Spending and Spending Some More

No, its not a quote from The Merry Wives of Windsor. 

Last weekend’s Wall Street Journal (May 12, 2007) had a special report on the retirement of the baby boom. It was titled “Spending and Spending Some More”. To me, at the tail end of the boom, this is the conundrum of my immediate seniors. Think Globally, Act Locally! Save the Planet! Live Simply so that Others may Simply Live! And now, “Zero Carbon” bumper-stickers on the backs of the SUVs.

This cohort has always had plenty of good intentions, and is not afraid to share them with everyone. They just want to do it comfortably. Give me a hair shirt, as long as it is Angora.

The challenge is how to meet these lofty goals while living up the expectations. Don’t interfere with my Autonomy! Do not deny me any amenity? Let me cast my actions so that they live up to my self-image! Accomplishing all these goals at the same time can be difficult.

My perception of this has been intensified by college visits. Next year, I will have three kids in College, at Case Western Reserve, at Chicago, and at New York University. I am as sensitive as anyone to the recent run-up of college prices. A lot of it is un-necessary to education. To compete, each college needs to offer better food, better dorms, more high tech than ever before. But not to satisfy the kids.

As you can imagine, I have taken a lot of college trips in the last five years. I have heard the talks, seen the student tour guides, grown to hate those who waste everyone’s time asking questions from page two of the catalogue. But what has always surprised me is hearing the parents bid up their own expenses. “I don’t think you’d like the food” they say to junior chowing down happily on cafeteria pizza. “The school you were at last week had better closets” they say to their daughter who is trying to meet a professor in her major. It is the parents who drive up the demand for amenities they will have to pay for.

And these parents will be retiring. They will have lots of money, but little interest in efficiency, and engineered solutions, and all the topics of the Power and Facilities world. In retirement, their social agenda will expand while their attention to detail will lessen.

And they will want Green Power. And they will want to know how green it is, and get gold stars for it. And they will want zero carbon, although they can’t quite remember what organic chemistry is. They will shun the responsibility of knowing the details. And they will not want their comfort interfered with.

They will be the biggest market for new energy models. The challenge is, can we engage them?

So many Grid Reforms, so little time...

A blogger on Power Encounter recently made me aware of an Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) report on the different grid modernization efforts underway in the US, and a comparison of their efforts.

http://www.electricitydeliveryforum.org/pdfs/EPRI_Report_1-07.pdf

It makes a good read, comparing the initiatives on their technical meris.  I think it does not give enough credibility to the liberalizing and energizing effect of markets on innovation, and thereby underplays the benefits of GridWise AC.

The End of the Bottom Line

Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (May 12, 2007) had a front page story on the end of the bottom line. The old style bottom line, designed to give banks a picture of whether they would be paid if the company failed, and where the cash was coming from, is deemed to have outlived its usefulness. Years of taking special charges and hedging income off-line put it in the emergency room. Financial plays, foreign hedges, and other high end tricks that can swamp the numbers from business operations have killed it. New statements will replace the bottom lines with separate P&Ls for the company's operating business, its financing activities, investing activities and tax payments. The overall message is that it was easier to game the old statements than to just do well in business.

Isn’t it time we retire other unidimensional measures that are easier to game than they are to do well? Readers of this blog may guess that I am referring to carbon credits, green power, and green buildings.

Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson was the first to declare loudly, publicly, and with actual energy calculations that Corn Ethanol was a net energy loss. However renewable the corn was, oil was used to fertilize it, to drive tractors around it, and often the final distillation used coal. Others will find over the next year that using government subsidies to misuse a key food crop used in meat production across the US, causing the price of not only corn, but soon meat fed on corn, to rise, brings its own problems.

California has recognized this, and is creating new standards will only award carbon credits based upon full life cycle analysis of alternative automotive fuels. This will undoubtedly cause its own controversies, but it is a step in the right direction. We need to look beyond first glance at all alternative fuels.

Green power is one of those things consumers want, but with an asterisk. People want renewable power but want to know how. To some, bird deaths make wind power unacceptable. (I have a friend who installs renewable power systems who has learned to describe turbines in “fractional cat-years’ – but that is another story…). In other areas, energy systems that use scarce water resources make some renewable power technologies a poor choice. People want to be able to choose between fish runs and reliability. For automated green power markets to work, we need to commit to full verifiable ontologies, meaning computer readable meanings of green power that will express the different values that consumers want.

Green buildings are finally hot. Multiple reports in the last few weeks have suggested that at last we are seeing increased rent for green buildings. But what does this mean?

In the middle of the largest building boom in a generation at UNC, I note that we always seem to build on parking lots. We always seem to put parking lots in places where buildings are eventually going to go. Under LEEDS, you will always get extra points for building upon a brown field, whose definition includes a parking lot. So the campus always gets extra green points for each building.

OSCRE (Open Systems for Commercial Real Estate) develops standard data structures to describe all the dimensions of value in piece of property. Clearly, GREEN-ness has become a source of value. Will we be able to describe this value in some way other than a single LEEDS number?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117893520139500814.html

SOA and Controls go to the movies

The movies have a long history of exciting people with impossible control systems. The first year Star Trek was on the air, the set received visits from all the automatic door manufacturers. They all wanted to know how they got the doors to open so well, so quickly. All left disappointed after finding the secret was stage hands. Behind the set. With levers.

A few summers back, the big Tom Cruise hit was Minority Report, set in the near future. Cruise's character flees while being tracked by a high-tech police station. As he runs down the street, each store and each bar he passes scans his retinas, and displays an ad just for him. Comely maidens call him by name, and beckon him to try on some pants, to have a Guinness, to buy the next volume in a series, or even how he liked his last purchase. Meanwhile his pursuers are tracking requests for his identity. Colin Farrel’s character asks “Where are these stores in this order”. Fifth Street someone replies, and the squad cars are off.

Maybe I’m weird, but I think about the system architectures of the movies. And this movie struck me not as far out but as something that with a few assumptions, and proper attention to a service oriented architecture (SOA), one could build with off-the-shelf parts today. Here are the surfaces and the XML pay loads.

• Generic intelligent camera systems. Each camera watches the street and attempts to capture an iris scan. When it does so, it transmits a BIAS message to the company Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) and then tracks the person whose image it acquired until it is lost in the crowd
  

<CamId><TimeStamp><BIAS Payload>

• CRM Server at corporate HQ contacts government biometric database for a match on the BIAS package it has received from the camera.
  

<CompanyId><TranId><BIAS Payload>

• Government biometric database responds with a match while logging request for billing and, in this case, police tracking. The Identity that matches the BIAS packet is returned
  

<TranId><SSN><FirstName><LastName>

• CRM Server looks in customer databases, selects type of ad, and sends request with personalization information to Ad server
  

<AdRequest><PersonalizationData><CamId><TimeStamp>

• Ad Server generates custom ad, contacts Camera, and requests if it still knows where the person whose ID was captured at a certain time is.
  

<TranId><TimeStamp><Location>

• If the Camera is still tracking the person, it sends back to the Ad Server a geo-tagged location. Otherwise it sends back some sort of negative acknowledgement.
  

<TranId><GeoRSS>

• Ad Server selects holo-projector based upon reported current location and transmits ad. With Ad successfully delivered, Ad Server notifies CRM system for bill-back purposes.
  

<TranId><AdName><DeliveryTime>

Simple. Each system works well within the parameters of what you could do today. Just a series of minor upgrades. None of the systems require deep knowledge of the process of any of the others. And any of the components can be outsourced without changing the interface.

This is what interfaces for the enterprise require.