The Sound of Breaking Glass

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I love the sound of breaking glass
Deep into the night
I Iove the work on it can do
Oh a change of mind
Oh change of mind, sound of breaking glass
All around, sound of breaking glass

Nothing new, sound of breaking glass

Nick Lowe

Security in the built world is most critical at precisely those times when the demands for performance and interaction are greatest. Buildings may lose their communications with the outside world when partially destroyed. The power grid may require ad hoc reconfiguration when its communication lines are down.

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An Evolutionary Composite Services Framework for Energy

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Future energy systems must not only support interoperability on operational, e-commerce, and security levels, but they must do so against a background of innovation. New technologies will arrive from innovators who are not traditional energy participants; it must be easy for these innovators to introduce their products and easy to integrate these products into the intelligent grid.

New business models, especially support for distributed generation and the hybrid technologies such as the zero net energy building, will demand new interfaces. These business models require...

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Distributed Generation and Lightweight Integration

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Distributed generation is a big part of the anticipated new grid. Distributed generation refers to having many small sources of power on the grid. A traditional power company can own distributed generation or someone else, perhaps the building owner, can own it.

Wayne Longcore has described distributed generation today as akin to the early days of personal computing. The big centrally managed power plants have the role of the mainframe, the site where all real power generation occurs. Pocket generation plants, including solar generation on household roofs, are akin to the poorly networked early microcomputers, only able to get on-line with great difficulty, and unable to...

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The Song of Atlanta

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I wake up unusually early, and unusually alert. All senses are wary, and I am waiting for something, for anything to happen. The city is all around me, humming its early morning song.

I am staying uptown in Atlanta, at my friend Paul’s flat in Buckhead, in the city to speak speaking of standards, and surfaces, and transacted energy. It is not really any noisier than home. There is no river roaring in the background. There is no early morning siren of an ambulance coming north from Scotland County to the teaching hospital in town. It is really much quieter than Bynum in summer when the cicadas and katydids are fiddling their mating tunes into the hot humid night.

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