Toby Considine Contributing Editor

About Toby Considine
Scheduling, building systems, electric vehicles, and the smart grid–coordinating time, space, and energy–are the basis for the third industrial revolution. Toby Considine works with numerous groups to define and explore how the internet of things will meet the internet of people and e-commerce.

Through his company TC9, Inc., Toby Considine advises building owners and engineering companies on business strategies for enterprise-responsive buildings. He participates in several industry-led international groups defining the interactions between the enterprise, capital assets, building systems, and the power grid. His work is based upon decades of experience in IT infrastructure as well as in maintenance management and building operations. In 2009, Mr. Considine was a sub-contractor on national projects to define the NIST Smart Grid roadmap and to oversee its development.

TC9 also works with early-stage ventures in smart energy and smart systems, particularly those that will operate at the borders of e-commerce, energy, the internet of people, and the internet of things.

Mr. Considine is also a leader in several national standards efforts in buildings and energy, including oBIX, EMIX, and Energy Interoperation. You can find out more about working with TC9 at www.tcnine.com  You can read Toby’s blog at www.NewDaedalus.com

Columns

• Energy On The Edge -The Energy Mashup Lab is unveiling its first full release
• Cybersecurity in Building Automation, Power Systems, and Energy Management for a New Decade
• Next Generation OT Cybersecurity Profiles for Buildings and Microgrids
• Gaining a Backbone, Bolting on Security  This month, I describe how I put systems that are insecure-by-design on the corporate backbone and then enabling remote access.
• New Cybersecurity Standards for the Internet of Things  OpenC2 is a communication standard for coordinating responses to cybersecurity attacks without regard to the technology of the device that is responding.
• Tighten Up on Cybersecurity  Formal cybersecurity defense rests on the evaluation tripod: Capabilities, Threats, and Mission.
• Cybersecurity for Modern Building Services   Even cybersecurity is becoming more secure and scalable by becoming service oriented.
• Lifetime Learning for Smart Things Everywhere Thousands of AI systems in each building will require tools to manage the rapid evolution algorithms.
• Choosing a Light or a Black Mirror When we consider how buildings can manipulate our emotions, we also are considering how our emotions can manipulate buildings
• Irresistible Data Forces and Unmovable Buildings  Agents for the human and for the building will need to negotiate to come up with the best outcomes.
• Securing the Edges of the IOT In cyberspace, you no longer know who your friends and enemies are.
• Ending Oversharing in the IoT  DKDC: businesses Don’t and will not Know the details because they Don’t and cannot be made to Care.
• ESIF and Security at the Edge of Smart Grids  ESIF names the Energy Systems Integration Facility. The workshop demonstrated both what should be done to secure future energy systems, and how difficult, labor-intensive, and non-scalable this is using standard practice.
• Cryptocurrency is more than just Blockchain and Bitcoin The time to for smart buildings developers to begin working with CC is now.
• From the Clouds to the Fog  New options in computing and small-scale intelligence introduce patchy fog and mist (or just fog) into the technical conversation.
• Principals of Transactive Energy Building toward Transactive Microgrids Everywhere
• Higher Service Autonomy and the New IoT  What would you do with a building service that can tell your system that the building occupants are angry, or happy, or frustrated?
• Looking Ahead, Looking Behind   Recently, Ken Sinclair suggested I reach back to some earlier columns that are newly relevant for the Internet of Things (IoT). The buzz around IoT is now white hot. This has attracted a host of fresh thinkers.
• Eight Agents for Energy  The descriptions below refer to electric power for clarity and brevity. The agent behaviors apply to any resource micromarket.
• Just-In-Time power and water at the edge.  Since water must be pumped, and pumped water can generate electricity, markets in transactive power and transactive water can work together.
• The New Utility and the Farm to Plug Movement  Distributed energy is local, so distributed energy markets (and prices) must be local.
• Overcoming Market Challenges to Microgrids  The faster a broader market for micro-trading arrives, the more the capital markets will invest in microgrids.
• Built to Mash  Economic mashups enable allocation, balancing, and smoothing of resource use within a micromarket.
• Is this the year of the Microgrid?  A microgrid is a system of systems that manages its energy generation, distribution, and use internally.
• Smart Building Integrators Should Celebrate the End of Net Metering  The engineering is now unconstrained by artificial limits of technology choices driven by the need of grid operators to limit technology options.
• Resource Frameworks to Integrate the IoT  As the Internet of Things becomes the Internet of Doing Things, Apps will need to work within the boundaries of locally available resources.
• Resource Frameworks and the 3rd Wave of the Internet of Things The third wave will be built on Apps of Things, and ontologies based on composite semantics of sensors.
• Have you updated your IoT Plans?  On June 29, millions of users installed a securable open source IoT Platform.
• Time for Buildings to Participate as Distributed System Platforms  At last, as a matter of regulation and law, every commercial building, industrial site, or home can see new opportunity by acting as a microgrid.
• A Rosy View of Smart Buildings Smart buildings are often moving the wrong way, with more central “cloud-based” decision making, and less autonomy.
• Distributed Energy, Distributed Control, and Defense in Depth  As the internet of things and the internet of energy use converge, we must apply defense in depth.
• Autonomous Systems and Cloud Diagnostics  We need standard ways to name things and their relationships to spaces in buildings.
• It Starts with a Zombie Fortress  – Plans for a Zombie Fortress cannot assume that the grid will work, or that the neighbors will be a useful source of supply or resilience.
• Autonomy as a Transformer of the Building  The playing field has been tipped toward autonomous systems optimizing energy based on transactive principals—and that can only be good.
• Getting Things to Work Together  Direct server-to-server communications of schedules without the usual email were demonstrated, along with specific hooks for authorized interactions between web sites and personal calendars, and between trusted business partners.
• 15 Years and Odds and Ends  All I have is a scattershot article for a scattershot industry.
• Getting Over the Internet of Things  It’s time to get over the Internet of Things (IoT).
• What can you ask an OBIX Server?  While you can ask if a point is a thermostat, you can’t ask an OBIX server to return a list of all thermostats.
• OBIX, Smart TVs, and the Commercial Building  OBIX is a generic web service interface for control systems.
• Moving beyond Demand Response: Energy Interoperation
• Need a Map to those Bridges? If systems can understand what they discover, they can integrate themselves.
• When Things Negotiate Schedules  It won’t be long until aggregations of systems become self-organizing, able to balance their needs for scarce resources and their requirements to provide services.
• The Taxonomies of oBIX  Every taxonomy is the outward manifestation of an information model.
• A Path to Multi-Agent Operation of Buildings  Binding oBIX through BIM creates a simple path to multi-agent transactive operation of buildings.
• Work Plan for oBIX 2.0  oBIX started nearly a decade ago as an effort to define a standard means of communication with any building system using XML.
• Unfinished Business for oBIX  40 North American companies offer products that provide oBIX access.
• Energy Surety for Buildings  Buildings should be designed as microgrids in their own right, managing their own energy supply and quality.
• Tactical Building Communications and Slim BIM  This month, we get our first chance to look at COBie Lite, a profile of COBie built for today’s applications using today’s tools.
• When Worse is Better  For the internet of things, it is essential to keep your systems’ interfaces, small enough that they can be truly understood.
• Smart Energy Basics: How can everything be a Microgrid?
• Slim BIM  Getting Elephants to Dance – Toby Considine, TC9 Inc
• Using COBIE as an integration interface  COBIE-based integration fits building operations and building systems into the core business of the building owner and occupant.
• Big Data, Buildings, and the Internet of Things  Big Data from Building systems must learn to share well with others.
• BIMCards, COBIE, and touch-less Integration  The problem with traditional approaches is that they are too hard and take too much skilled time.
• 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.

Articles

• 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.

Interviews

• Semantic Spaces: Where Everything is in a Name  Last month, Toby Considine closed his column with an invitation to meet him in Northern California in mid-September, where he was speaking at the TechIntersection conference.  I seized that opportunity to interview Toby on the topic of “the semantic web.” – Therese Sullivan
• 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).