Smart Grid Blood on the Floor in DC (1 of 3)

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Thirty ornery smart grid partisans gathered outside DC last week for a hastily convened review of the customer oriented standards development plans. To one side, the plans developed at the August Standards Development Organization (SDO) was putting critical ongoing deployments of billions of dollars infrastructure upgrades at risk, and throwing long term plans into disarray (Team A). The other side saw keeping the August plans intact necessary to enable new investment and new participation in distributed energy, and to break the iron grip of dinosaur twentieth century processes and organizations that impede new energy (Team B). There was little common ground.

The first morning passed with quiet platitudes, until Dr. David Wolman, technical lead for NIST on its smart grid project, called for "blood on the floor" during the afternoon session...

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How should green builders prepare for smart grids?

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Brian Duggan from West Coast Green asked me at GridWeek what green builders and sustainable construction companies should do to prepare themselves for the smart grid. What new construction methods should they use? What new smart-grid aware control systems would they need to install. My answer—nothing.

My answer was that before a building can collaborate with a smart grid, it must know what it has and know what it can do....

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Energy Collisions and Autonomous Appliances

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Appliance manufacturers are moving beyond energy pain points to energy collisions. Utility-based energy standards are stuck on energy pain. Energy collisions can offer much more benefits to smart grids than can pain points; they can offer still more to the off-grid or near grid building. Collisions are part of a wide variety of autonomous energy behaviors we will see in the near future—if only the energy suppliers will stop blocking them...

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Scheduling our Things, Scheduling our Lives

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The best restaurants are seasonal, and know where ingredients come from. Locavory is dedicated to the proposition that the best food is not only seasonal, but local, served at its absolute freshest. Energy, too has its seasons, and they can be tied to the way we live our lives, and they can bind our things to our pursuits. One of the most intriguing agreements in the standards development organization (SDO) smart grid conference last month, may change how we coordinate our lives and our things.
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