us had completed the math, the professor sprang the surprise on us: "OK, what is happening from the perspective of a cockroach on the log?"

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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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New Energy and Legacy Buildings

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Building systems used to be fully compatible and interoperable. Prior to digital controls, the best systems were built with pneumatic controllers. Electric signals are complicated. There’s voltage. There’s there is binary packing of data. There’s non-standardized xml vocabularies. Pneumatics were simple. Pressure was everything.

Many institutional owners of buildings resisted the new-fangled digital controls...

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Cargo Cult Energy

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I spent last week in Chicago and by of Silicon Valley, talking about new energy. In Chicago, we were talking about the smart grid, and how it enables new markets in energy. Out by San Francisco Bay, the conversation was, of course, about ventures and new businesses and high tech. There were exciting conversations in Chicago, ones that may lead getting the underlying structures of smart energy markets right. There were innovative projects in California, ones that are beginning to answer "What would your stuff do, if it knew the price of energy, now.?" In both locations, there was a tendency to fall into a trap that I call Cargo Cult Energy...

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