Demand and Emergency Responses

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New models for DR anticipate that buildings become full intelligent partners in energy negotiations. DR rewards for each event offer too few dollars to engage the building full time attention of the occupants. DR events today (prior to significant renewable energy generation) occur too rarely to require full attention. Future DR will shun control interactions and therefore require intelligent buildings that are able to respond on behalf of their occupants.

Six cities have already rolled out Next Generation 911 (NG911) as early adopters prior to the 2010 larger scale roll-out. NG911 was designed so that security companies and even buildings can submit calls without waiting for an operator to verify information. Of course, this means that the intelligent building must...

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Nuclear Zombies and the Smart Grid

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Today I’m thinking about the unconventional security problems of the smart grid. This means that I am considering the special issues of widely dispersed intelligent devices. I am also becoming the 1,142nd blogger to write about the newly recognized zombie menace in Texas.

Widely distributed assets cannot be entirely protected against direct physical access. If responsibility for the distributed assets is distributed as well, as they would be in Distributed Generation (DG) and Net Zero Energy (NZE) scenarios, then it is foolish to act as if...

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Energy, Innovation, and E-Tech

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The culture of information technology is one of innovation and rapid change. The culture of energy is risk-adverse and slow to change. We need to move from energy to E-Tech to address today’s problems of climate, of security, and of reliability. E-Tech will embrace diversity to customize each solution for each situation. E-Tech will support rapid quick adoption of new technologies. E-tech must not be constrained by the slow adoption of the regulated utilities. E-Tech must be more tolerant of poor power quality. E-Tech must provide better support of digital systems for business and entertainment than do today’s systems.

Today’s energy distribution systems are deeply integrated and intolerant...

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Smart Buildings, Smart Energy, and the Road Ahead

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I arrived in Chicago for the AHR show with the early Sunday morning budget flight crowd. I was not surprised that most of the van worked with HVAC. I was gratified to be recognized by Terry Reynolds of Control Technology. Terry told me that he was using oBIX in his jobs. "We are just starting to crack things open" he observed. We compared notes on projects ranging from the UNC EBMS (Enterprise Building Management System) to the New York City public school energy management system.

He went on to ask me of what is going to drive adoption faster. I think there are five elements of smart energy that are now...

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