Virginia Tech, Emergency Communications, and Academic Sheep

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When the Virginia Tech shootings hit the news two years ago, I was sitting in on a meeting of the committee developing standards for communication in emergencies. Interoperability is critical to innovation, and emergency scenarios make the innovation scenarios crystal clear. Unfortunately, emergencies also cause the timid to stampede, and there is no more timid class in America than the academic leadership at our colleges and universities. I began thinking of this entry during the anniversary recognitions on the UNC campus.

Every school in the country rushed to do something, anything in the aftermath. Campus police chiefs were instructed to make a decision now, without waiting to ...

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Cybersecurity for smart buildings and the smart grid

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Building systems have until now been secured only for interaction between their parts. Schemes such as shared tokens used on open networks serve the purpose of isolating systems from interaction. They do not address the more intriguing security issues of interaction with non-system actors. These non-system actors may be agents from other systems, business process from other companies, or even direct consumer access.

Today’s shared token security schemes are only thinly deployed...

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Collaborative Energy—the Smart Grid and the End Node

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A significant goal of the smart grid is to encourage rapid innovation in the end nodes, that is in the commercial buildings, homes, and industrial sites that consume most of the electricity produced. Today’s North American power grid is probably the supreme engineering feat of the twentieth century; it has made possible the greatest life style ever lived. Its reliability, though, is insufficient for the digital world. Every system margin has been pushed too thin. The introduction of any significant portion of intermittent source energy, such as wind and solar, will make things much worse.

It is time to engage the end nodes in supporting system reliability. Today’s buildings have higher requirements for reliability and quality than the grid was ever designed for. Site-based generation and site based storage are part of the solution, but they could make the system even less reliable. It is time to begin the move to collaborative energy...

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Do we really need "IP Everywhere" in the smart grid?

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If you want to start a fight in a crowd of smart grid participants, you can begin one by announcing unambiguously how you feel about IP (Internet Protocol) everywhere. Vendors fight to gain advantage for or to forefend elimination of their product lines. Utilities become passionate to defend their AMI projects and their rate bases. Many of these conversations are premised on (to my mind) flawed thinking. Others need to define what they really want rather than relying on a simple slogan...
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