One Stop Party Shop

The Sector Information Technology Forgot

Information technology has mostly passed the energy sector by… but for how long?

Information Technology revolutionized the way we buy things (Amazon, eBay), how we get information (Google, Wikipedia, the decline of newspapers), and how we interact with out peers (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn.)  Yet so far, it has had little, if any transformative impact on energy.  Tim Healy , CEO of EnerNOC (ENOC), the world’s largest  third party provider of Demand Response to utilities and grid operators, thinks that’s about to change.

Demand Response (DR) began decades ago with Interruptible loads and Interruptible rates, driven by simple economics.  It ‘s much cheaper to pay users to temporarily curtail usage during peak periods than is is to build new capacity.  Under Interruptible loads and rate, utilities give large customers favorable electricity prices in return for an agreement that the utility can turn off certain parts of their equipment (interruptible loads) or their entire power supply (interruptible rates) for a few hours per year in the event there is not enough spare generation capacity to meet demand.  My first encounter with DR came as far back as the late 1980′s, when I was an undergraduate at Harvey Mudd College in Southern California.  At the time, the college was on an interruptible rate plan.  I don’t recall any power outages because of the interruptible rate, most likely because I was not on campus at the time.  For an institution where most students and faculty are away during the hottest months of the year when Southern California energy demand peaks, an interruptible rate must have made a lot of financial sense.

But interruptible rates are limited in their application.  Most businesses and institutions are less able to compromise on power reliability.  That’s where Information Technology (IT) comes in.  By selectively controlling machinery, lighting, and HVAC equipment, modern DR providers such as EnerNOC can wring better coordinated and targeted power reductions from facilities without disrupting mission-critical operations.

Because types of energy use are so varied across institutional, commercial, industrial, and government sectors, there are few cross-cutting DR measures that apply everywhere.  Instead, EnerNOC works with each facility or business owner individually to identify the energy services they can do without for short periods of time, and connects those devices to monitor/controllers that feed into a central Network Operations Center (the NOC in EnerNOC) where aggregate load can be controlled as easily as any power plant.  One way to look at DR is as a virtual power plant , that can substitute for new supply-side resources such as gas turbines.  Such virtual power plants can not only shave peak loads, but improve grid stability in other ways as well.

stood up and left the party « One Stop Thought Shop

Roseanne Barr: Fame's a bitch.

It's hard to tell whether one is winning or, in fact, losing once one starts to think of oneself as a commodity, or a product, or a character, or a voice for the downtrodden. It's called losing perspective. Fame's a bitch.

It's hard to handle and drives you nuts.

Yes, it's true that your sense of entitlement grows exponentially with every perk until it becomes too stupendous a weight to walk around under, but it's a cut-throat business, show, and without the perks, plain ol' fame and fortune just ain't worth the trouble.

"Winning" in Hollywood means not just power, money and complimentary smoked-salmon pizza, but also that everyone around you fails just as you are peaking. When you become No 1, you might begin to believe, as Cher once said in an interview, that you are "one of God's favourite children", one of the few who made it through the gauntlet and survived.

The idea that your ego is not ego at all but submission to the will of the Lord starts to dawn on you as you recognise that only by God's grace did you make it through the raging attack of idea pirates and woman haters, to ascend to the top of Bigshit Showbiz Mountain.

All of that sounds very much like the diagnosis for bipolar disorder, which more and more stars are claiming to have these days. I have it, as well as several other mental illnesses, but then, I've always been a trendsetter, even though I'm seldom credited with those kinds of things.

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