Heading to New York

It's been a sparse week, but I am working on some talks, and doing a lot of work at my day job on BIM as a service model. There is something quite powerfull in this realm that I have not been able to define yet - not even enough to write about.

BIM as a service framework. BIM in the clouds. Transactional BIM running through service markets. Open Geospatial COnsortium (OGC) tagged Demand/Response in localize energy day trading.

It is snowing here in Carolina, but I will be up early to put my daughter on a plane to NYC. North Carolina does not handle ice well. I am expecting a complete mess on the way to the airport tomorrow morning.

A few hours later, I get on the plane to the city myself, to speak at AHR in the Javits center. As the biggest trde show for AirConditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration, there is alwauys a cluster of meetings and events nearby.

January 21, 2008 B2G (Building two Grid) summit - "New Business Models in Service Oriented Energy Management"

January 22, 2008 Global Warming and GridWise 10:30 at the Javits Convention Center

January 23, 2008 Preparing Buildings for a Sustainable World 1:30 PM Javits Convention Center

In between, I will try to squeeze in some time at the Commercial Building Initiative (CBI) to see the latest efforts to meet the 2030 challenge of zero net energy buildings. 

Come by and see me if you're in town.

More on Energy Shorts and Control

Lynne Kiesling has written an excellent summary of the economic and social issues in California's odd statist proposal for central control of thermostats over at Knowledge Problem. As always, her disection of bad economics is better than mine.

I wrote about the proposal, and how it would undermine the development new markets, including small scale energy arbitrage in my musing on Energy Shorts.

Read what Lynne writes in Big Brother or Control Freaks.

Drop your Energy Shorts in California

The California Energy Commission, using technology to steal a march to the past, has proposed that all new buildings have thermostats under mandatory control by the power companies. It is hinted that there will be some exceptions, perhaps for health reasons. Look for the exemptions to be applied as a new source of patronage, with the occasional widow and orphanage puff piece in the press to cover up a highly politicized allocation process. In the 1930’s, central societal control of models were all the rage among the cognoscenti, and the only models that technology could support. Today, such ill considered efforts that the liberating power of modern technologies make me ashamed of my native state.

As bad as it is to train the populace to surrender autonomy to their technocrat overlords, it is worse that such regulations will hamper the development of new solutions that could save much more energy. Zero net energy buildings (the 2030 challenge) require active participation and involvement . New markets in energy will drive new savings and efficiencies. California is about to misuse technology to shed load badly, just as they misused regulation to create bad energy markets (Enron).

Buildings and Businesses will participate in active energy management when the transactions look like business, not like control. Markets preserve human autonomy while providing incentives to develop new solutions. Technology, when properly applied, enables energy use to be driven by markets.

Last spring, I wrote about Peter Kelly-Detwiler’s Option Calls on Customers as an improved way to sell demand response to owners and tenants. This approach is far superior to control operations for 3 reasons. (1) It makes energy management into a benefit rather than a burden, moving it out from the Maintenance Back Yard (behind the Back Room), and into the C-level suite. (2) It focuses energy control on the times of scarcity, rather than all the time, when its affect will be greatest. (3) It leaves the customer with the greatest range of behaviors to respond to a shortage.

Business options will always be larger than mere control options. Assume that I get a day ahead forecast. Tomorrow will be a scorcher and electricity will be scarce. Under a control model, all I can do is move up the thermostat. Under the business model, if the price is right, I can cancel all meetings and declare a telecommuting day and shut off the building.

One potential problem with the Options model is that the failure to execute an option, the lack of follow through on an accepted deal, can push a system into a crisis of or cause the utility to incur great expense to buy on the spot market. Real business markets will require real penalties for non-execution. Which leads me to my thought for the day; what to do if I short my energy needs for tomorrow?

Without execution penalties, not much. Without execution penalties, the utility company will have to somehow swallow the problem, perhaps by turning down all thermostats. With penalties, financial penalties, the problem becomes that of the owner who made the commitment.

Perhaps I can meet 85 percent of my commitment at an agreed upon price. I might be willing to buy, on the spot market, the remaining 15% at an double that price to preserve the overall deal. This price, far higher than the utility is offering, might make market participation attractive for the smaller business across the street. At that price, that company might have its own strategies that it is willing to use.

Energy Arbitrage is just one of the markets that might develop when we have an intelligent grid negotiating with intelligent agents in each building. It is also another market that won’t develop in California…

Sun and Clouds

Earlier this week, I suggested that one outcome of the Software as a Service (SaaS) approach will be that complex operations such as BIM servers would migrate into cloud computing, where there data can be shared and updated by Designers, Architects, Engineers, and used by Owner/Operators.

This week, Sun (the computer company that long used the motto “the network is the computer”) announced that by 2015 Sun will have *no* data centers. All internal IT for this technology company will be acquired under the SaaS model. "We will need to get to a point in which we mandate detailed SLAs and manage/monitor those SLAs," Cinque writes. "As long as a SaaS provider can adhere to our detailed SLAs, then it shouldn't matter where the applications sit. The challenge is getting those detailed SLAs written out, (and) having the SaaS industry evolve where they can accept client-driven SLA's." By 2013, 5 years from now, Sun expects to eliminate half of their square footage in data centers

So what does this say about buildings and energy?

First, it both intensifies the reasons behind The Green Grid (see my earlier comments here) while reducing the number of people interested. While CABA may call Networking the 4^th utility, data processing may instead become the 4^th utility. The differences in cost, and the intensity of the operations load may make data centers an unjustifiable expense.

Rapidly rising energy costs may be the catalyst; virtualization and the associated capability of outsourced customization to produce tailor-fit solutions are the enabler. The increasing demands of security and enhanced benefits of service specialization will be long term drivers. Those data centers that remain will demand highly efficient interactive means to manage transforming energy to raw business process.

Next, it invalidates the traditional building system model of on-site monitoring. Traditional building systems bring too much data and too little information to too few people. Cloud computing will decrease the barriers to fewer people with greater expertise monitoring more building systems. Communications models for embedded building systems that do not match the new reality will suffer competitive disadvantage.

Low level protocols will remain much as they are; gateways that abstract underlying system up to actionable alarms and descriptive information. These gateways will use enterprise-style protocols that perform well over the internet.

Such gateways are exactly what we need to enable new business service. Remote analytics. Knowledge based maintenance management. Live energy modeling. Third party interactive demand/response. Each of these services, and others we do not yet know, will also become services, and move into the clouds.

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2008/Jan/10/suns_goal_no_in-house_data_centers_by_2015.html