Microgrids and Distrib...
Far too many of the presentations at Connectivity Week last month touted building efficiency. Efficiency is important to Smart Energy, but can also work to defeat Smart Energy. Resilience is ultimately more important than efficiency for meeting the goals of Smart Energy. What energy efficiency can do, is support energy resilience.
A Smart Grid is one that can work despite...
All the Smart Grid attention is on Demand Response, that is, on the half dozen times a year when the grid runs out of energy or has to turn to expensive energy sources. All the building attention is on efficiency, using the least energy inside the building possible. Neither approach supports renewables, or distributed energy resources. Efficiency may reduce the ability to respond to Demand Response signals. Buildings should turn to...
Last week, I spoke at the Department of Energy’s Industry to Grid (I2G) Summit, a pre-meeting of the ARC World Industrial Forum. For me, it felt like something of a homecoming. Several careers ago, my biggest customers were manufacturers. In the late 70’s, popular imagination held US manufacturing to be dead, poorly managed and low quality. In a famous Newsweek article, a celebrity athlete boasted of a summer in the UAW, during which he deliberately added rattles to pass the time. As often happens, a renaissance had begun some years before public perception hit bottom.
As a young programmer, I was working with companies trying to improve quality while...
Yesterday, I presented the NIST B2G (Building to Grid) group with a proposal to simplify integration within buildings and between buildings and the grid by relaying on existing well-defined, and well known web services standards. The feedback was surprisingly positive. Now I have to consider how to get it into the Energy Interoperation specification.
Energy Interoperation was conceived of as the market and situation awareness gateway for...