Microgrids and Distrib...

Whither Grid Standards

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On last Friday’s phone call about advancing the OpenADR specification to a national and perhaps international standard, we agreed to continue the discussion in an open forum at the OASIS site (www.OASIS-Open.org). OASIS, or the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, has long been the home for the underpinnings of e-commerce, for web security, and for service oriented architecture. OASIS is also home to a number of domain-specific standards, such as LegalXML, Open Office, and OpenDocs as well as the foundational web services registry UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration).

OpenADR (Automated Demand Response) is a California developed specification developed for...

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Distributed Generation and Lightweight Integration

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Distributed generation is a big part of the anticipated new grid. Distributed generation refers to having many small sources of power on the grid. A traditional power company can own distributed generation or someone else, perhaps the building owner, can own it.

Wayne Longcore has described distributed generation today as akin to the early days of personal computing. The big centrally managed power plants have the role of the mainframe, the site where all real power generation occurs. Pocket generation plants, including solar generation on household roofs, are akin to the poorly networked early microcomputers, only able to get on-line with great difficulty, and unable to...

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DC, Service, and Bacteria

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Regular readers know I am intrigued by DC (Direct Current) power systems in buildings. This fascination was born while examining a data center UPS system several years ago. The potential efficiencies shouted out to me. This week, I found something new that fueled my interest.

Most consumer devices are DC powered. That brick outside your laptop is to convert AC (Alternating Current) power to DC. Your television has a similar brick built inside it. That annoyingly large plug on your cell phone charger is another AC/DC converter. The digital world is a DC world. The exceptions in your homes are...

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How to Enable the Energy Revolution

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This weekend, I read what may be the most important book yet for those transforming today's grid into the Intelligent Grid, and transforming today's buildings and the systems inside them into Smart Buildings. No, it is not Thomas Friedman's "Hot Flat and Crowded", although that work has set the table nicely for discussions of the importance and opportunity of this effort. It is not and of the chap books from the Department of Energy, or the IEEE, or EPRI. It is not one of the many books on environmental eschatology. Nor is it any of George Gilder's visionary history books that bring perspective to technology.

I recommend that anyone involved in these efforts read "The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It"...

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