Reflections on Father’s Day, 2015

It’s been five Father’s days, since I could call my father, and different aspects of remembrance guide my thoughts during each recurrence. Today, I am remembering life-long learning, and how he kept up until the end, when he could not remember anything.

Books, everywhere, were a key aspect of any house he lived in. There were built-in bookshelves in the living room, built-in bookshelves in all the hallways, built-in bookshelves in his office, and a high pile of books coming in, near his bed.

I was his ninth child, and so I did not get him full bore. A founder of the Society of Industrial Engineers, he spent the war improving production lines for liberty ships, and for mustangs, and for some things he still would not describe, at the end. He always feigned ignorance of computers, but his stories included things I later recognized as Whirlwind.

After 11 kids, some in college, some in boarding school, some. Like me in grammar school, he worked on his PhD in Mathematics. This was at one of the Pomona colleges, which turned the journey home into an Odyssey two nights a week. He would pick us up from the school playground at 5:15, and drive north from San Diego. We would stop at some take-out restaurant, notably a sandwich shop renowned for its “Torpedo Sandwiches”, and eat in the car. And then we would stay in the car. My older brothers would work on homework, my younger brother and I would squabble until we fell asleep, and after class broke up at 9:30, we would drive the hour home to the ranch outside of Escondido.

Years later, the Italian-Armenian sub-shop behind Ionics in Watertown, one of my first consulting customers, always tasted just right. I didn’t recognize until later that their aged sausages, sharp provolone, and tough bread reminded me of the Torpedo shop somewhere south of Pomona.

That was a small bit of his commitment to learning. Through most of us, he would order every book on the syllabus of each of his kids in college, if he had not read it already, and read it at the beginning of the semester. The quizzes at the table at Thanksgiving were likely to be more penetrating, and detailed, than any exams in the class.

I remember one semester of Russian History in which the reading list included two literary collections, one of Turgenev, and one of Pushkin. I bemoaned having to read a small short story from each. I was little prepared to discuss all the works, in detail. I did not make that mistake again, and took to reading the entire book.

When he retired, he resolved to read any book that was referenced in any of the founding works of Catholicism and the Enlightenment. No author, no matter how obscure, whether mentioned in the writings of Irenaeus or of John Chrysostom, or later in the works of Thomas Aquinas or Hugo Grotius escaped his list. One of the pleasures of his last visit, before he stopped travelling, was introducing him to an old bookstore in Durham, with an endless attic, in which he found a dozen books he had sought in Oxford and Cambridge (England and Massachusetts) and London and San Francisco, to no avail.

So this Father’s day, I am thinking of life-long learning. I am reflecting what a sterile self-indulgent introspection, of reading only like-minded like-experienced post-Marcusian scholars, that passes for scholarship in the college-town I work in today.

When I reflect on my father, and his appetite for everything humanity had written for all time, I then look at that the tiny slice of humanity that today arrogates to itself as bespeaking diversity, and, well words escape me.

This Father’s day, I have been thinking about life-long learning, and if I measure up. I have tried to catch up recently. This year I am re-reading all of Livvy, not just the highlights, and enjoying the first century historical perspective on the previous 500 years.

For light reading, I am jumping through the History of the British Navy that my son gave me for my birthday. For heavy reading I am wandering dispatch by dispatch through the Life of Marlborough. For the human touch, I am laughing my way through the oh-so-human Diaries of Samuel Pepys, as he started his career that ended as secretary of the Navy and then secretary of the Admiralty. These perspectives and time-lines bounce off each other in ways that keep me pondering how the modern world was built.

Yet I knew he would have read the same and more, and in less time.

Life-long learning is a habit of mind, and a gift from my Father, one that gives long after he is gone. I hope I gave some of it to my kids. Habits of thought, and habits of knowledge is the only thing that we really give our kids—and we all turn too much of it over to third parties, to professionals, who too often toss away our patrimony. It is the gift from my father that gives me most pleasure today. I hope I was able to give it to my own children.

Leaving IB-CON with Microgrids and DC Distribution in mind

I write (and post,you have to be amazed at the technology we so take for granted) this on a plane flying away from a great IB-Con, the REALCOM Intelligent Buildings Conference. It is a trade show like no other, with deep involvement of both the technology leaders in Real Estate, i.e. CIOs and CTOs of the largest REITs and those that would sell to them. The panel discussions were embued with new issues tied to deep adoption of IT not only into the corporate operations of estate, but into the operations of the hidden systems within.

Deep analytics and deep security concerning embedded systems, BAS and others were recurring themes this year. There were frank discussions of using the BAS to get to corporate information, and of using hacks to destroy building internal operations. There was just enough White Hat “think like a hacker” to keep the talks interesting.

But what really stands out at REALCOMM in the focus on emerging technologies. Jim Young and Howard Berger have a genuine interest in start-ups, identifying the ones that could do a lot of good, and helping them to meet their early hurdles. New companies may get coached on messaging and presentation. They go out of their way to introduce potential risk-takers with the new technologies. I have even listened in as companies just out of angel funding get coached through their next steps. The unseen services these two provide are immense.

On the other side, they create a real community among the technologists on the ownership side of real estate. Some come back year after year to challenge each other with the changing world of real estate. I have written here before of the challenges of setting up start-up office for millennials, of coffee shops and food trucks replacing the in-house conference rooms and in-house sandwich shop.

Some of these owners have set up their own coaching for new tenants, helping them with marketing, and financial planning, and other topics the young founder of a new venture may not know. At one level, this is raw self-interest, for a tenant that goes out of business is a tenant that breaks his lease. But at another level, and I think a truer level, it is a commitment to helping other flourish, so long as they learn and work hard, so that we all flourish. And I think this commitment and community starts with Jim and Howard.

My most immediate concerns this year were microgrids and semantic frameworks, as well as the Energy Mashup Lab. These topics are no surprise to my regular readers.

A moderated a microgrid session with CleanSpark and Stem, two technical companies with quite different focuses. Because another vendor, an early start-up, dropped out, I expanded my own comments on personal microgrids. What was remarkable was how each participant agreed on the big issues, the big benefits, and the driving forces. As an industry, microgrids are now know where they are going. Years ago, I moderated similar sessions, and the speakers were coming out of the labs, with vision, but not yet much delivery. Today, either of them, and maybe a dozen more vendors, can deliver systems out of the box.

Those systems are quite different though. They share a commonality of benefits: lasting reduction of energy risk, capabilities to work with real energy markets to reduce costs, a capability of consuming local storage for local purposes rather than the dead end of net metering, and privacy and security for the building and its occupants. The prices are coming down, leading to three-to-five year ROIs on pure energy costs without pricing the other elements. The risk is now low. The question is now moving toward “Does a microgrid make sense in this state with these regulations?”…and regulatory frameworks are starting to predominate. Keep an eye on these technologies, because if you have a site with greater than average price risk, or reliability risk, or security risk, you should be considering a microgrid now.

At the end of the day, I finished in a discussion of low voltage DC lighting. Again, long-time readers know I have been enthused by this technology for five years. It is now coming to market (LumenCache) with standard parts, standard high-performance LEDs, modular component s anyone can install and maintain. I hope to learn more about this company and its products in the weeks ahead.

Which makes me look ahead. Is it time, at last, for the eMerge alliance, and for DC-based distribution inside the building to come to the fore? Storage (batteries) are DC. Solar PEV is DC. Digital electronics and LEDs are DC. With less need for heat shields and conversion, LEDs are cheaper, safer, and more reliable. Without the need to convert from DC to Ac to DC (storage) and from DC to AC to DC (storage to use), there is a 30% “free” increase in efficiency. With enough distributed energy generation, DC power, as Edison thought it should be, may be back.

That’s all for now. I’m tired and travelling.

Launching The Energy Mashup Lab

After nearly two years of work, The Energy Mashup Lab is creaking into public operation. Since Dave Cohen and I initially sketched out its activities in the Fall of 2013, we have been putting the pieces together. William Cox joined us in 2014. Our goal is open source software agents for self-assembling microgrids.

Much of the work is routine business. We are incorporated as a 501C3 non-profit. We have a working web site, www.TheEnergyMashupLab.org, We have a merchant account to process memberships. We have set up secure private forums and list servers. Dave has contributed his award-winning software for energy-aware agents for home and office systems. William is creating the stub architecture and is days away from the secure code repository in which to nurture the work.

Some of it is refining the mission. The Lab is aimed at the microgrid owned and operated by the owner and operator of the site is supports. A microgrid that is operated by its inhabitant, personal or commercial, should have no interaction with its containing grid other than economic negotiations over supply and demand. For microgrids to be everywhere, you must be able to put them together easily. Our goal is that a homeowner can pick up a major appliance on a Saturday and have it fully integrated into his home microgrid before dinner.

Such a microgrid is a necessary enabler of rapid technology innovation. By limiting interactions to standards-based economic communications, the larger grid has no need to see or understand the technology within the microgrid. The owner can readily adopt new technology (for use, recycling, generation, conversion, storage, ...) of energy, because the larger grid can see only the net effect, i.e., the negotiations over supply and demand.

As the most valuable loads (lovely name the utilities have for their customers) are smooth and predictable, these economic interactions reward the microgrid that internally smooths its load curve (no jitter) with storage, whether up or down. They reward the microgrid that can predict (or even better commit) to a particular load at a particular time. The transactive agent is able to get better terms for being a better partner. Smooth, well-chosen forward transactions for particular load shapes augmented by the ability to take advantage of spot markets to adjust position up or down are most rewarding.

That’s where the agents come in. The agents are participants in an internal market negotiation over time. If you consider the matter, the laptop, or the tablet you reading this with fits almost every definition of microgrid. It can disconnect from the grid and continue to operate. It deals with supply and demand internally, adjusting operating parameters based on whether power is available or not, and whether they are in active use. It has internal energy storage. What it lacks, though, is an economic interface on the plug. In the same way, the consumption-only Heat Pump microgrid and the consumption-only Refrigerator microgrid need know nothing about each other—they need only know not to buy at the same time from the home’s internal market. As supply and demand align, the load curve is smoothed and the aggregate market position is improved.

An economic interface is the lightest path to integration. The Lab’s agents will need to go beyond the published OASIS specification Energy Interoperation to discover the market it is in. These standards-based economic behaviors will be grafted onto the energy-aware autonomous agents.

Math and Power and the System with No Name

Every once in a while you run into something that just does not fit into any categories. The world welcomes a better mousetrap, but won’t even consider a mouse dispatcher that sends the mice outside to mow the lawn. We all want things that fit the categories we know. It is hard for a new category to make our purchasing lists.

For the last year, I have been talking to a company that manages energy based on math. The founder created new math to understand how dolphins process signals over time. We create three dimensional models based on what is effectively instant access to shadows and shapes. Dolphins assemble three dimensions based on time-delays in echoes—sound is much slower than light. The founder then applied this math to digital processing of power.

Normal complex-instruction set computers are slow to do certain kinds of math. We all use special-purpose vector-processing CPUs to do graphics (“graphics chips”). In a similar way, this mathematician had to come up with special-purpose CPUs to analyze and fix power in real time. But what does it mean to digitally fix power?

These novel CPUs are now built into special purpose computer systems that take the normal dirty power we all get and make it look as much as possible like the idealized model of a three dimensional power wave. This redefines what we mean by dirty power. Normal power conditioning creates “trapezoids”, power shapes that only mimic a sine wave. True digital power quality is something quite different. And we don’t have a name for what it is.

I have written here before that the effects of digital power quality can be pronounced. Florescent lights stop humming. Motor vibration is reduced and heat generation is reduced. A closer look shows subtler effects. Power output of motors is increased. Impedance is reduced and harmful power harmonics are reduced. Outside the device, power factor tends toward one, which may reduce power bills.

A large facility with a motor load reduced power requirements by 20%, according to a 3^rd party engineer monitoring a trial. Data centers have seen power requirement reduction of 10%, as harmonic stresses are reduced. High-rises with digital power conditioning on each floor may not need to upgrade neutral throughout the building.

Sites close to the Carolinas, where 3DFS is headquartered and can monitor installations closely, can experience something new. But 3DFS is a startup, and their product is not a better mousetrap. It is something else. It is power conditioning based on novel advanced math. And for too many of us, we start the day hoping there will be no math required.