FIATECH

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...

Earlier this month, a few of us met for the NAESB PAP10 (Energy Usage) task force to discuss EPA EnergyStar Climate Control 2.0. We met to consider how the draft affected the work going on to define a standard for communicating energy usage. The draft EPA specification describes the changing requirements for EnergyStar certification. The EnergyStar certification is aimed for the home markets. Much of the specification discussed consumer interfaces for smart thermostats. My understanding is that the proposed release of this standard is in November of this year.

What caught my eye within the specification were abstract standards for communicating with a home HVAC system. The clear direction of this work is to increase competition and speed innovation in home systems by reducing the integration costs of mixing and matching major system components, i.e., air handler, heat pump, furnace, and smart thermostat.

To me, it is clear that an abstract interface to home systems could be an abstract interface to the small commercial package system. It could also be the abstract interface to each zone in a larger commercial installation. Such an interface would “dis-integrate” commercial building systems in ways that would more easily accept floor-by-floor and even suite-by-suite system and technology upgrades.

Enterprise interfaces to building systems must allow interaction without requiring that enterprise programmers learn mechanical engineering. They must allow coordination and monitoring without letting financial and business programmers screw things up. They must be generic to let one integration work for many technologies.

Don’t look for support for this from the usual standards bodies. Many of the participants are looking to preserve existing business models and fight over scraps. Maybe a newcomer could arrive with an open API and cool enough technology to make everyone else follow.

Or maybe, it could come from outside, from an EPA standard for homes.

Regular readers know that I am concerned that the accumulation of many small legal actions can create a violation of privacy that exceeds the sum of the observations. This week, the DC Circuit Court ruled that prolonged recurring legal acts can become an illegal search, or one that requires a specific warrant. If it stands on appeal, this theory may be one of the most important decisions to protect individuals and restrain the modern state ever.

The ruling defines a new "mosaic" theory of the Fourth Amendment...

Last week, twenty of us gathered in DC for a two-day charrette on the standards needed to apply BIM to the problems of dynamic energy management. The work-shop, entitled “Smart Buildings, Smart Energy”, was put on by the Corps of Engineers Research Lab (CERL) at the National Insitute for Building Science (NIBS). The meeting was a fascinating, and occasionally heated conversation that brought together academic and government researchers, building system practitioners from industry leading companies, and participants in standards committees from ASHRAE to OASIS. It was a fascinating meeting, filled with bright, deeply focused individuals who as a group had not yet recognized the profound changes in their goals required by smart 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 14th amendment, and by implication, eliminating the 9th amendment from any real meaning.

The 9th amendment, the shortest and simplest of the bill of rights...

In the political world, we often speak as if the smart grid will create and internet of energy. This sounds sexy, but it can be hard to noodle out what it means. I’m pretty sure that it does not mean that we will use smart meters to deliver porn. To find the internet of energy, we must acknowledge straight up the problems with our energy plans.

The internet was built around assumptions, scarcity of bandwidth and fragility of infrastructure, that clearly apply to today’s grid. Long distance transmission was expensive; email used to hop...

I have been writing too much elsewhere to write as much as I’d like here recently. WS-Calendar, EMIX, and EnergyInterop all have drafts out for comments this week. Standards specifications require a lot of coordination to get into publication.

Last Sunday, the WS-Calendar Technical Committee released a draft for comments. This is a small component among standards, but one that can help integrate building systems into the businesses that...

We do not have a problem of knowing what to do to make buildings participants in smart energy. We do not have a problem that the technology is too expensive. We do have a problem that it takes too long to integrate systems. High integration costs lead to vendor lock-in. High integration costs lead to long sales cycles for replacements and upgrades. High integration costs will continue to slow the adoption of distributed energy resources. High integration costs lead to islands of automation, unable to participate in smart energy and demand response.

In design and in construction, today’s best practice is to use a BIM (Building Information Model) to deliver better buildings on-time and under budget. BIM trades higher design costs for much lower construction costs and reduced risk. We use BIM to generate energy models, essential to green certifications for buildings. Until recently, BIM hasn’t had much to do with the operations of a building, or with systems inside a building. This month, I am writing about how this is starting to change.

In traditional CAD, we have used libraries of templates supplied by product vendors for years. Suppliers of plumbing and lighting equipment have wanted it to be easy to design with their products, and they have wanted their products to look good in design renderings. Specifiers Property information exchange (SPie) is a project that encourages this approach applied to the more detailed requirements of BIM. SPie objects are cross-referenced with Omniclass and can include hookup and connection information. The National Electrical Manufacturing Association (NEMA) and is one of the associations participating. SPie brings the things we install in buildings into BIM.

Two technologies dominate the generation of building energy models. GBXML has wide support not only in energy modeling, but also in the design of HVAC and control systems. Information built on GBXML has had no path pack into BIM. EnergyPlus is purported to generate more accurate energy models, and has a well-defined model view for re-entry into BIM. ENERGie, (the ie is again for information exchange) is an effort to merge the two to provide a single model coordinating system design with building design and supporting full system detail. It is likely that ENERGie will soon be required for General Service Administration (GSA) and Department of Defense (DOD ) work. GSA and DOD are the two biggest landlords in North America, so their wants can drive the industry.

In information technology, we again and again see the technology we develop for the most advanced systems flowing down through normal business and all the way to the consumer. ISO 15926 is an information framework developed to express the relations between systems and components in the largest chemical processing plants. Today, ISO 15926 being adapted for a variety of tasks, from the esoteric mapping between ontologies to the automated mapping between form and function to operate smaller systems. ELie is a project to hand over the Equipment Layout in buildings to the owner by mapping from BIM to ISO 15926. ELie connects...