[CAnet - news] How Web 2.0 and SOA could help save electricity

For more information on this item please visit my blog at 
http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
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[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."
.

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