Columns

• 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.

Articles

• 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.

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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