Columns

• The Path to Smart Energy   Smart energy looks to each home, business, and industrial site to take responsibility for the management of its own energy in the face of an ever-changing supply. 
• Developing Shared Agendas for Enterprises, Buildings, and Other Things  Increasingly, the internet of things will integrate with the internet of people.
  
• Planning for Abundance  So what if things did change? What if distribution and electricity were not the be-all of commercial and domestic energy?
  
• Standards Update Abstraction and Schedule Communication
  
• Bringing Schedules into Building Design and Operation  Facilities that understand their energy use will be able to control economic risk through committing advance purchases of energy on a schedule.
• Efficiency, Resilience, and Smart Energy  Because the building owners are inherently diverse, and building systems naturally autonomous, building based smart energy gains resilience as a larger system of systems.
• Gentlemen, Start Your Smart Engines   Smart energy transfers responsibility for energy volatility to the end nodes, along with economic incentives to adjust to that variability.
• Productive Load Banking - as important as Efficiency and Demand Response?
• Energy that Thinks Like the Web  The internet of things and of energy could learn to think like the web. 
  
• The Building Services Interface  The foundation of smart building security and interactions.
  
• Load Shaping for Net Zero Buildings  Load shaping prioritizes energy use by prioritizing systems, matching demand to supply within the microgrid. 
• Smart Buildings share schedules with Business and Smart Grids  Using WS-Calendar for scheduling things 
• Smart Buildings & Smart Energy: the Integration Challenge 
• Doing things at the right time We created WS-Calendar to create, share, invoke, adjust, and track coordinated response between domains and organizations.
• The Integration Barrier to Smart Energy  These specifications will move the markets in energy management systems into improved interfaces, for users, for enterprises, and for energy marketers.
• Microgrids and Smart Energy Microgrids, whether virtual or real, are an important organizing concept of smart energy.
• Buildings must get smarter because Smart Grids will be worse  The grid’s reduced safety margins make even moderate adoption of intermittent energy sources risky. By every measure, the quality of the North American grid will get worse. That’s the plan.
• Idle Thoughts on Smart Grids  Musings from the GridWise Architectural Council, Orlando, 2010 
• Smart Grids and Distributed Energy create opportunities for Diversity in Energy Storage There is no reason at all to limit our concepts of grid energy storage and buffers to electricity and batteries—and many opportunities open up if we do not.
• Privacy, the Essential Service for Smart Buildings  Privacy issues and privacy concerns became front and center at the Grid-Interop and the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP). 
• Managed Energy, Collaborative Energy, and Autonomous Load  There are two fundamentally different approaches to Energy Interoperation: managed energy and collaborative energy. 
• Smart Buildings and Market Information Enable Collaborative Energy  Collaboration requires able partners; smart grids require smart buildings able to make intelligent decisions about energy use.
• Distributed Energy Resources and Storage  With the big smart grid standards roadmap conference coming up in Washington on the third and fourth, I am going to stick with writing about what this means for buildings.
• Intelligent Buildings talk to the Smart Grid  Last month, the National Institute for standards and Technology (NIST) unveiled the Interim Smart Grid Interoperability Roadmap. (http://www.nist.gov/smartgrid/) The roadmap defines the smart grid and how it interacts with is smart end nodes.
• Conversation between Intelligent Buildings and Smart Energy  As I write this, the Interim Roadmap for the Smart Grid has not been published. What follows is my view of how this area will develop.
• SGIX – Smart Grid Information Exchange  Some feel that direct control of tomorrow’s smart buildings must be in the hands of the utilities. I feel that that building owners must be in control.  
• Cyber-security, Smart Buildings, and the Smart Grid  We went to a distributed approach for Enterprise Building Management System EBMS, something that looks nothing like the approaches of traditional building systems and of SCADA.  
• Energy Interoperability Standards: Smart Buildings, Smart Grid
• Energy, Innovation, and E-Tech  Current assumptions of a paternalistic utility providing all control will not be sustained. New models of loose integration and symmetric interactions are required. 
• Working with the Wind in Chicago  Next week, there will be a lot of wind surrounding the AHR Expo, the largest conference anywhere dedicated to the efficient movement of air, and thereby the biggest energy-related conference of the year.  
• Standards and Opportunities when Smart Buildings meet the Smart Grid The goal of the new standards efforts is to support new markets that we do not today know or understand.
• The Lie in Demand—Response  We encourage only the crudest, least effective energy savings, while denying the market the energy signals that would cause better. 
• Buildings, Emergency Response, Energy, and Situation Awareness  The NG911 system, or Next Generation 911 upports better interaction.  Even buildings, and building systems, might act as 911 operators.
• Privacy, Price and the Cost of Control As we seek to extend Demand / Response to more systems in the house, we run into what we might call Knowledge Problems, problems of diversity and understanding.
• It’s all too cheap  If we are not going to manage our devices, our systems, and our energy, who will?
• Clouds and Rain  Cloud Computing is a name for putting computing services, whether traditional, such as CRM applications, or modern, such as SaaS, on computers up in the wider network.
• Newton's Fall  Efforts to solve traditional building-grid interactions as command and control interactions will fail if they leave out the human and social factors.
• Stop throwing it away – Energy Recycling  Once you start thinking about waste heat as a resource, it will lead a long way from where you started. 
• Service Performance, Compliance, and Business Responsiveness  Just as in the rest of business computing, open source is coming to building control systems. Open interfaces such as oBIX make open source programming effective.  
• Rent Seeking is Crippling Building System Markets  Rent seeking is defined as when an individual, organization, or firm seeks to make money by manipulating control of the economic environment rather than by making a profit through trade and production of value.  
• SOB - the Service Oriented Building  My passion is web services interfaces to the engineered world to let embedded systems be full participants in the enterprise.
  

• The Price of Energy  You cannot understand price unless you understand the product you are buying. 
• Transacted Energy End Games  It starts today, with demand response, and continues with transacted energy.
• Blue, Buildings, and Energy The shift from green to blue has started.
• SmartGrid Domain Experts Workgroup NIST Notes on August 5, 2008 Meeting
• oBIX is alive and kicking…  The people who know oBIX best have been going out and doing things with oBIX. Many of these projects are large.

• The Building System Interface  Space is what the building systems support, space is what the tenants recognize, space is where building systems deliver service. To interact with those services, we need building services interfaces (BSI).
  

Professional Information

Chairman oBIX (Open Building Information Xchange)

Toby Considine has been working with enterprise applications and the integration of embedded control systems for 20 years. As a Systems Specialist in Facilities Services at the University of North Carolina, Mr. Considine has real world experience with the poor security, poor interoperability, and brittle integrations of last-generation protocols. Toby used this experience to drive his work with oBIX, and with issues of integrating buildings with larger systems and each other using enterprise-grade protocols. This experience is very pertinent to the issues faced by the GridWise Architectural Council.

Before coming to the University, Mr. Considine worked to integrate other silo processes into the enterprise for companies including multinational architecture, engineering, computer, and consumer goods companies. Toby’s dirty secret is his participation in a large free ad-supported public access computer network a decade before the DotCom boom (and bust). He began tinkering with computers using an acoustic coupler and wrote device drivers for some of the first microcomputers sold.

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