Smart energy names the techniques and technologies needed to manage energy flows and energy supply and demand when energy generation and energy storage are as distributed as energy consumption is today. During the early years of distributed energy, distributed energy resources were so small as to be losable in the noise of the grid. Installations were treated by utilities as if they were just another utility installation. This design approach has become the single largest barrier to distributed energy. So when are we going to get smart about distributed energy?...
Read MoreSmart TVs, OBIX, and your next Commercial Building
As regular readers know, I have been caught up in the production of OBIX 1.1 for most of last year. OBIX has world-wide use in niche locations. It has open source platforms. They do not interoperate as well as they might. To improve interoperation, and ti improve telemetry, we started work on 1.1. Then the Smart TV Alliance upped our game.
But first, a little about how 1.1 is shaping up. We broke oBIX up into smaller pieces, to make it simpler for a programmer to tell what rules they are using. With smaller pieces we can more easily say “An Application conforms only if…” This makes interoperation of different platforms much more likely.
By last May...
Smart Energy with a little bit of Seoul.
My visit to Seoul this month was fascinating. The country of Korea built its infrastructure essentially from scratch in the last 50 years, and in doing so was able to use modern technology to challenge some fundamental assumptions that we make in the USA. IP-based telephony predominates based on pervasive free Wi-Fi. Custom tailors use radical outsourcing mediated by IT to provide near-instant services. The National Virtual Power Plant (NVPP) is as up-to-date as any, while using big-data tools in ways not often seen here. There is a desire to embrace the new without fear that seems young and fresh in the way the US often does not. But somehow, the single observation that stays with me is how the use of IT to challenges our assumptions about natural monopolies....
Read MoreFinding a Needle in the Internet of Things (part 2)—Buildings and Building Systems
In a previous post, I described how vCards are used throughout standards-based scheduling and calendaring systems. Many different vCard standards coexist in today’s organizations. I also described how directory services, especially LDAP (the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), are the well-established means to enable wide secure access to the information in vCards. In this post I discuss current efforts that will expand these existing standards to support buildings and their systems.
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