Angered and motivated by my experience preparing a large state university for Y2K, I made my public entrance to the public building systems space in 2002. Y2K was a crisis when it was anticipated that any program that used a two-digit year in the date (as in 99, and it was all of them) would fail after the year 2000 (when the year might be 01). State universities build using low bidders in accord with state construction law, and the University of North Carolina had accumulated a hodge-podge of systems for building operations, steam distribution, chill water distribution, cogeneration, and electricity purchases that barely interoperated. Worse still, the interoperations were fragile, and upgrading any one system would break the connections with any number of other systems. I simply wanted stable inter-system connections that did not break with any minor change to either system.
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Cybersecurity of Power and the Signals of Time
in Basics, Cybersecurity
I was writing about about Power Cybersecurity and the information transmitted over the power signal, when I got distracted by an old family story. The story made that post too long. This post Recalls Power as a Time Signal.
Today, power is usually turned to DC before it is used, and doing so removed its periodicity as a signal. It wasn’t always so. The frequency of power used to be the heartbeat of time.
Spontaneous Order on a Continental Scale
A recent conversation about European power markets and some “glitches” in early June shown a light on profound issues in cybersecurity, in system architectures for big infrastructure, and to an extent the scalability problems with many of the hottest applications for the Internet of Things (IOT).
The specific observations was a plea for direct central control, even as it used an example that showed the shortcoming of infrastructure architecture based on assumptions of central control. It then learned the wrong lesson, that spontaneous order is too “risky” at large scale.
Read MoreIndependence of Services provided by Transactive Energy Nodes
Grid operators cannot know the purpose of each system attached to the grid. On a college campus, very similar sets of components: fans, ducts, temperature sensors, could provide environmental conditioning for a classroom whose windows can be opened, for office space, or for document archive which requires constant temperature and humidity. The most important attribute of animal quarters might be constant high-volume ventilation, while for a biohazard lab it might be maintaining a negative air pressure in the room. Humidity and temperature changes might make a basketball court slippery, and environmental management is focused on making sure that the All-American is not injured before the NCAA tournament.
Direct control for demand response requires that all parties know these issues and agree on their import. A central operator cannot know this.
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