Microgrids and Distrib...

Smart Energy with a little bit of Seoul.

My visit to Seoul this month was fascinating. The country of Korea built its infrastructure essentially from scratch in the last 50 years, and in doing so was able to use modern technology to challenge some fundamental assumptions that we make in the USA. IP-based telephony predominates based on pervasive free Wi-Fi. Custom tailors use radical outsourcing mediated by IT to provide near-instant services. The National Virtual Power Plant (NVPP) is as up-to-date as any, while using big-data tools in ways not often seen here. There is a desire to embrace the new without fear that seems young and fresh in the way the US often does not. But somehow, the single observation that stays with me is how the use of IT to challenges our assumptions about natural monopolies....
Read More

Finding a Needle in the Internet of Things (part 1)

Things cost what they cost to install. Ongoing charges are, in the short term, fixed. Value may be the only thing you can control. In the Internet of Things, value will be determined by how many ways you can use that Thing. Value will be determined by how many different uses can use that thing. Some of those users will be other things.

Things (as in the Internet Of…) tend to be commodities. One thing is inherently like another. Once I have more than...

Read More

Privacy, Self Defense, and Smart Energy

I spent some time last week down a country road, watching the local power. I watched three phases that were greatly out of balance. I observed trapezoidal wave forms. We could see the home appliances of everyone else on the road, as they each turned on and off.

Together, we watched the power coming into his lab. They were his neighbors, and he knew them from observation. He could relate...

Read More

Service Oriented Scheduling (Part 1)

Some interesting new interaction patterns, and new business models, can be found by combining WS-Calendar and EMIX Terms. WS-Calendar is a specification for constructing web-services that incorporate iCalendar, the long-established basis for personal scheduling. EMIX is an information model built to support the exchange of market related information between suppliers and buyers of energy.

Service orientation names a pattern for systems interaction in which ...

Read More