DER systems in the house and small business

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The purpose of an energy management system (EMS) or building management system (BMS) in a home or commercial is to serve the owner or occupants of the home or building. Only secondarily is its purpose to “serve the grid”—and then only to the extent that it is rewarded for doing so in a way that supports its owners or occupants.

Every system in a house or building is a legacy system from the moment it is installed (manufactured, actually). No matter what standard we may posit for future use in home systems and home integration, most systems managed by the EMS or BMS will be...

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Cryptocurrencies and Cybersecurity and Clouds

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This post is part of the continuing Paths to Transactive Energy series. You can find them all listed by clicking on the matching metatag at the bottom of each post.

Many of the hottest startups in the Internet Of Things (IOT) are cloud based. This is driven by: are cloud based. Motivations driving this include:

  • Using powerful shared computing to reduce the cost of simple things in the house.
  • Pushing inter-Thing compatibility into the clouds
  • Providing a locus for high end user interfaces, on phone and tablet, over the web.

Of course a more powerful incentive is:

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Money and Markets: digital currency, security, and resilience

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When we start a conversation about Transactive Energy, most thoughts go immediately to government-backed currency, such as Dollars or Euros. The second thought may be digital currencies for which there are wide exchanges that can be immediately converted to a government backed currency. I name transactions made using these currencies as bankable transactions, because the proceeds of a sale can be deposited directly into a bank. Large transactive energy markets, such as those for the bulk power market operated in North America by the ISOs and RTOs, have to use bankable transactions.

At the other end of the scale, in a transactive market operating a home microgrid, perhaps entirely off the grid...

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