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Reducing Electricity Bills For Buildings With XML
Roland Piquepaille writes "Even if new buildings are connected to Internet, they usually don't communicate between themselves. And when it comes to electricity, these buildings are selfish and consume what they want without any coordination. Now, an XML-based system developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is using Web services to collectively adjust power usage to variations in price. In 'Internet ups power grid IQ,' Technology Research News reports that the system was successfully tested for two weeks on five commercial buildings. 'Beyond price, systems could be programmed to respond to changes in air quality or to tap into sustainable energy sources.' You'll find more details, pictures and references in this overview. [Additional note: The system described here is completely different to the one mentioned in Slashdot last March in Building the Energy Internet.]"
And, how much do the servers who calculate this consume?
"Reducing Electricity Bills For Buildings With XML"? Is the "With XML" part really necessary? Can we stop pretending like XML is the reason that something succeeded? Almost every time I hear someone touting an XML-based solution, that same solution would have been just as successful without XML. Yes, XML is nice, but for most products, unless those products are adhering to an open standard that uses XML, XML offers little more than plain text.
While this system seems like a Good Idea(tm), it seems to me that the whole "done in XML" thing isn't a big deal. That's the technological tool they chose to use for this task. Good for them, but pretty much irrelevant to the overall system.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
of this technology is for buildings to get built/retrofitted w/solar panels. Then have the system sell the unused energy the solar produces back to the utilities at the highest price and buy energy at the lowest. This would require energy storage cells, though.
P2P - Yup. In many areas if you "push" electricity onto the grid you get paid for it. Push juice during peak hours and pull during off peak and you could save money.
...why not just reduce the power usage? This seems like its just being used to use cheaper prices to justify being wasteful.
I don't understand why they would use these systems to respond to price changes. I mean, if you can get by with less power (less money) why would you be using more power? Am I missing something? It makes sense for this to be brownout protection, since you could shut down unnecessary services to keep from everything going black... but I don't understand why you would, say, run the AC at full when the price is low and half when the price is high, when you can easily just run it at half the entire time.
I think my principles are reachin' an all time low
Is it just me or is this just more XML hype? The fact that their system uses XML doesn't actually add any new functionality. They could have chosen anything else really... as long as the systems communicated with the same ontology and language.
I'm scared to fathom the possibilities of PHBs reading this story's headline, and calling up a meeting with all the programmers. He'll announce: from this day forward, our organization will program everything in XML to increase efficiency, enhance synergy, and become more competitive in the market place, while increasing our return on investment! Meanwhile all the programmers look stunned or they're smacking their foreheads.
"There is no spoon." - The Matrix
Even if new buildings are connected to Internet, they usually don't communicate between themselves. And when it comes to electricity, these buildings are selfish and consume what they want without any coordination.
Am I missing something here? I just reread the articles and I didn't see anything about buildings communicating between themselves. . . I saw an article about buildings configured to respond to energy price information . . . but this information is not shared between buildings. In fact there is a diagram at this link from the original post . . . and it shows XML sent from a central center, not between buildings.
In fact . . . Quoting from the same link: Beyond price, systems could be programmed to respond to changes in air quality, to participate in emissions trading schemes, to tap into sustainable energy sources, to coordinate the responses of groups of buildings, and possibly to minimize local brownout threats and price spikes, according to Connors. "There's still some wiggle room. But, all in all, it's a very cool beginning," he said.
The article says that one could . . . coordinate responses between buildings
The people who did this did not make buildings communicate which each other . . . they said that the could use the same technology to do this. The original post is at best misleading. At worst just plain wrong (according to the articles it cites). Either way it strikes me as an example of exagerated irresponsible journalism.
No, no. You have it wrong. Buildings that have XML have higher electricity costs, probably because of the added bandwidth to ship the verbose data format around. The article is how to reduce your energy costs if you have one of those unfortunately designed buildings.
Compare it to "Reducing energy costs for buildings with skylights" Its not that the skylight reduces the energy costs. It is the reason why you need to reduce your energy costs.
do i care if the system use xml?
it's like highlightinh a calculator for using binary in the insides!
He's not saying XML is crap (though it is). He's just saying that the fact that XML was used doesn't have anything to do with the core idea. It makes just as much sense to say "Reducing Electricity Bills For Buildings with Intel processors" (if that's what the servers happened to be running).
It's my understanding that XML is basically just a standard way of saying what a [document] contains. Something like a format which says:
1. This is how you specify what type of data is in this block.
2. This is how you specify what should be used to look at data of type 'x'.
To me, that's about it. It sill requires that the receiving system knows what the heck to do with data of type 'x', or where to get the thing that number 2 above says is required to do something with data of type 'x'.
If that's all it is, I really don't understand why so many folks are so happy about XML. While I agree that it is great for looking at a document and saying, "OK, this document has data types 'x', 'y', and 'z'." If an [application] knows what to do with those data types, then great. Otherwise, the file is useless.
Granted, there is great value in having a standardized method of saying what's in a file (after all, a good bit of file formats and OS protection and the like is simply determining what the heck type of data is in a file). I think the problem is that for some reason, somwhere, "XML" got billed as doing something more than just wrapping data contents in some sort of standard metadata. For instance, in this article, you could have sent pricing information out in plain text, or binary, or whatever. They chose to use XML because... well, we'd have to ask the developers.
As far as I can tell, XML simply specifies how you tell people how you intend them to treat data, but doesn't have any mechanism by which that intent can be enforced or enabled.
I'd love to hear your comments on this, and definitely any clarfications.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
My old roommate worked for a firm that made automatic real-time meter readers and associated equipment to help facilitate real-time pricing and usage control.
Managing the grid turns out to be a problem. If buildings or factories are programmed to shed load as the price increases then you can cause a situation where the load drop causes a price drop which signals the systems to start up again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Additionally there is the problem that some systems can respond quickly (reduce to minimum lighting) while others have much longer startup/shutdown times (assembly lines, utility peaker plants).
Balancing everything to prevent gaming the system and to ensure reliabilty will have to be addressed before such systems can reach widespread use.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
The real trick is convincing both companies (A and B) that it's in their best interest to provide this non-proprietary interface.
And there-in lies the rub. It is simply not in a company's best interest to play nicely with competitors or adhere to standards that make it easy to replace company A's product with company B's product. The only way that it happens is if an external agency (usually the gov't, rarely the market) forces all of the players to abide by a standard.
Sometimes, companies will adhere to open-standards, but only if they don't have vested interests in the other side of the interface. (IOW, they don't stand to profit if they manage to lock the customer into a proprietary interface.)
All of which is why I chuckle every time the idea of interchangeable data standards comes around. (e.g. EDI, XML, web services)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I understand the point you made with your scenario. But what about the scenario where Company A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M,N, and O all use one standard and company P uses a proprietary standard. Most consumers are going to choose the other companies products so that when it breaks or they want to upgrade they can fix it with tools they already own or replace it with parts they have on hand.
Like you admitted could happen, this is a scenario where market forces are creating an open standard. Although I'm not sure it is all that rare.
Most cars run off the same types of gasoline and have similar controls (there aren't too many hand operated throttles). Most screws are either flathead or phillips. Pipes and most building materials all adhere to standards. Perhaps the reason market forces aren't forcing software companies to adhere to standards is because their customer base is too ignorant to consider that when shopping for solutions.
If someone tried to sell me a car that I couldn't fix because all the screws and bolts had heads that required a special tool that only they made and sold for 50 Bajillion dollars; well, I'd go to their competitor who uses the standard bolts and screws and I don't know anyone who wouldn't barring fairly competitive products from each company.