I like a Winter Morning

I like waking up warm, under the covers in a cold room. When the kids were younger, I had to leap out of bed at the alarm, and walk the dogs, and make breakfasts, and pack lunches, and get the kids out the door, like a paratrooper sergeant shouting “Go!. Go!,Go!”. Now a can lie in bed and revel in the warmth, and let WCPE (Great Classical Music 24 hours a day) ease me awake. Today, for the first day of winter, the Waltz of the Snowflakes at 5:30 was as good a background for a joyful awakening as one could hope for.

Rusty is old, and slow, and no longer chases into the next county. He stays close in the dark, even as the herds of deer, meticulously eating the buds off my camellias chuff their startlement and prance off into the dark. The cold air keeps smells down, and they are as startled as I when I come on them in the dark. From the bottom of the hill, it’s a half mile to the old store, and the morning paper.

The guinea fowl are in a tree off the road, calling quietly to each other in their cold weather voices. By summer, they are outraged, and angry, shouting their annoyance at all who pass near. But in dark winter, they are quiet, perhaps they do not know I am about. Perhaps they are calling to sooth each other, back and forth like night hikers on the glacier, awed by the silent dark, but keeping an eye on each other.

Up ahead are the brightest Christmas houses, right across from each other. On one side, the Hispanic family has moved in, and dedicated a passion to Christmas lights that I remember from growing up in San Diego. I remember in 1969, San Diego’s 200^th, when we were asked to keep our lights up all year. The town’s colors are Brown and Gold, and the call went out to change all the Christmas colors to yellow after Christmas. Changing light bulbs is not as easy when they are up as when they are on the floor. I seem to remember that my mother kept me in the tall carob trees on either side of the driveway for all of January, two sacks of tiny bulbs in my hands.

On the other side of the street is the solar power house. They always offer me light on my morning walk, as self-powered driveway lights create an aura around the Clyde Jones chainsaw sculptures. But with Christmas, they have thrown all caution, and perhaps solar power to the wind and the sculptures are awash in tiny lights. Perhaps they are leaders in using the early morning energy surplus; but I think it is the Joy of lighting for Christmas.

From there on, it is lights all the way to the store, a lot of purple this year. The road is silent, with no one else about. Even the dogs are all inside on these cold nights. Rusty and I have the walk alone, with the dear, and the fowl, and the lights. Any colder, and it might be too much of a good thing. The full moon was getting ready to hide for the day.

I like a winter morning.

The view from 400 miles, and 100 years away

As I walked the dog to the store this morning, I thought of the different way we know things today. The sky was clear, but I could tell. The air was cool, but I could tell. I didn’t need to hear the announcers from the weather service. I wondered how I knew. And I pondered what it would have been like to know, a hundred years ago, with no way to tell whether it would affect me and my life...

One of the great gifts a dog gives its owner is dawn. Rusty is getting slow now, and white about the jowls; he really prefers to keep his travels to those between the cushion in his kennel and the mat by the glass door where he can watch the yard. Still, in the morning, he complains until we go out. Nowadays, he can’t make it all the way to the store and the paper. He slows. He pretends to be interested in something half way, and he waits until my return. Still he has given me the pre-dawn, again...

At dawn, the roads don’t smell like cars. The night shift, the animals that come out at night, is sleepily returning home. In Bynum, for the last decade, guinea fowl wander in the early morning. They cruise across yards, gobbling up ticks and fleas. The dogs seem to leave them alone. I think it’s the noise; a flock of guinea fowl makes the most horrendous noise when harassed. This morning, they were silent.

The air, the quiet still air had an ineffable feel. Perhaps there was a hint of sea in the wind, but there was no wind yet. The humid summer air in North Carolina always blurs things in the distance just a bit; perhaps today it blurred it less. The skies were clear of clouds, in a way I don’t usually expect until fall. This clearing seems to come before the clouds of a hurricane.

Everything felt like a hurricane. I don’t know if I would have noticed, without years of dawn walks, led by and leading a succession of dogs. This morning I knew. And I thought of what it was like, walking here, a hundred years ago.

What would it be like to know, but to have no idea whether the storm was coming to land, or staying at sea?

As I drove into town, driving North, I could see the summer sky to my left, to the East. I could see those long banded clouds that surround a hurricane, catching the morning sun. They were silver and gold, and beautiful, and ominous.

The storm, at that time, was 400 miles away. I knew it wasn’t going to get any closer to me, than that. But a hundred years ago, the signs would have been just as clear, without that knowing.

Privacy Rights, Operational Data, and the US Government

Thinking about smart energy and the 4^th of July generated an essay too large and too personal for publication. A shorter version re-oriented toward the buildings world appeared in the July issue of Automated Buildings magazine (www.AutomatedBuildings.com). This piece pulls together the more personal views from the same article. If you came here from Automated Buildings to find out more about my views, I recommend looking to my previous post on the Internet of Energy.

Several readers have written me that privacy has no place in US Law, and was only discovered as an emanation from a penumbra (in Justice Douglas’s words). I think that this is a profound misreading of the constitution, arising from an awful ruling in a good cause in the 1870’s. The Slaughterhouse Case created a framework that profoundly limited the privileges of citizenship, gutting a key component of the 14^th amendment, and by implication, eliminating the 9^th amendment from any real meaning.

The 9^th amendment, the shortest and simplest of the bill of rights, states “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The Federalists argued that the whole Bill of Rights was dangerous as it would be impossible to list all rights it would be dangerous to list some, lest there would be those who would assert that government was unrestrained as to the omitted rights. The 9^th amendment was so clear and so revolutionary that all parties have tried to ignore it ever since.

The first direction in the 14^th amendment is that “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” These statements hang together on natural law, and on those rights of a held by all citizens, or by all men. As the old saw goes, some statements are so clear that it takes years of legal training to misinterpret them.

Privacy and its twin, the right to be left alone, which Justice Douglas referred to as “the most fundamental right,” are essential to one’s personal pursuit of happiness. Privacy is at the heart of the 4^th amendment, which prohibits searches of papers and possessions. Privacy and self-determination were at the heart of the concerns of the first amendment, restricting the reach over conscience held by the state churches of New England. They were fundamental to the founder’s concept of natural rights. Natural rights are not granted by the government, and nor can they be legitimately taken away (alienated) by government.

A simple reading of the simple words of the Constitution would include natural rights among the privileges of citizenship, as opposed to the obligations of subjects. Recent scholarship shows that Jefferson expunged the work subject from the Declaration, substitution citizen. The Ninth amendment and the privileges and immunities clause of the 14^th, have been ignored for years. Recent opinions from the Supreme Court have invoked each of them.

The rejuvenation of the 9^th and the 14^th can’t come quickly enough. Courts have ruled that inspection of cell phones, including contacts and email, is no concern of the 4^th amendment. The Justice Department argued last spring that there is no expectation of privacy over cell tower operational data, pinpointing your location at all times. New laws enable direct federal control and tracking of the internet. Direct load management of energy use, one competing model of the smart grid, would expand the trove of operation data about our lives and homes beyond anything previously seen.

All because of men of good think society need this information. As Milton wrote, “Necessity, the tyrant's plea".

The strains between a good new idea, so necessary and so important, and basic liberty and natural rights are not new. We can see them in quotes from presidents early in the last century, in their 4^th of July addresses.

From Woodrow Wilson, our most progressive president:

“The Declaration of Independence did not mention the questions of our day. It is of no consequence to us unless we can translate its general terms into examples of the present day and substitute them in some vital way for the examples it itself gives, so concrete, so intimately involved in the circumstances of the day in which it was conceived and written.”

From Calvin Coolidge, so conservative he as thoughtless:

“About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.”

Today, there is a new urgency to privacy issues. We live our lives on-line and connected. Tweets and cell calls expose our every move. Digital storage costs have plummeted; there is now no reason to ever throw out information. With tracking and record-keeping essentially free, there is really no impediment to the government tracking everyone, all the time and keeping it forever. Cheap and powerful search matched to that cheap and boundless storage means nothing ever goes away. As the CEO of Google stated :Privacy is dead, get used to it.”

Without privacy, and mandatory rules concerning privacy, no part of our lives will be free from government meddling, from Wilsonian good intentions. We need to reassert privacy, all privacy, and rediscover the subversive rights of the 9^th and 14^th amendments.

The US has always been the land of the frontier. “Go west, young man!” Horace Greely famously spoke. West was where you could make something of yourself, perhaps a new something that was not what you once were. The West was where you went to start over. The west was the creator of a classless world, one where your parents did not matter because no one had a past. Failure to protect privacy is the final closing of the frontier.

Idle Thoughts on Smart Grids

Musings from the GridWise Architectural Council, Orlando, 2010

After a week at the AHR show, and meeting with ASHRAE, and sitting in on B2G (Building to Grid) summit, I was back in the building zone as I sat in on day one of the GWAC meeting. The GridWise Architectural Council (GWAC) is a voluntary organization of people concerned with the future of energy. The Department of Energy sponsors meetings of the GWAC, a commitment that keeps the group in meeting rooms, coffee, and pastry. The DOE also provides administrative support through Pacific Northwest National Labs (PNL).

The GWAC is immensely influential in the development of the North American approach to smart grids. It draws members from many industries and not just the best thinkers of the utility industry (although its members include those, too). The GWAC often meets at the end of conference or show tied to a different field of energy, to cross-pollinate their approaches. This week, they met after the AHR show. I have never had the time and resources to commit to a GWAC membership; the members make a serious commitment of time. When one of their open meetings is in the same town as me, I always attend if I can.

What follows are mental doodles from my meeting notes, none long enough to warrant their own post.

Is Demand Response the worst marketing phrase ever?

Demand Response is the girlfriend (or boyfriend) who you dated for a while, but dumped because she only talked about her problems. If utilities want to people to care about DR, they have to come up with some better way to talk about it. Until they do, energy suppliers are going to continue to have a hard time engaging their customers.

Is Customer engagement “the disruptive technology”?

The system designs of electrical grids have been defined by deep integration and process interactions. Service integration and service orientation were unknown. The services, both between supplier and consumer, were undefined. Even within the consumer realm, the services were not defined. Rarely does a commercial owner hope to buy electricity on any given day—electricity is not a service. . . Lights, warmth, computing, music, even flushing toilets, now, those are services.

What will it take commercial building owners to embrace energy response

A building owners business is to operate a building efficiently without, at a minimum, annoying his tenants. If he knew a way to use a third less energy without annoying them, he would be doing it already. Annoyed tenants may not renew their leases. It is safer to avoid this risk.

If a building owner could see how each part of his building would respond to DR, and knew which tenants would be annoyed, this risk is removed. I think the killer app of demand response can apply all service degradation only to those tenants who are habitually late on their rent.

Why does the smart grid have no formal architecture?

This was a real challenge when developing the national roadmap. We did not want an architecture, for a good architecture is ultimately an expression of a particular business model. When we developed the national roadmap, we wanted to support any number of business models, both those known today, and those we might find in the future. How would a traditional “architecture”, or perhaps even a TOGAF-style instantiation of Intelligrid, handle, say Google becoming its own virtual utility buying directly in multiple ISOs? We deliberately left architectures undefined.

We had to socialize the services as “reducing the size of interoperation domains” to enable innovation by reducing the requirements to form cross-domain interactions

Why does it seem that there is a fundamental contradiction between the smart grid and new technology?

When integration and interoperation are the biggest challenge, then diversity is the biggest controllable expense, and technical innovation is the biggest controllable risk; it is most easily controlled by preventing the introduction of either. The smart grid must introduce both.

The real question, if properly constructed, is not how we create The Smart Grid™, but how do we define Service Oriented Energy (SOE), of which the Service Oriented Grid is just one arranged subset. The SOG interacts with another entity, with quite different purposes, the Service Oriented Building, The SOB exposes some of its attributes and behaviors through SOE interfaces.

From this, we derived the existence of an Energy Services Interface (ESI). The ESI is the external face of any building or microgrid. What happens behind the ESI is of no concern to the grid other than how it effects how the node behind the ESI comes to market.

Can you really keep your mind on smart grid all the time?

No. During most of an excellent talk on new energy generation from FPL, I was thinking, “It won’t be carbon that destroys the biosphere, but alternative energy, specifically, through the slowing of the Gulf Stream by ocean current generation and slowing of the trade-winds by wind turbines…”