Utilities and Regulatory commissions are obsessed with demand response (DR). All want to know how to get more of it. I could, with little effort, attend a national conference on DR every week. A large share of the standards priorities of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to support smart grids support DR. And yet, almost everyone recognizes that DR is a short-term solution. Plans are just now underway to move beyond DR.
Read MorePrivacy Mosaic: Tiling over the Fourth Amendment Piece by Piece
Regular readers know that I am concerned that the accumulation of many small legal actions can create a violation of privacy that exceeds the sum of the observations. This week, the DC Circuit Court ruled that prolonged recurring legal acts can become an illegal search, or one that requires a specific warrant. If it stands on appeal, this theory may be one of the most important decisions to protect individuals and restrain the modern state ever.
The ruling defines a new "mosaic" theory of the Fourth Amendment...
Underpinnings for standardizing Demand Response (DR)
For decades, regulated electricity markets have struggled to deal with volatile energy markets providing to support un-caring customers. Customer’s real-time purchases, called load by the electricity industry, vary throughout the day, and more to the point, co-vary with external events. These issues are not limited to electricity. The “Super-Bowl flush”, which has reached the status of urban legend, names the stresses placed on urban waste water systems as external events synchronize demand.
Read MoreSmart Buildings & Smart Energy: the Integration Challenge
Last week, twenty of us gathered in DC for a two-day charrette on the standards needed to apply BIM to the problems of dynamic energy management. The work-shop, entitled “Smart Buildings, Smart Energy”, was put on by the Corps of Engineers Research Lab (CERL) at the National Insitute for Building Science (NIBS). The meeting was a fascinating, and occasionally heated conversation that brought together academic and government researchers, building system practitioners from industry leading companies, and participants in standards committees from ASHRAE to OASIS. It was a fascinating meeting, filled with bright, deeply focused individuals who as a group had not yet recognized the profound changes in their goals required by smart energy...