Many building owners are suspicious of energy performance contractors because the performance contractor is both a player and a score keeper. Because a significant effort is required to understand the information in building systems, there are significant start-up costs. These costs, both in money and time, require that each contract include a significant minimum contract lengths over which to amortize the up-front costs. These up-front costs make it uneconomical for energy contracting to use a third party auditor to verify results.If the owner selects a new a new performance contractor, the up-front costs will be incurred again.
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Easy integration of the Internet with Things: Calendar Subscription and Syndication
in Energy, Schedules, Smart Energy, Standards
I use Outlook in my day to day life. It shows me an aggregate calendar, with meetings I accept at UNC (one account) meetings I accept not at UNC (anther email account) and two corporate calendars: one based in Exchange, and one in SharePoint. When I was working on the national smart grid roadmap, my Outlook showed the calendar of that SharePoint project as well. In Outlook, I can turn each calendar off or on, and when aggregated, each appointment was a different color by source. I live by Calendar aggregation.
In my Phone, which happens to be an Android, I used to have...
Scheduling Resources and Operations with BIM
Recently, I wrote of standards for calendar synchronization, vcards, and directory services. This week, in a meeting on iResource, we explored the Enterprise IT perspective on the same issues. Today, I will place these two views side by side, and look for a solution.
In enterprise calendaring, conference rooms were originally added to corporate address books as if they were another person. An account was created in the corporate directory for each conference room, albeit an account that lacked an employee ID. This account was assocated with a calendar server and perhaps an email account. Conference rooms were set up Justas were senior staff that do not manage their own schedule. Anyone could invite the conference room to a meeting. An assigned administrative assistant received all schedule requests.
The Path to Smart Energy
For the last two years I have been so immersed in smart energy that I sometimes lose track of the big picture myself. This post goes back to basics.
Read MoreThe power industry of North America has provided its customers with the greatest life style that any civilization has ever had. The old service model assumes an ever-present supply of power that is predictable, abundant, and inexpensive. World-wide, our plans are to reduce the power supplied by predictable an inexpensive power sources, to replace them with power sources that are intermittent and less predictable, and that are widely distributed across the grid, including within homes, businesses, and neighborhoods. The old service model will not survive...