Took a bit of time yesterday to run up to Long Beach and walk around the Energy Management Conference exhibit hall. I would have liked to attend the conference sessions, or perhaps speak at the conference, but I didn’t realize that I’d be around for it. Oh well, maybe next year.
Anyway, there were quite a few interesting concepts and ideas out there for not only monitoring power usage, but also for reducing power usage and power spending. Daylight tracking sunlights, ice based cooling systems (makes ice during the night with lower cost power, then uses the ice during the day instead of running A/C compressors), that sort of thing.
Also in attendance at the show where a few consultants who do power profiling of your business and buildings. I like the idea of that, and truthfully never really thought of doing it as a business (at least until yesterday) but being in the IT field, with a solid background in building systems, I think that Voodoo may start offering a service along those lines. Though I’d rather just do the work to fix the problems that other auditors find. And help people make better choices from the early stages of a project.
As usual though, the exhibitors that interested me the most where the control systems guys. Slowly but surely they are moving away from weird proprietary control schemes to straight IP based controls. I can’t wait until they all get to the point where IP is the control scheme, and you don’t need proprietary software to control the systems. They are so close to that now (at least some of them) that I’m excited for what I will see coming in the next year. I think that someone will finally get there. And as soon as they do I’m ready to start deploying it.
Though that does bring up the issue of security on converged networks. Something that we’ll get to shortly.