Standards

Interfaces for the Power Grid

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This week has been crazy busy, but I managed to submit the following to the B2G interoperability group at NIST.

Each interface around each process of the grid should allow bi-directional buying and selling. The interface should support discoverable diversity, allowing the standard to grow over time. Ideally, the interface would be the same for different forms of energy, allowing the same economic interface to be used for buying standard power from the grid, solar energy from the neighbor, or thermal energy from the data center in the basement. I should be able to set my heat pump with gas pack to switch not only on peak efficiency, but on the price for each fuel...

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It’s not Use Cases, it’s Interaction Patterns

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The NIST B2G efforts so far have annoyed me like an itch I cannot quite scratch. The B2G (Building to Grid) group is trying to collect applications and use cases, to create the desiderata for the new interface standards. These are the traditional ways to characterize known systems. Certainly even distinguishing the two can be a strain, although practitioners may prefer one over the other. And yet there is that annoying itch

This morning over coffee I realized that it is because we should be talking service instead of procedure.

One of the truisms of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), is that it is nearly impossible to implement a SOA in a ...

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It’s all too cheap!

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Even with today’s rising energy costs, most things do not cost very much. This is a good thing. Food, as a percentage of income, is still at historic lows. In real dollars, gasoline is just where it was at the birth of the modern car in 1908. For most people, switching to a more fuel efficient car will not pay back the initial capital outlay in the next five years. Local energy generation just doesn’t pay back its installation cost quickly enough. A penny saved may be a penny earned, but today, everyone leaves their pennies by the cash register. Gas prices do not
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