Aligning Time, Space, and Energy

Whenever time, space and energy are misaligned, you are spending too much. NBIMS (National Building Information Model Standard), now buildingSmart, is a standard for the definition and creation of space for work and life. The functions inside buildings are the largest users of energy in North America. Time is the missing component, the piece which is never aligned.

When we use energy at the wrong time, we require too much from the power grid. When we do not know the scarcity or plenty of energy, we will not use energy at the right time. Energy availability has seasons, as do other perishable commodities such as fruits and vegetables. Where the seasons of produce are the seasons of the year, the seasons of energy are the hours of the day. Using energy in the afternoon is like consuming raspberries in February, a profligate act. To know the scarcity or abundance of energy, we must have pricing that varies during the day.

When buildings are uncommunicative, they cannot respond to our needs for space. They cannot prepare space to be optimal when we need it. The cannot release their claim on the energy needed to prepare space when we do not need it. If we cannot communicate with buildings whether one person or twenty will use space, then the building must lay claim to the same energy for either case. When we can let buildings know what our space needs are, then they can use energy by preparing just what we need.

If we knew the scarcity of energy, would we change how we move through time and space? Human Resources may tell me to stay at home for a snow emergency. Why not tell me to stay at home for an energy pricing emergency? It would certainly save me time, and a lot of energy, to not commute to a building that is temporarily over-priced.

Space need accurate time. Too many building systems have no way to update time, no way to calibrate their clocks. To be responsive to time signals, building systems must pick up network time as do all other networked systems.

Managing space is old hat.

Managing energy is so ‘70s.

Managing time is in every self help book.

But to manage all three together requires standards, and interoperability.

Not just Sensors and Schedules

Several alert readers have observed recently that most of this is not new, that we have long known how to do this. Occupancy sensors can make the building responsive to the tenants. Operations schedules can make the building responsive to the enterprise. We’ve long had performance contractors offering to tune the building’s performance and get energy savings.

They are right. The building engineering community knows how to tune buildings and to make them responsive. Alas, the building engineering community is applying what it knows in the wrong way. It is still trying to provide an engineering service, and it continues to leave the owner and the tenant out of the conversation. It is still trying to sell the process of automating the building rather than the services that an intelligent building could provide.

Building schedules are a great place to start. Every Energy Management system offers a way for the building engineer to set whether the building is operating from 9 to 5 or from 8 to 6. They all have ways to flag holidays. But buildings aren’t operated for the engineers. The best engineers aren’t even on site as they operate multiple buildings from a distance. These operations schedules may take account of the whole building, but not the individual tenants. Because they operate as “set and forget”, they do not truly respond to needs and operations that may change every day. And so we set up building schedules to be “good enough”.

Building sensors are a great way to cover for the insensibility of the building scheduling. They work pretty well for lighting. As long as a room is almost warm enough, or almost cool enough, sensors can make a room respond fairly quickly to the needs of being occupied. Of course, it can respond so quickly by treating the room as “nearly occupied” most of the time. It can respond so quickly because the designers have over-sized the cooling equipment (often by double) just in case. Just in case what? Well, in case someone enters the room for a planned meeting and they would like to be comfortable before the meeting is over.

So there we have it. Systems that use too much energy because they are too large. Systems that are too large so they can cover for the lack of planning when the sensors only discover that the room is already occupied. Rooms that use too much energy day in and day out because they might need to respond quickly to the sensors.

Building systems that communicated with enterprise systems can anticipate scheduling needs rather than catch up to them. Freed from the need to catch up, we could size building systems properly. They would also have exactly the information they need to respond properly to Demand Response signals. If they were unable to respond, they could tell the enterprise what the scheduling constraints were that prevented the response. The enterprise, unlike the building, can decide to change the constraints.

I will write of how this lack of communication is the largest impediment to performance contracts another day.

Sustaining Sustainability

In the middle ages, people were scared. They had good reason to be scared. Wolves in the forest. Plague in the village. Roving bands of soldiers, and ex-soldiers, living off the land, and farm, and village. Pilgrimages became popular. Get out of town for a while. Get out of the oppressive oversight of your neighbors. It was all to show your devotion and faith.

Virtue is a good cover for economic uncertainty. Worried about the value of your house or the stability of your job? Shocked by $100 a barrel oil and its effects on all energy prices? You cut back. But no one wants to acknowledge they are cutting back. So you can go green, instead. Turn down the thermostat because you want to reduce your carbon footprint. That’s the ticket. I’m not worried. I’m virtuous.

Those who feel guilty about how well off they are can play, too. They can buy indulgences, errrr, carbon credits. Virtue by proxy. Western society is more committed to indulgences than any time since Martin Luther stirred things up in Wittenberg.

This sustainability is as shallow and short-lived as the arguments on a late night sports BLOG. The problem is, when times are good, when the uncertainties are gone, this kind of virtue evaporates. That thermostat will creep back up. That cold shower after the power company turned off the water heater in the afternoon becomes unacceptable.

We have seen this before, following the energy shocks of the 70s. We have worn cardigans to demonstrate virtue. We have seen home-made solar thermal collection installed in house after house. Some house and factories even installed the more expensive photovoltaics. You can see them now in some neighborhoods, rusting on the roof, taken off the window and stacked at the edge of the yard, unmaintained and unused.

The last wave of sustainability faded away because it made economy tolerable, but failed to make life better. Faced with that cusp, we will always go back to a better life, when we can. The challenge, then, is not to make buildings more efficient – we know how to do that.

The challenge is to make buildings that tenants like better, that happen to be more efficient. This keeps the homeowner committed. This lets the commercial owner recapture his investment on resale. We do this by making the building more responsive to the owner. We do this by talking about tenant benefits and not about cost avoidance and efficiency.

A responsive building saves money by responding to the tenant, with enough intelligence to know when to buy on the energy markets. An intelligent building will reward the tenant with rebates and cold cash, not with imagined cost avoidance. A responsible building will provide greater reliability to the tenant by implementing Galvin’s Perfect Power principles. A responsible building will request maintenance when it needs it, reducing the thing the owner and tenant have to worry about.

And if all of these benefits just happen to be more sustainable, then the owners and tenants will keep on using them when the crisis is over.

Today’s concerns and fears are an opportunity. They give us an opening to discuss what we know how to do. If use this opportunity to re-create the un-responsive siloed applications of the 70’s, well shame on all of us who know we can do better.

Building Expert Folksonomy

I gave an enjoyable talk yesterday at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS). It was not policy, and it was not a plan; it was a variant of my usual talks in a venue that regularly hears talks about standards and open source issues.

For those who haven’t looked at library schools recently, they are not what they once were. When I was an undergrad, I am not sure if there was an computer in the school. I took a course there a decade ago, when the hot skill for new librarians was the skills to set up a small network and a connection to the internet. Aside from finally getting all seven layers of the ISO protocol stack down cold, there were few surprises.

Today’s library science is all about classification of data in a variety of ways to enable quick discovery of meaning. Research posters on semantics and ontologies covered the hallways. Video catalogues vied with personal medical record analysis. Privacy and easy access vied in the same application. Let those guys in computer science come with a better hash table to index the bits, they seemed to say. We, in libraries and information will catalogue the world and categorize meaning.

The audience was attentive and the post talk was long. There was more to it than the Schools interest in building their own new building, pushing the standards of sustainable design. The were interested in a new pool of data sets to make into information, By discovering meaning, they could discover service and define performance. The questions were quite different then I usually get.

One doctoral candidate, Terrell Russell, is working on contextual authority tagging, or what he describes a cognitive authority through folksonomy. Folksonomy is a newly trendy word describing approaches that most of us use every day. Google, for example, became the best search engine by ranking each page by how many other pages referenced it; the most referenced page, must be the best page for a topic, and so comes out first. This ranking is performed not be some formal scheme, not by some learned discourse, but by folk (think folk tale or folk music). Folksonomy, then, is a classification discovered by referencing peers.

Contextual authority is the authority that is recognized in a special context. We acknowledge authority in some contexts by licensing and education (MD). In other areas, we acknowledge authority by election or appointment (Judge). Authority through folksonomy asks the question “who would you turn to explain widgets”. Russell wants to capture this cognitive authority, and rank it, Google style, to find experts.

Of course, this is a glib summary of some detailed work that was heard in passing. If you are itnerested in this, use your favorite web content context authority to find Terrell Russell.  It won't take ling.

I began thinking about buildings, and agents, and emergent behaviors. What is the role of experts in the embedded world. Are the experts agents, or are the experts operators? Can a power provider recognize the best experts, and recommend them to others? Would building owners accept these recommendations only if the owner fit a similar social model to that of owner of the building operated by the recommended expert?