GE Minds and Machines 2016 - November 15,16 - Pier 48 SF.

Was a real pleasure to attend GE Minds and Machines 2016, November 15,16, Pier 48 SF.

Highlights:
Current EMS Announcement. Here is a great talk by John Gordon. Also many new Current partners. Analytika is but one.

Meridium APM. Analytics for risk, availability and value management. Some great technical points made by Meridium. High in mind was a comment in an APM technical session that the majority of faults are not time related.

Many new players in the GE Digital ecosystem. TCS making great use of Predix Analytics. BitStew helping utilities. Too many to go into detail.

State of Massachusetts Internet of Things Day - May 12, 2015.

Morning and afternoon May 12, 2015 event at the MA State House about Massachusett's commitment to Internet of Things - IoT. Organized by Tech Caucus - Senator Karen Spilka with support of MassTLC.

Remarks by Senate President Rosenberg and Speaker DeLeo. Keynote by Chris Rezendes of INEX Advisors. Breakouts on Government, Healthcare, Energy and Transportation.

Toys, Open Source Hardware, Littlebits.

Seems like new important technologies can often get a beach head in toys or playthings. Batteries, Energy harvesting, AI and Watson... Regardless - toys are fun.

It is said there are five proto-toys - seen from the earliest times: ball, doll (including animals), stick/stylus, string/rope/cord, musical-instrument (like wind and percussion instruments) .

Magnifying glass, magnets, and telescopes are some nice more "advanced" toys. Blocks and vehicles come along too. My personal favorites are classic construction toys.

The modern age has brought electronics and tablets as toys. Especially electronic toys and kits. Brings to mind the venerable first handhelds.

At the OHS2013 at MIT was introduced to Littlebits. They gave away a small sample kit. Very intriguing.

And the idea has gotten legs. Search for littlebits pops up many things. There is an Internet of Things connection with the cloudbit.

So it seems littlebits is becoming the Internet of Things construction toy. They want to be an app store for hardware designs with the bitlab.

Littlebits are in many ways "perfect"... though one caveat is cost (for a toy)... but it is understandable. And it leads one to think of alternatives (and a marketplace) - which has its ecosystem benefits (for littlebits and others). Might come back to that in a later blog entry.

For now thinking of ways that the deluxe Popular Science kit might be used -(sorry)- played with *grin*.

Early Failures Sour Future Efforts. Energy Efficiency. 3D Printing.

That early failures sour future efforts is almost self evident. Mentioned in piece about 3D printing that failures (or weak successes) often sour further exploration. Various are working on getting barriers to success lowered. Better tools. Better examples. Better materials. Here is a Greentech article with a similar sentiment, on how low hanging fruit in energy efficiency might actually poison worthwhile efforts.

Staying on Track Blogging.

Stay on Track Blogging 2015 by thoughtlight, LLC, Thursday, February 5, 2015 from 6 to 8 PM.

Great group, presentation and ideas. At 50 Milk Street at new(ish) CIC Boston. Visit to the space worthwhile. Takeaways:
- schedule regular blogging
- images always worthwhile (even a little relevance is fine).
- okay to curate or review.

So as a part of the scheduling "exercise": Editorial calendar : (and maybe this has some tongue in cheek spirit *grin*):

Thousand blogs by end of main career (next two decades). Smoothed average: four to five blogs a month.

Current feature: IoT. Ongoing emphasis: Energy and metrology. With a mix of hobbies, book reviews, sociology, robotics, manufacturing, design, toys, transportation, travel, science, engineering and so on.

How Many Tonnes of CO2 in a ....? And How Much is it Worth?

CO2 value and content? 

Short article in Dec 14, 2013 Economist p70. Easy to miss.
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21591601-some-firms-are-preparing-carbon-price-would-make-big-difference-carbon-copy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Trading_Scheme
ETS price $5 - "EUA" (which appears to be a tonne of CO2 'equivalents')
http://www.pointcarbon.com/news/euets/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_credit
California price - very roughly $12.

But for businesses internally: $6 to $60.
Non-energy companies around $10.
Energy companies around $30-40.

So how much CO2 in, say, a barrel of oil?

0.43 equiv-tonne CO2/barrel.

EPA: http://www.epa.gov/cleanenergy/energy-resources/refs.html

Comprehensive, yet simple open book calcs.

Given carbon credit (tonne of CO2, ETS EUA, etc.) prices above; what fraction of an energy unit cost is this cost/price?

http://www.oil-price.net/ Barrel of oil Jan 2014 about $100.
0.43 equiv-tonne CO2/barrel @ $10-40/equiv-tonne CO2 implies $5-20/barrel carbon price… five to twenty percent of oil price. Not insignificant, but not so high as to set off reality alarms.

"Theoretical" societal CO2 cost of $33/tonne implies $15/barrel.

http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/EPAactivities/economics/scc.html (using %3 rate at 2013?)

How much does it cost to produce a barrel of oil?

EIA: http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=367&t=6

[And this excludes transportation and such.]  Very roughly $30/barrel.

Observations for rules of thumb:

“Market” cost divided by two gives roughly sum of production, societal and transport.

Production cost divided by two gives roughly societal cost.

PBS - America Revealed - Yul Kwon

My wife happened by this television program, and put me onto America Revealed on PBS http://www.pbs.org/america-revealed/

Host Yul Kwan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yul_Kwon

Stories on transportation, manufacturing, energy and food http://www.pbs.org/america-revealed/story/

Have interest in them all. Have blogged on these topics. The series presentations have something for everyone. Learned something from each.

Batteries and Energy Storage

Many friends and colleagues are deeply devoted to Lithium battery technologies. There is some great research at my alma mater Dalhousie University.
http://fizz.phys.dal.ca/~dahn/jeffDahn.html

But, though not very exciting, the past, present and potential of Ni-x chemistries and ultracapacitors seem very real
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NiMH_battery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93hydrogen_battery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93iron_battery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nickel%E2%80%93zinc_battery
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NiCad

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_double-layer_capacitor

One must make the mental leap to supporting such with electronics and devices (charge and discharge) tuned to a charge bucket instead of a chemical cell.

And when it comes to equations involving battery mass and volume (transportable), it is hard to beat Lithium systems.

LED Lighting - Update

Posted on LED lighting in last few days of 2011.
http://albertputnam.blogspot.com/2011/12/led-lighting.html
Here is a nice roundup article from Greentech Media, Jeff St. John.
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/LED-Roundup-Redwood-Systems-Lumenergi-IKEA-and-the-GSA

Smart lighting comes up... and always seems to go down the wireless path. Why not think about where the power comes from differently? What if power came with your communications? LEDs need much less power, and what if you had a standard way of delivering low power via the network?

Presto: 802.3af and 802.3at Power over Ethernet (PoE).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_over_Ethernet

Will discuss more about PoE and LEDs in subsequent posts.

The Energy Guru – Arthur Rosenfeld

Saw an LA Times article in January 2010 about Arthur Rosenfeld.
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jan/11/business/la-fi-rosenfeld11-2010jan11

One could do worse than Rosenfeld’s list of accomplishments in the energy field…

Having your own Wikipedia article
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_H._Rosenfeld
Getting an effect named after you
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenfeld_Effect
Being one of the last students of Enrico Fermi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Fermi
Winning the Fermi Prize.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_Prize
Being involved with the development of compact fluorescents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp
Pushing the idea that it is cheaper to conserve than to build new power plants
http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2009/11/energy-saving-much-cheaper-than-building-power-plants

Optimizer Energer Energist

Friends and family ask what I do, and it takes a couple of sentences to describe products and services to help people save energy, reduce maintenance, move data, and improve governance. Lawyers and doctors and physicists and accountants and politicians and economists have it much easier. They can describe their professional services in a word. My thought is to make up a couple of professional classes.

If an "X"er/""X"ant/"X"ist/"X"ian is a professional expert in the "X" field who understands the science, technology, sociology and economics of "X". And offers professional services in "X"... then

1. Energist or Energer: Professional expert in the energy field. Understands the science, technology, sociology and economics of energy. Offers professional (often technical) energy consultation.

2. Optimizer: Professional expert in the optimization field. Understands the science, technology, sociology and economics of optimization. Offers professional (often technical) optimization consultation.

So I would style myself an Optimizer with a specialization in Energy and Metrology.

There are other parallels to such professionals too. It is considered "comic" (except amoung family and closest friends) to ask professionals specific service questions, without tacit realization you are engaging them in their profession (and the livelihood by which they feed their children). It is the age old funny story of meeting an orthopedic surgeon at a dinner party and asking about your backache.

It is considered declasse as a customer (but not as friend or family) to ask professionals to offer their service as an educational programme without paying a large multiple of the costs for the actual service itself. I mean if you, as a customer, ask a lawyer/doctor to teach you or your organization how to be a lawyer/doctor, he/she is well within their rights to ask for ten to twenty times their hourly rate to teach you how to do their job. I guess I am only bemused with individuals, but company-types should know better.

On the flip side of the equation, that is why some companies which have core law and finance needs have in-house lawyers and accountants, but they are paid well and have been trained in professional schools (which had a high initial cost) and are key to the company. The company realizes the value of having devoted personnel in such a core company function.Most companies are not there yet for energy and generalized optimization.

Flow and Consumption

The most basic metrology, no matter what you are actually measuring, comes down to two basic things FLOW and CONSUMPTION. Beyond that there can be issues of qualities of what flows or is consumed. And there can be issues of the toppolgical/spatial distribution of flow/consumption. For the sharp, FLOW is just the time rate of change of CONSUMPTION (dCONSUMPTION/dt), but it is sometimes thought of inversely as CONSUMPTION being the accumulation of FLOW over time (the time integral of FLOW).

Enough generalities. Water is a good concrete thing to think about. We can measure its flow, or we can measure totals of water consumed. One can look at qualities of water too like temperature or purity/salinity.

Electricity is the omniprsent modern meterable. And it is the most often confused. One loses sight of Energy=CONSUMPTION and Power=FLOW at one's peril. Too many people lightly ask "How much Power am I using?" when they really mean Energy. Most people understand interest versus principle/capital better (which is also arcane at best), and that is part of why we have such problems getting the rational economics of energy policy right.

Natural Gas and Steam are much like water, though pressure and changes of "quality" due to the nature of the plumbing/transport system are key for gases.

Oil flow tends to be exactly analagous to water.

Then one can go to more exotic materials like printing ink in a printing plant, or grain in a feedmill, or spirits in a distillery, soda cans in a vending system, bits in a router, or even coins/bills in a cash control system.

And one can go to smaller or larger scale. It is one thing to talk about flow past a given point through a given conduit. A network of meters demands a topological analysis, and there are economies to be had through understanding detailed distribution.

Think about why people use just in time manufacturing and ask how they could do such without monitoring flow in the supply network.

"Let's start at the very beginning, a very good place to start"

Apologies to the writers allied with the "Sound of Music".
The first thing I have to figure out is how to make sure my postings go smootly to archive and I do NOT end up with a page that has to load over a thousand objects so that people can read my post from the middle of 2010.

My plan is to muse about energy and metrology and other things which interest me.
Those things might include:
Travel - like to Japan, Britain and Russia.
Trains - both real and in models and fiction - like in Japan and Europe.
Complex interfaces - like those in trains and air or space craft.
Energy - conserving it, measuring it, undestanding its science, technology and sociolology.
Virtual systems - machines, services and so on.