Preparing for Climate Change through Energy Internet and eVehicles: How Web 2.0 and SOA could help save electricity

Energy Internet and eVehicles Overview

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to prepare society for inevitable climate change. To date most people have been focused on how to reduce Green House Gas emissions, but now there is growing recognition that regardless of what we do to mitigate against climate change the planet is going to be significantly warmer in the coming years with all the attendant problems of more frequent droughts, flooding, sever storms, etc. As such we need to invest in solutions that provide a more robust and resilient infrastructure to withstand this environmental onslaught especially for our electrical and telecommunications systems and at the same time reduce our carbon footprint.

Linking renewable energy with high speed Internet using fiber to the home combined with autonomous eVehicles and dynamic charging where vehicle's batteries are charged as it travels along the road, may provide for a whole new "energy Internet" infrastructure for linking small distributed renewable energy sources to users that is far more robust and resilient to survive climate change than today's centralized command and control infrastructure. These new energy architectures will also significantly reduce our carbon footprint. For more details please see:

Using autonomous eVehicles for Renewable Energy Transportation and Distribution: http://goo.gl/bXO6x and http://goo.gl/UDz37

Free High Speed Internet to the Home or School Integrated with solar roof top: http://goo.gl/wGjVG

High level architecture of Internet Networks to survive Climate Change: https://goo.gl/24SiUP

Architecture and routing protocols for Energy Internet: http://goo.gl/niWy1g

How to use Green Bond Funds to underwrite costs of new network and energy infrastructure: https://goo.gl/74Bptd

Thursday, November 1, 2007

How Web 2.0 and SOA could help save electricity

[This a good example of the power and flexibility of SOA and Web 2.0. These tools allow integration with various network services as well. Inocybe, for example, allows web services to interconnect power devices with network services -- www.inocybe.ca and is ideal for integration with Green Broadband initiatives as mentioned in my previous post. Some excerpts from NetworkWorld article--BSA

http://www.networkworld.com/supp/2007/ndc6/102207-pnnl-ibm-soa-case-study.ht
ml?netht=102307dailynews2&&nladname=102307dailynews

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Wash., decided to find out. With IBM as a partner, they built a demonstration network called GridWise that showed how an event-driven service-oriented architecture (SOA) can be used to build a power marketplace that lets residential and commercial customers change their electricity consumption nearly in real time, based on price and other factors. During the yearlong, Energy Department-sponsored marketplace demonstration, customers spent less money on power, and utilities easily accommodated spikes in demand without affecting service levels.

The marketplace, an SOA application ran on an IBM WebSphere Application Server at PNNL and received data in real time from various Web services about electricity's current wholesale price and most recent closing price, as well as whether those prices were trending up or down. It communicated with specialized, "smart" appliances at participants' sites via IBM-developed middleware built within what IBM calls its event-driven architecture (EDA) framework and running on the WebSphere server. The EDA middleware provided the link between the transaction-oriented marketplace and the more physical world of the controls-based appliances. "Using event-based programming, we bridged between the control-systems world and the SOA-transaction world," says Ron Ambrosio, manager of Internet-scale control systems at IBM. "It let us build applications that are more control-like."

Via Web services, the virtual thermostats would bid a certain price into the marketplace based on the current temperature in the house, what the user's preferences were, and how responsive they wanted to be to changing prices.

Every five minutes, the marketplace would take those bids and determine a new clearing price for electricity. The new price would then flow out from the SOA marketplace through an event bus to all the virtual devices, kicking off their reaction.

In fact, Pratt estimates that adopting an SOA-EDA market-based approach across the United States could result in huge savings in power-grid infrastructure. "We are going to build a half a trillion dollars of new generation, transmission and distribution facilities in the United States in 20 years just to meet the load growth of our population and economy," he says. "And we can save at least 10%, maybe 20%, of that investment with these distributed, Internet-type control approaches." .