Newsletter – September 2017

THIS MONTH…..

• TRENDS
• EYE CATCHING
• FIRMWARE
• WORK PACKAGE PHASES
  
• THERMOSTAT DEVICE OPTIONS
• PROJECT NEEDS
  
• EXISTING CODE
• LASTLY

TRENDS

United States Electricity Price per KWH
Present and Past

EYE CATCHING

Demand Response
An article Honeywell Lyric product line is now capable of providing Demand Response functionality. An article Tata Power Delhi Distribution and the Russian Federal Test Centre have signed a Memorandum of Understanding for development of Smart Grid technologies. An article Itron stock price has risen considerably since their purchase of Comverge. An announcement Honeywell has acquired Nextnine for their Industrial Automation and Control offering. An article Enel completed their acquisition of EnerNOC. A report Western Europe to invest $133.7 billion in Smart Grid infrastructure by 2027. A survey of electricity customer purchasing preferences. An article electricity providers are researching new options to communicate with their customers. A purchase battle is in play for Oncor between Elliott Management and Berkshire Hathaway. A set of recommendations to mature HVAC control systems. A report home automation will grow exponentially in the next five years. An additional report supports this growth claim. An article Smart Thermostats are gaining adoption in both North America and Europe. Microsoft has released their first Smart Thermostat. Nest has released a lower cost Smart Thermostat. A research project to identify Smart Home efficiency improvement opportunities.

The second generation of the Smart Grid is occurring now. Financial strength is purchasing first generation organizations which have valuable resources but poor management. Hedge players are now in the market to advance their initial offerings and holdouts are now in the market. These actions are more about debt markets and financial engineering and less about energy markets and network engineering. History is clear on what is happening now and what will happen in a free market. Big money will make money by mass adoption. Proprietary does not feed mass adoption. Big money will move away from proprietary technology to make more money. Watch the Smart Grid, Demand Response, and Smart Thermostat markets move faster and faster to bring residential properties into Time of Use pricing.

Smart Grid – Security
A video describing the 2017 UK National Health Service cyberattack with comments at time stamp 50:40 stating the nature of the Smart Grid security construct today from the device perspective. The SANS reports of 13 June, 07 July, and 08 September 2017 identified credible evidence of electrical grid cyberattack vectors.

There is now no doubt an electrical grid cyberattack will succeed. It is unclear when a cyberattack on the electrical grid will succeed. Hopefully, the attack will not cost as much as the evidence indicates it will in terms of outages and restoring electrical service.

Feedback
We received more responses from our June 2017 newsletter than any other edition in the past few years. Comments included increased understanding of the impact on electrical grid availability from cyberattack, along with desire not to use proprietary technologies in the residential markets from fear an electronics manufacturer will not hold sufficient concern for the residential market. The feedback is encouraging to us, as it tells us the newsletter readers are now more engaged than we understood previously. The GNU remotecontrol team is thankful for the appreciation expressed to us by our newsletter readers.

FIRMWARE

GNU remotecontrol Firmware section of the software project had a rough summer regarding development efforts. We lost some resources due to Hurricane Harvey. We had some developers take employer mandated travel. We had a development environment migration effort stall due to little free time to complete the migration. We need more time, more people, or both. We will get there, but it will take longer with the available resources now recovering from team resource depletion and free time changes.

THERMOSTAT DEVICE OPTIONS

We shared in our March 2017 newsletter edition of our new section to both identify and discuss available Smart Thermostat options in consideration with internationally accepted technology standards. This section provides insight into each offering as new information becomes available.

Carrier
No new findings.

Ecobee
No new findings.

Honeywell
No new findings.

Microsoft
No information yet on their newest offering.

Nest
No information yet on their newest offering.

Sensi
No new findings.

WORK PACKAGE PHASES

GNU remotecontrol accomplishes productive work output through structured work packages. This approach helps to organize our efforts and keep things on track to achieve publishing our work. We have ten different phases for our work packages.

GNU remotecontrol Work Package Phases

Order	Label	Name
1	REQ	Requirements
2	DSG	Design
3	DEV	Development
4	UNT	Unit Testing
5	SYS	System Testing
6	UAT	User Acceptance Testing
7	DOC	Documentation
8	RLS	Release
9	TRN	Training
10	SPT	Support

The GNU remotecontrol team does not perform any work output outside of structured work packages.

PROJECT NEEDS

Staffing
GNU remotecontrol Project Help Wanted.

New Thermostats
Many people have asked us about adding other types of thermostats to GNU remotecontrol. There are three questions that need to be answered before we can offer GNU remotecontrol support for any IP thermostat. These questions are:

• How to CONNECT to it (NETWORK).
• How to READ from it (CODE).
• How to WRITE to it (CODE).

It is our hope to have dozens and dozens of thermostat types that work with GNU remotecontrol.

EXISTING CODE

Bugs
We have 0 new bugs and 0 fixed bugs since our last Blog posting. Please review these changes and apply to your GNU remotecontrol installation, as appropriate.

Tasks
We have 0 new tasks and 0 completed tasks since our last Blog posting. Please review these changes and apply to your GNU remotecontrol installation, as appropriate.

LASTLY

Whatever you do…..don’t get beat up over your Energy Management strategy. GNU remotecontrol is here to help simplify your life, not make it more complicated. Talk to us if you are stuck or cannot figure out the best option for your GNU remotecontrol framework. The chances are the answer you need is something we have already worked through. We would be happy to help you by discussing your situation with you.

…..UNTIL NEXT MONTH!

Why the Affero GPL?