ABSTRACT
Today, commercial and governmental energy consuming facilities are discretely managed by sophisticated building automation systems. Energy suppliers rely on sophisticated automation systems to manage the delivery of energy to their customers. The Enterprise Energy Management (EEM) industry emerged in the late nineties with new technology and services designed to help energy consumers and suppliers better understand energy consumption patterns and find curtailment solutions. Internet and web-based technologies have made a modest impact on enterprise energy and information management, but mostly in a reactive way and not in a proactive way.
The automation systems used by energy consumers, suppliers, and EEM providers, which have driven more efficiency into the chain of energy supply and consumption, remain disconnected by design. Some EEM companies have developed costly custom interfaces between their energy management solutions and consumer-owned building management systems.
Now it is time to consider the notion of automation system connectivity between any combination of energy consumers, suppliers, and EEM providers. This level of connectivity should be a standards based open information technology framework that allows secure and trusted communication between any of these separate entities. Such a framework should also allow additional entities such as regulators, ISO’s, and equipment manufacturers to connect and access data from consumer, utility, or EEM owned energy management systems.
The IT world has created and defined such a framework for integration and interoperability; it is known as the “XML Web Services Architecture.” XML web services is not a human-machine interface via a web browser, but rather a machine-to-machine interface using the transport protocols of the Internet – independent of hardware, operating systems and programming languages. The next generation energy management solutions are now embracing XML web services as the standard for integration with enterprise business systems.
