A couple of months ago, I had the distinct pleasure of visiting Boston, MA-based EnerNOC, a demand-response company which arranges deals between utility companies and commercial buildings to reduce energy usage within commercial buildings in order to prevent avoid peak power usage. EnerNOC negotiates contracts in which commercial buildings reduce their energy usage whenever power usage within a utility's jurisdiction threatens to overwhelm the grid; building owners are paid for their compliance with the program.
One of the secrets to EnerNOC's success is their ability to interface with building management systems (BMS) at commercial buildings via remote communication. A buildling managment system is an automated system for managing a variety of systems within a commerical building, including, among others, lighting and HVAC. If technically possible, EnerNOC attempts to add a demand-response control sequence to its partners' BMS, so that when utilities request a reduction in power usage, EnerNOC can push a switch and automatically reduce demand in a number of different buildings, without requiring human intervention. The company takes steps to ensure that the demand-response control sequences does not interfere with the business needs of its partners.
The success that EnerNOC has enjoyed - they have quickly managed to generate the equivalent of a gigawatt of clean power in just a couple of years - demonstrates the untapped potential of BMS to reduce energy usage in a variety of settings, and thereby to help address the global warming crisis. Unfortunately, these systems are usually proprietary systems which are tightly coupled with the hardware devices they control. The proprietary nature of BMS stifles innovation within this sector of the software market, because it prevents third-party software developers from inspecting and improving the software.
For similar reasons, third-party service providers are inhibited from introducing novel uses of BMS to reduce energy usage. To begin with a third-party provider must have familiarity with the BMS. On top of that, third party providers may wish to enhance a BMS to suit their energy efficiency services; in many cases, such enhancements are simply not possible. While EnerNOC has managed to overcome these limitations, there is plenty of room for improvement in the market. EnerNOC's partners tend to be very large commercial energy consumers, and, to my knowledge, there are no similar demand-response companies serving medium and small commercial energy consumers, or residential consumers.
An open specification for building management hardware, coupled with an open source building management system, could pave the way to improved energy use management in these sectors. Such a platform would allow a wide array of providers to gain expertise in building management systems, and to develop improvements and value-added services for these systems, in much the same way that EnerNOC has done for large-scale commercial energy consumers. Naturally, strong security measures would be absolutely crucial to such a platform; the opportunities for mischief in a BMS are significant. While some commerical building managers might be suspicious of an open source system controlling such sensitive systems as lighting and HVAC, I would argue that open source systems generally can offer much more rigorous security assurances than proprietary systems - wide exposure to the source code that many people have the opportunity to audit the software and fix security bugs quickly, as opposed to the typically much smaller groups in proprietary development settings.
There has been some progress in development of an open source BMS. The OpenLynx project promises to offer such a system. In fact, a new release of OpenLynx was due yesterday. While the SourceForge project page for OpenLynx doesn't yet include any source code, the project made an impressive show at the Connectivity Week conference in Santa Clara earlier this month. Hopefully, open source building management projects will continue to gather momentum, enabling third-party providers to organize additional sectors of the building energy management market.
