I've been a little busy lately and don't have time for a full-blown blog post, so again we'll have to settle for some quick hits that I've taken note of lately:

• Recently I've been reading Greg Pahl's fascinating book, The Citizen-Powered Energy Handbook.  It's full of fascinating practical information about medium-scale renewable energy projects, which citizen groups and municipalities can undertake.  Pahl is a champion of Community Supported Energy (CSE), a co-operative model of renewable energy production not unlike the more popular Community Supported Agriculture (CSA).  Most CSAs I'm familiar with are well behind the technological curve and could benefit tremendously from even simple web-based technology for facilitating membership signup and horizontal communications; I'm sure the same could be said for CSEs.  (I've been thinking about websites for community supported agriculture for a long time, but I never seem to get the chance to put together a good CSA website solution.)
• OpenADR is an open-source demand-response system.  As far as I know demand-response is really making its presence felt only in the enterprise and commercial sectors, so hopefully OpenADR will help expand the market to include a wider swatch of commercial buildings as well as some residential buildings.  (h/t Earth2Tech)
• OpenPDC appears to be a promising open-source platform for aggregating and analyzing the health of the electrical grid, courtesy of the TVA.  (h/t Earth2Tech, again)
• PeoplePower is working on an open source wireless home automation network solution, which could be a great improvement on the elegant, but somewhat hobbyist-only, solution that is Tweet-A-Watt. (h/t Earth2Tech for the hat trick)
• EcoFactor is developing a smart thermostat, meant to reduce energy needed for space heating.  I'd be fascinated to see those algorithms!  (h/t - guess who?)
• Scientific Conservation, Inc. has recently released software to predict building energy use accurately.  The idea is to provide additional motivation for efficiency retrofits, by demonstrating return on investment more effectively than traditional modeling approaches.  That's well and good, but it makes me wonder whether or not it would be possible to use the tool in concert with a large database of information about buildings - from a municipal government's licensing board, let's say.  That would make it possible to identify a large set of buildings which would benefit from retrofits rapidly, and to prioritize the retrofits based on current or projected energy use.
• Mariah Power has released an incredibe iPhone application to measure wind speed in your backyard, to assess the feasibility of placing a turbine there.

I'm beginning to think I should pull together a library of open source projects on renewable energy, energy efficiency, and the like.  That could be a fun project for the holidays!

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.

Earlier this week, Riversimple announced unveiled an "open source" hydrogen-powered car, according to the BBC (with a tip of the hat to Earth2Tech for the lead). A partnership with fuel company BOC will allow the drivers of its ten prototype vehicles to buy hydrogen in their home towns; the goal is to build a national hydrogren infrastructure one city at a time.

What's most interesting about the car, from my perspective, is the open source approach to design. Riversimple will give the designs to the 40 Fires Foundation, which will make them available under an open source model. The goal is to make it possible for the cars to be manufactured on a small scale in many different localities; as manufacturers tweak and improve the design, the improvements will be contributed back to the 40 Fires community.

To put it mildly, this is a new approach to building cars, and a fascinating one. There has been some talk about small-scale manufacturing as the foundation for local sustainable economies - for example, see Decentralization and Small-Scale Manufacturing: The Basis of Sustainable Regions? in the Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning (2004; subscription required). Riversimple's approach is a significant step forward along these lines. It remains to be seen whether small-scale manufacturing of cars is even remotely economically feasible; auto manufacturing tends to have high overhead costs, meaning that large-scale production is key to keeping prices affordable. On the other hand, the new Riversimple car will be considerably lighter than most cars, weighing in at 350kg, and might benefit from an overhauled under-the-hood design. I'm no expert in assembly lines, but perhaps these innovations will make small-scale manufacturing feasible.

I am also interested to see how the open source community organized around the designs will emerge. As a dedicated Drupal developer, I have a great deal of first-hand experience with an open source community which is organized exceptionally well. I think 40 Fires - and indeed, any open source community - could take a few pages from Drupal's book. The key to Drupal's success as an open source community, from my perspective, is the clear organization and extensibility of the core product, i.e. the Drupal source code. That clarity of design means that there are many avenues for a developer to step up and contribute to the community. At the same time, Drupal's loose licensing requirements, in which all contributions are released under the General Public License, make it possible for anyone to profit from an in-depth knowledge of Drupal (which is, indeed, the better part of our business model here at Lightbulb First.)

In that vein, I hope 40 Fires loosens its restrictions a bit. The foundation has already, and wisely, decided to add a moderate licensing fee of £ 5 - 10 per car onto the designs, so its economic survival is safe, as long as the cars themselves are commercially viable. But the designs are licensed under a Creative Commons non-commercial license, meaning that "the designs can be used, modified, distributed under the same license terms but not for commercial purposes", according to the foundation. It seems to me that modification and distribution for commercial purposes will be important to the success of the community - that will help provide the proper incentives to get manufacturers to contribute back to the community. Of course, designing an open source community for car design is not exactly well-trod ground. 40 Fires is well aware that of the potential for mistakes, and is actively seeking input on its open source policies. I may try and send them some ideas, and if you have some experience with open source communities, I highly encourage you to do the same!

Whether the small-scale manufacturing revolution takes off is still a big question, and the design of the 40 Fires open source community forms one small part of that question. But I think this experiment in sustainable transportation is extremely exciting, and I am eager to see what comes next.