Is Smart Grid opportunity in Residential or Commercial? I voted Commercial, but the popular media topic is Residential

I’ve watched the industry come up with energy monitoring solutions over the past few years, and I am amazed at how much attention the residential market gets vs. commercial.  I determined that the commercial market and data centers being the epitome of the right place for energy efficiency.  Which is part of what got me to spend more time in data centers.  Data Centers are the early adopters of the ideas, and we’ll get the rest of commercial to follow next like Hospitals.

After sitting in multiple presentations at conferences on energy efficiency and monitoring, I figured out that this was a futile effort to educate the masses.  The comparison I’ve used in consumer behavior terms is when you get your monthly bills how much effort do people spend on their credit card & bank bills vs. the utility bill.  Think about.  How many people spend even a tenth of the time on their utility bill vs. bank/credit card bills?

Why is smart grid in the consumer space popular?  It is easy for the media to talk about and relate to, making it a popular topic.  There are tons of appliance and electronic vendors who see the money to be made by selling smart grid features.  Utilities are viewed as progressive to come up with residential smart meter solutions.  Google and Microsoft are throwing efforts in as well.  Does this make residential the right one just because it is popular?

CNET news has an article that provides a perspective on the smart grid that supports the opportunity in commercial.

Businesses offer best path to money in smart grid

by Martin LaMonica

BOSTON--For consumers, the face of the smart grid is most likely to be a home energy monitor that gives people insight into home electricity use. But from a business perspective, there may be more action catering to business customers, rather than homeowners.

A panel of smart-grid company executives here at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen East conference on Tuesday said saving commercial, industrial, and business customers is an easier sell than helping consumers save on utility bills.

Images: The many faces of the smart grid

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Home energy monitoring systems and Web applications such as Google PowerMeter let people get details on where home electricity is going. But it's unclear at what point consumers are willing to make changes in their behavior based on that information.

And raises the issue of consumer behavior.

"I think we need to temper our expectations," said Tim Healy, the CEO of energy efficiency company EnerNoc. He noted an "apathy found by consulting company the Shelton Group, which found that consumers would be willing to spend $129 more a month on energy bills before taking actions, such as buying an EnergyStar appliance or scheduling dishwasher or dryer jobs to take advantage of off-peak rates. (Click for PDF of study.)

And, here is a big wake-up call from an Accenture survey.

Consumers Reject Lower Energy Use As The Answer to Reducing Reliance on Fossil Fuels and Energy Imports

* Related Assets

March 09, 2010

Consumers call for strong government intervention in energy market

NEW YORK; March 9, 2010 – Three out of four consumers are concerned by energy and climate change issues, but nearly two thirds say that using less energy is not the answer to reducing reliance on fossil fuels or foreign energy supply, according to global research by Accenture (NYSE: ACN). The survey of 9,000 individuals in 22 countries also shows that almost nine out of ten consumers want more government intervention in the energy market.

The survey reveals this interesting consumer behavior.

· When asked why they think reducing reliance on fossil fuels is important, 60 percent of Americans say dependence on foreign oil while 26 percent say climate change and reducing emissions.

· Globally, 49 percent of respondents say lowering emissions is the chief reason to reduce dependence on fossil fuels while 32 percent say dependence on foreign oil.

· In the U.S., extreme concern for climate change declined to 36 percent from 53 percent in the past year.

· U.S. consumers see new forms of energy as a better solution than reducing demand, with 62 percent favoring alternatives and 38 percent favoring curbs on demand.

I am so glad i lowered my expectation in the residential scenario for energy efficiency.  Just because I turn off the lights, watch my energy consumption like a lot of you doesn’t mean the rest of the public will change their behavior.

There is no Prius badge people can wear by shaving their electricity use by 10-20%.

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Lesson learned from Apple’s iPhone SDK agreement disclosure, beware of the Freedom of Information Act if a US gov’t agency signs

Having been an ex-Microsoft, I learned this lesson if you have a gov’t agency sign an NDA or confidentiality agreement watch out for Freedom of Information Act.

The act explicitly applies only to federal government agencies. These agencies are under several mandates to comply with public solicitation of information. Along with making public and accessible all bureaucratic and technical procedures for applying for documents from that agency, agencies are also subject to penalties for hindering the process of a petition for information. If “agency personnel acted arbitrarily or capriciously with respect to the withholding, [a] Special Counsel shall promptly initiate a proceeding to determine whether disciplinary action is warranted against the officer or employee who was primarily responsible for the withholding.” [6] In this way, there is recourse for one seeking information to go to a Federal court if suspicion of illegal tampering or delayed sending of records exists. However, there are nine exemptions, ranging from a withholding “specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy” and “trade secrets” to “clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” [6]

The Electronic Freedom Foundation used this to get a copy of Apple’s iPhone SDK agreement reports NetworkWorld.

EFF publishes iPhone developer agreement

By Dan Moren, Macworld
March 09, 2010 02:02 PM ET

If you've followed the news of App Store rejections over the past couple years, you may have wondered what exactly is engraved upon the stone tablets that govern the terms of Apple's App Store and developing for the iPhone. The trouble is we haven't been able to tell you, as the agreement itself contains terms that prohibit publicly discussing it. But on Monday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) legally obtained and published a copy of the agreement for the first time.

In order to do so, it had to take advantage of a legal loophole. EFF noticed that NASA had created an application for the iPhone, and NASA--being a government agency--is subject to the Freedom of Information Act. EFF requested a copy of the SDK agreement and a revision dated March 17, 2009 was provided.

If you have confidential information you may want to think about your disclosures to federal gov’t agencies.

The author makes a closing statement.

For my part, as somebody writing about these issues, the most frustrating part of the agreement has been the ban on public statements. I can see why Apple believed it was in its interest to keep the agreement private, but in the long term I think it's done more harm than good, both in terms of contributing to the perception of Apple as overly secretive and by gagging developers from speaking publicly about their issues. Apple's platform remains wildly popular despite what some consider Byzantine restrictions--the company shouldn't be afraid of a little discussion.

And some of his points are why for the Open Source Data Center Initiative we are have adopted the practices of openness and transparency for what we will be doing.

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A different interpretation of “Open Source” in an Intelligence Analysis scenario that defines how GreenM3 works public data

I ran across the term Open Source Intelligence.

Open source intelligence (OSINT) is a form of intelligence collection management that involves finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence.

This description fits what I have been telling others about the various data center sources of information. 

“If there is a public publication of information, we are open to look at and provide feedback on the value we see in the information.”

Which is a pretty good description of how this blog has been run, commenting on public available information.

The description goes on to clarify the difference vs. open source software.

In the intelligence community (IC), the term "open" refers to overt, publicly available sources (as opposed to covert or classified sources); it is not related to open-source software or public intelligence.

Sources of information are:

OSINT includes a wide variety of information and sources:

  • Media: newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and computer-based information.
  • Web-based communities and user generated content: social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies.
  • Public data: government reports, official data such as budgets, demographics, hearings, legislative debates, press conferences, speeches, marine and aeronautical safety warnings, environmental impact statements and contract awards.

We have seen helicopters flying over Apple data centers, and world wide maps of Google data centers.

  • Observation and reporting: amateur airplane spotters, radio monitors and satellite observers among many others have provided significant information not otherwise available. The availability of worldwide satellite photography, often of high resolution, on the Web (e.g., Google Earth) has expanded open source capabilities into areas formerly available only to major intelligence services.
  • Professional and academic: conferences, symposia, professional associations, academic papers, and subject matter experts.[1]
  • Most information has geospatial dimensions, but many often overlook the geospatial side of OSINT: not all open source data is unstructured text. Examples of geospatial open source include hard and softcopy maps, atlases, gazetteers, port plans, gravity data, aeronautical data, navigation data, geodetic data, human terrain data (cultural and economic), environmental data, commercial imagery, LIDAR, hyper and multi-spectral data, airborne imagery, geo-names, geo-features, urban terrain, vertical obstruction data, boundary marker data, geospatial mashups, spatial databases, and web services. Most of the geospatial data mentioned above is integrated, analyzed, and syndicated using geospatial software like a Geographic Information System (GIS) not a browser per se.

OSINT is distinguished from research in that it applies the process of intelligence to create tailored knowledge supportive of a specific decision by a specific individual or group.[2]

I wonder how much OSINT has started searching twitter and Facebook.

In the Open Source Data Center Initiative I anticipate we be using this type of description for what we will be doing.  Part of the challenge for the data center industry is there so much information out there, it is hard to make sense of it for an organization that doesn’t have a full staff of experienced professionals.

Here is where I got the idea for Open Source Intelligence.

kapowtech

Complimentary Online Seminar:

Real-Time Intelligence - Exploit Open Source Multimedia

Online Seminar

Real-Time Intelligence - Exploit Open Source Multimedia

Date: Thursday, March 18, 2010
Time: 11am Eastern; 8am Pacific
Duration: 1 Hour

Hello Dave,
Al Qaeda uses online videos to recruit and train. Other terrorist networks use audio files to disseminate messages. China circulates propaganda via video. The Internet is exploding with multimedia; streaming video, audio, images, PDFs and more. Open Source Intelligence needs to account for and take advantage of all advanced media types. But how?
Learn how you can:

  • Capture streaming video for on-demand classification and detailed examination
  • Automate extraction of multimediaOSINT and all contextual data
  • Transform complex data sources into accurate information for advanced analysis
Please join this free online seminar and see a live demonstration of Kapow Technologies’ advanced web harvesting capabilities in use at US Intelligence Agencies, extracting from sites like YouTube, China.org, Al-Jazeera and MySpace.
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Open Source Data Center Initiative openness, flexibility, and methods not for everyone

There are critics of the Open Source Data Center Initiative.  To be clear we don’t expect this to work for everyone.  An example that illustrates the different approach is this IntoWorld article discussing the Google Android Phone vs. Apple iPhone.  Some people want the iPhone, some want the Android. The Open Source Data Center Initiative is going to appeal to the users who consider the Android for its openness.

MARCH 03, 2010

Where Android beats the iPhone

Android's openness, flexibility, and Java foundation make it the best choice for many developers and the businesses that depend on them

By Peter Wayner | InfoWorld

The author starts out by discussing a simple feature of having a person’s picture show up when they call.  You can do this on the iPhone as well.

image

But, the Google Android does this as well with Facebook integration.

The most interesting question to me is how Android's openness will change the entire ecosystem on the phone. On the first day I had the Nexus One, I created an entirely new test Gmail account to avoid any problems when I returned the phone. Yet when I called a friend by typing in his phone number, his face popped up on the screen. Was this a demonstration of the power of Google's endless databases to link together everything?

After some experimentation, I concluded that the photo came from the Facebook app I had installed on the phone. When I logged in to Facebook, the app pulled pictures, phone numbers, and who knows what else into my phone. I think I accepted this feature when the Facebook app's AndroidManifest.xml file was loaded, and I'm not sure if I can ever get rid of it.

Openness has its benefits.

This deeper openness is going to be the source of any number of surprises that will be even greater and more useful than the unexpected appearance of my friend's photo on the phone. I think some of the more serious companies will start to release APIs to their apps, allowing the programs themselves to link together and solve problems.

Yesterday I blogged about the concept of the Open Data Source Initiative having APIs.

Defining a Data Center API, on the list of things to do for Open Source Data Center Initiative

I have spent so much of my life working with Operating System nerds both at Apple and Microsoft that I take it for granted the concepts of an API.

An application programming interface (API) is an interface implemented by asoftware program to enable interaction with other software, similar to the way auser interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers.

Part of what the Google Android has is a more open development environment which encourages others to be open, but this doesn’t mean everything has to be open if you use the Open Source Data Center Initiative.  In the same way that Google controls parts of the Android, we expect companies to implement their own ways to secure, protect, and optimize the designs to meet their business needs. But, at least we helped them with the 60 – 70% that is common across many data center designs.

There are other interesting questions about the role of cloud services in our smartphone future. Google is still guarding access to the Maps API and forcing developers to get an API key before deploying. I wouldn't be surprised if Apple, Palm, and others are frantically working on their own mapping, search, mail, and who knows what other cloud services. Right now the phones are little clients that aren't too closely linked to the Websites, but I can see that changing if better performance makes it possible to tilt the playing field. The quality of the cloud may become just as important as the slick GUI, app store, or number of pixels in the screen.

Consider the difference the author points out between the iPhone and Android audience.

This interaction with the cloud will be a question for the future. Right now, it seems that Apple won over the latte-sipping fashion plates who love the endless stream of cute games. Apple's decision to court the game developers is paying off in some amazing titles, but the Android platform is a real workhorse. Anyone who wants to do more than play games will find a huge range of possibilities in the Android platform.

While Apple is reportedly fixing some of the worst problems with the App Store process, the Android world avoids most of them by giving people the freedom to use the platform as they want. Considering that people have been using this freedom relatively successfully with PCs for decades, it's a welcome opportunity in the world of handhelds.

I have a good friend who is an operating system and application SW developer turned Data Center Service Manager, running online services for a Fortune 1000 company.  He is a big user of open source operating system and data center tools, and he made the switch from the IPhone to Android for the development environment.  This is a small percentage of the cell phone audience, and his points align with Peter Wayne’s.  As Google and Apple fight the cell phone wars, think about all the Google Data Center guys who have Androids running their own mobile data center apps.  At Apple and Microsoft, the mobile phone is not their data center tool, but Google it could be happening.

It would be interesting to play with a Google Data Center engineers Android and see their application list.  :-)  But, I doubt they’ll let it out of their hands.

The author Peter Wayne previously wrote about tools for IT Pros in Jan 2010.

Better Terminal Emulator

The outside world may call it a phone, but it's really a Linux box that fits in your pocket. And that means there must be a command line somewhere. Better Terminal Emulator is the simplest way to open a window into the guts of the machine. Price: $3.99 for Pro, free with ads and fewer features.

bMonitor

Do you worry that your server is down when you're out of the office?bMonitor can test a server with a variety of protocols, such as ping, FTP, and HTTP. If the connection fails, the phone starts ringing. The tool offers a variety of customization options, including the ability to set how often the phone burns up battery power by testing a server. Too many tests can really wipe out a charge. It's not perfect -- I've found that bMonitor can get mixed up if the network connection is unstable or hogged by another app, leading to a false alarm. But a false alarm is often better than none at all. Price: Free.

O'Reilly's Pocket Companion Guides

There are now hundreds of O'Reilly books available as Android applications, so you can answer that burning tech question or settle that bet from the bar without opening up the laptop. All are dramatically cheaper than the books themselves, thus making them a very good buy. Price: $2.99 and up

GScript

You asked for power, and GScript gives you the power to run shell scripts with a push of a button. Whatever you do, though, remember that GScript explicitly reminds you that the authors are "in no way responsible for the damage caused by running scripts with this app." It comes in an ad-supported Lite edition or a professional version. Price: €2.20 or free with ads.

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Defining a Data Center API, on the list of things to do for Open Source Data Center Initiative

I have spent so much of my life working with Operating System nerds both at Apple and Microsoft that I take it for granted the concepts of an API.

An application programming interface (API) is an interface implemented by a software program to enable interaction with other software, similar to the way a user interface facilitates interaction between humans and computers.

A critical concept of an API is abstraction.

An API is an abstraction that defines and describes an interface for the interaction with a set of functions used by components of a software system.

The data center is waiting for abstraction..

In computer science, the mechanism and practice of abstraction reduces and factors out details so that one can focus on a few concepts at a time.

But the many people are concrete minded thinkers. Concrete Thinking is.

Thinking characterized by a predominance of actual objects and events and the absence of concepts and generalizations.

Google’s Urs Hoelzle and Luis Andre Barossa wrote on the concept of a Data Center is a computer.

image

Well if the Data Center is a computer it should have a set of APIs.  It is a fact that Google has interfaces for its data centers.  I haven’t talked to a single Google employee on this concept.  But, it has to be.  How else are you going to interface with all the data centers around the world in Google’s inventory?  if you search the google document you see multiple references to API.

image

image

In Google’s Warehouse-Scale computers they close with.

At one level, WSCs are simple—just a few thousand cheap servers connected via a LAN. In reality, building a cost-efficient massive-scale computing platform that has the necessary reliability and programmability requirements for the next generation of cloud-computing workloads is as difficult and stimulating a challenge as any other in computer systems today.

Google thinks about the programmability, the APIs, of the data center.

I don’t need any more proof data centers need APIs.  But, concrete thinkers will not believe it until there are multiple customers already doing this.

In the short term, we can use Johnson Controls solution GridLogix I blogged about as a reference point.

Information Management for Sustainability
Gridlogix provides your organization with the tools for sustaining your enterprise. More than going "Green", Gridlogix helps you continuously cut wasteful costs, prolong the life of your facilities’ equipment, and maintain a comfort level throughout your enterprise. With Gridlogix's Automated Enterprise Management solution, Gridlogix empowers anyone in your organization with the real time data that allows your organization to improve the efficiency of your facilities, typically reducing energy and maintenance costs by 10-20% with a payback of less than 18 months. Gridlogix delivers the best form of Green Energy, conservation.

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