The New Daedalus

Virginia Tech, Emergency Communications, and Academic Sheep

2009-06-28T20:40:56Z

When the Virginia Tech shootings hit the news two years ago, I was sitting in on a meeting of the committee developing standards for communication in emergencies. Interoperability is critical to innovation, and emergency scenarios make the innovation scenarios crystal clear. Unfortunately, emergencies also cause the timid to stampede, and there is no more timid class in America than the academic leadership at our colleges and universities. I began thinking of this entry during the anniversary recognitions on the UNC campus.

Every school in the country rushed to do something, anything in the aftermath. Campus police chiefs were instructed to make a decision now, without waiting to ...

Cybersecurity for smart buildings and the smart grid

2009-06-23T13:51:50Z

Building systems have until now been secured only for interaction between their parts. Schemes such as shared tokens used on open networks serve the purpose of isolating systems from interaction. They do not address the more intriguing security issues of interaction with non-system actors. These non-system actors may be agents from other systems, business process from other companies, or even direct consumer access.

Today’s shared token security schemes are only thinly deployed...

Collaborative Energy—the Smart Grid and the End Node

2009-06-18T01:12:16Z

A significant goal of the smart grid is to encourage rapid innovation in the end nodes, that is in the commercial buildings, homes, and industrial sites that consume most of the electricity produced. Today’s North American power grid is probably the supreme engineering feat of the twentieth century; it has made possible the greatest life style ever lived. Its reliability, though, is insufficient for the digital world. Every system margin has been pushed too thin. The introduction of any significant portion of intermittent source energy, such as wind and solar, will make things much worse.

It is time to engage the end nodes in supporting system reliability. Today’s buildings have higher requirements for reliability and quality than the grid was ever designed for. Site-based generation and site based storage are part of the solution, but they could make the system even less reliable. It is time to begin the move to collaborative energy...

Do we really need "IP Everywhere" in the smart grid?

2009-06-15T11:00:14Z

If you want to start a fight in a crowd of smart grid participants, you can begin one by announcing unambiguously how you feel about IP (Internet Protocol) everywhere. Vendors fight to gain advantage for or to forefend elimination of their product lines. Utilities become passionate to defend their AMI projects and their rate bases. Many of these conversations are premised on (to my mind) flawed thinking. Others need to define what they really want rather than relying on a simple slogan...

Schedules for Things and Markets

2009-06-06T16:32:24Z

Yesterday, I sat in on the final day of the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium's semiannual conference (www.CalConnect.org). CalConnect is a consortium that promotes interoperability between dissimilar calendaring and scheduling systems. I was there to scout out their just unveiled xml serialization of ICalendar. I think we will use it a lot in buildings and on the smart grid.

Intelligent Buildings talk to Smart Energy

2009-06-04T00:51:32Z

Intelligent buildings filled with clever devices and intelligent systems will negotiate with the grid and with their occupants to provide new models for reliable power. The benefits to the grid will come from coordinating supply and demand using economic signals. The benefits to the buildings will be increased value by providing higher levels of amenities to their tenants and inhabitants for lower cost. The benefits to the tenants and occupants will be better services at the same or lower costs and more autonomy as they separate from grid dependency. The benefit to the clever devices will be longer life and more reliable operations from eliminating the power shocks that assail them now.

Smart Cars At Loose on the Smart Grid

2009-05-26T02:10:34Z

I have written before of the challenges of software for electric cars at home (Smart Cars at Home on the Grid). Today I want to expand the domain of those cars into the wider world. The minimal car software will have some way to make electronic purchases as it drives across the town and the country. The better car software will do much more.

The electric car may recharge while on the road. It can also re-sell power when on the road. How it decides...

Smart Cars at Home on the Smart Grid

2009-05-20T02:38:59Z

Too many of the scenarios for electric cars on the smart grid talk only about the relationship between the single car in the home and the grid. These relationships are not the most important ones, and will not determine the successful integration of millions of electric vehicles into the grid. The relationships that matter are those between the cars and their drivers, their family plans, and the other cars in the household. Car software will be even more important than car performance...

Transactive Energy and Little White Lies

2009-05-18T02:05:50Z

As I head off to the second smart grid interim roadmap workshop (whew – that’s a lot of pairs) I think back to one of the participants in the Business and Policy track that I led with Lynne Kiesling. Several members, bunched together in the participants, were from the Edison Electric Institute, the association of share holder owned utilities. They peppered us with detailed questions and countered transactive smart grid scenarios with valid objections. It was on the second day, however, that I recognized the thought behind many of their concerns. They feel that they are asked to subsidize pretend transactions...

New Energy and Legacy Buildings

2009-05-13T09:41:00Z

Building systems used to be fully compatible and interoperable. Prior to digital controls, the best systems were built with pneumatic controllers. Electric signals are complicated. There’s voltage. There’s there is binary packing of data. There’s non-standardized xml vocabularies. Pneumatics were simple. Pressure was everything.

Many institutional owners of buildings resisted the new-fangled digital controls...