Weekend Reading on Smart Homes
The Sunday New York Times has some nice introductory material on smart homes. They skate quickly by prices to devices and the smart grid. They write about putting the homeowner in control. They even show several home panels.
With only one screenshot, I cannot comment on the systems described. One looks more like a home theater console with a dishwasher added. Another allows scheduling of building systems, but gives no sign of interaction with and feedback from the power grid. Admitting that it might be based upon selection bias, the Echelon screen is the most interesting to me.
The Echelon product, shown above, is the only one that clearly indicates the economic aspect of each device. What it does not show is the effect of variable pricing on costs. What we need is Echelon (or someone else) sharing information like that in a standard format that consumer programmers can interact with. By consumer programmers, I mean that I want to see consumer oriented interfaces developed for the PC, for the Mac, for the iPhone, and for the Android.
Schedules, electrical use, and services are the important abstractions. Abstractions are the basis for standards, and interoperability. More importantly, abstract standards with prices are then at the level of business interactions. Such a standard is ready for third party management. Such a standard is ready for driving maintenance by value.
Check out the article, in the references below…
We have the PAN where’s the PAG?
One of the edgier concepts in computing has been the Personal Area Network, the network that surrounds a person. Seemingly way out there, the PAN is already surprisingly pervasive. What we need is the Personal Area micro Grid to go with it.
I first saw a PAN in an IBM proof of concept in the mid 1980’s, in which a small computer hidden in the heel of a shoe used body conductivity and perhaps sweat, for all I remember, to transmit information, Wearers of the shoe were able to exchange contact information by means of a simple hand-shake. This demonstration was half creepy, and have Maxwell Smart.
Today’s PANs are less exotic. Point to point networking between Bluetooth headsets and personal devices, whether they be phones, PDAs, or music players, make up the bulk of systems. The occasional user has even figured out how to share contacts phone-to-phone, or PDA to PDA.
Niche applications are creeping in to expand the PAN. When my son Josh worked in the Cleveland Clinics spine center, he described wired interfaces enabling people limited remote control of their own paralyzed bodies. With paternal sensibilities raised, I noticed engineering grads building open source responsive homes for the handicapped, using Bluetooth receivers cannibalized from old headsets.
Many people carry a surprising number of electronic devices with them every day. Charging them up requires a rats nest of different chargers. These chargers are as cheap as they can be made, and often draw nearly as much whether the device is plugged in or not. Keeping these devices charged throughout the day would keep them unplugged at night, as well as keeping them ready to use.
Meanwhile, personal power generations has slowly been creeping into society. My daughter spent the money from one of her summer jobs for a solar backpack when she was in high school, demonstrating her cred as a math and computer aficionado. Scott eVest markets a solar jacket to go along with the wiring harnesses in their TEC PAN.
But solar is not enough.
Recent reports talk of systems to generate power from kinetic energy. Science reports normal body movement. One system is reported to generate 13 Watts while reducing the effort of walking. Looking like a garden variety knew brace, the system harvests energy while reducing effort. At the end of a stride, a person must exert energy to slow his moving leg. The brace's generator helps slow the leg for the wearer, capturing energy in much the same way that a hybrid car harvests power from braking.
Others are working on bra-based generators. One lab is capturing swing and oscillation in a complex fabric-based generator. Another effort is focusing on piston-like energy capture from the brassiere straps. The [female] engineer note that different women have different power generation potential; I observe that there may be advantages to keeping that iPod set for dance tunes….
Microgrids use local energy production and storage to be self sufficient. The best reliability comes from a mix of technologies, with different performance characteristics. We have just begun to explore that the Personal Area Micro-grid might look like.
Ontological requirements of the service oriented grid
We will be unable to scale out the
integration of the power grid on a continental scale, to support the diversity
of systems currently installed using process oriented integration. We must
support even more diversity, from technological innovation as well as from
business innovation to achieve the new markets in energy today’s challenges
require.
While simple demand-response capable systems provide great aggregate value to the grid, the small-scale benefits they offer seldom make a compelling interest to the home or commercial building occupant. This limits new energy scenarios to small advantages that can be achieved by static regulation. If we enforce participation through regulation, we will only harvest the lowest of hanging fruit and encourage cheating and “malicious compliance.” To do more, we must increase the value proposition for building and home owners. This means either decreasing the costs of integration, offering more value for integration-capable systems, or both.
Service oriented coordination is opens up new avenues for energy re-allocation and conservation in the home and business. Service orientation solves the diversity of systems challenges while providing the building owner/operator with new means of controlling power use. A key challenge to establishing such services is common semantics to enable conversations about energy use and system performance. If properly defined, these semantics enable the owner to recapture investments in performance and interactivity through non-operations business processes, reducing the barriers to adoption.
The energy grid itself must acknowledge its roles as a service provider in the systems architecture of each building owner and operator. To be a full participant, business negotiations between building and grid must beyond availability and burn rate to a fuller model of cost, and scarcity, and projected reliability. To create discoverable markets in power, power source semantics must be mappable to ontologies of value that are relevant to the energy purchaser. In other words, we must move beyond mere price signals of demand-response. The integration client must be able to decide whether to make or buy based upon projected quality and reliability. Markets that allow the building to discover and negotiate with power sources must also enable the building to negotiate for which kind of energy sources.
Connecting the Services to Value
There is a fundamental disconnect concerning the systems that manage building performance between what the system integrator can do and what the owner asks for. Building service performance is not handled well during building design because there is currently no accepted way for owners and designers to discuss the services desired and the performance expected for each service in simple general terms. Our construction processes deliver diverse technical systems each discussed using concrete physical attributes whose effects are understood only by those with a deep domain knowledge not often common to either owner or designer, or even to different contractors. This leads to specifying materials and processes rather than results. This is ineffective in defining success after commissioning and into long term operations and maintenance.
New demands that buildings interact dynamically with entities other than the owner and operator will demand better. The provisioning of services will be managed over the lifecycle of the building rather than merely for procedural completeness at building turnover. Three of these external scenarios are emergency management, remote analytics (to support knowledge-based maintenance and operations), and interactive negotiations with power providers.
By formalizing new semantics to enable discussion of building services and their quality, we can create a common basis for discussing service between all actors over the life of the building. The semantics will also provide the groundwork for buildings to interact with actors external to themselves.
As Adam Werbach writes, the new sustainability is about how to harmonize human culture with our relationship to the living world. Building performance, and building value, includes occupant health, and worker productivity, and not mere energy performance. , then energy performance, as well as other values such as occupant health and worker productivity
As I have noted before in this blog, we will be able to recognize success when building owners adopt these semantics to express their own concepts of value in buildings. Tomorrow’s leasing agent will use the semantics of building service performance to distinguish his properties from others on the market. Commercial real estate brokers will incorporate these measures into the CIE (Commercial Information Exchange); the measures will be reflected in commercial real estate prices.
At that point, no regulation or moral suasion will be needed at that point to drive better buildings.
New Daedalus
Daedalus designed buildings, automated statues, and built wings for human flight. Daedalus worked by eye and hand, his designs scratched with a stylus on wax tablets. Until recently, we merely perfected his means of work, using better pens, and paper, and finally drawing on computers.
It is only recently that we have begun to leave the methods of Daedalus behind.
Simulations and digital twins guide each decision. Intelligence, or at least behaviors, imbue each system and device. Cyberphysical systems replace household servants and chauffeurs, operate factories, and manage energy logistics. The most pressing concerns are how intelligent systems and buildings will respond to us, and to each other.