Energy

The Last Big Thing

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Developers of the Internet of Things always seems to be moving into the last big thing—at least as far as communications expectations and protocols. Too often security is an afterthought, something that can be bolted on afterward.

I often have to design secure communications for new deployments on a University campus. Many new roll-pits are still using RESTfull JSON. Remote systems often transfer telemetry to the cloud using unencrypted FTP. OpenADR generally uses reverse polling because corporate security won’t let…

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Eight Agents for Energy

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The Energy Mashup Lab (The Lab) is developing open source software for agents that will enable systems that use, produce, or store energy to self-assemble into microgrids. These microgrids can be standalone or grid-attached. If grid-attached, they present a single market or OpenADR interface to the grid, and that interface reveals only the net market position of the microgrid.

The microgrid is operated by a micromarket, trading in availability over time. The Lab uses ...

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Math and Power and the System with No Name

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Every once in a while you run into something that just does not fit into any categories. The world welcomes a better mousetrap, but won’t even consider a mouse dispatcher that sends the mice outside to mow the lawn. We all want things that fit the categories we know. It is hard for a new category to make our purchasing lists.

For the last year, I have been talking to a company that manages energy based on math. The founder created new math to understand how dolphins process...

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