Looking for a Business Model in the Utility Closet

It seems almost weekly now that I hear complaints about power prices and more importantly, the sound of 'Death Spiral' alarm bells. It would appear that electricity utilities across the globe are finding it more and more difficult to charge their customers enough and yet fend off the threat of 'Grid Defection' and the impact of Distributed Generation. In Australia, we see governments doing their best to defend their investments by reducing incentives and programs that were introduced to address climate change and a demanding voter population.

There is plenty of history behind all this, but the question remains; what lies ahead for large utilities? 

What we are witnessing is, as always, a change driven by market forces. The issue is, that the utility stakeholders have been so used to being the primary player, they have been caught off-guard by the combination of climate change policy and the economics of new technology and large-scale manufacturing. A key factor that has brought about this 'surprise' is the long life-cycle and investment period of utility assets combined  with good old change denial. Thus we are seeing the beginning of an 'Energy Revolution' whether the utilities like it or not - People Power!

For a long time, the customer has had little choice; connect to the grid, or to not connect to the grid. Alternatives such as private fossil-fueled generation were laden with cost, inconvenience and uncertainty. With the advent of mature power electronics and Photo-Voltaic (PV) technologies manufactured on a large scale there is more choice. Of course other technologies such as wind and geothermal power have entered onto the scene, however they have tended to manifest in large-scale plants which are much more manageable for utilities. Additionally, small-scale credit is seemingly free-flowing to support the upfront capital costs that plagued the early adopters.

In the beginning, PV was adopted as a 'green' option by the high-end of town. To look good and feel good. Climate change politics sought to bring these feelings to the masses by introducing incentives. What can I say? It worked. But it is genuinely a threat to the business-as-usual utility model. In response to the reduction in revenue brought about by distributed generation, utilities have increased c/kWh tariffs and daily connection charges. However, the relative increase in daily connection charges reflects a reduction in per-customer demand and the need to maintain revenue to pay for long-term investments. From a utility perspective, they're managing their budget. Great.

However from a customer perspective, there's a couple of scenarios...

On one hand you have your working poor. The don't have the income to leverage their own generation to reduce the impact of tariff increases. Their only real option to try and cope is to reduce consumption through energy efficiency, a reduction in lifestyle or, of course, to find a better paid job. In my mind, their best option is energy efficiency, though that still comes with an upfront cost.

On the other hand, you have those customers that have already, or are considering distributed generation. The increase in tariffs pushes them to reduce consumption, then install generation. With the current trend that sees Feed In Tariffs (FITs) paying well under the cost of energy to the consumer, energy storage (self consumption) is looking attractive. The increase in daily charges just provides an additional incentive to get off the grid altogether and bump up the capacity of their energy storage. Of course, from an investment perspective, it is clear that grid connected electricity charges are only going to increase, and the cost trends of manufacturing will only make the alternatives cheaper in the future.

But we still haven't answered the question; how do utilities transform their business to survive? Can they survive?

At the end of the day, each customer is different. And that is primarily what distributed generation is addressing; the needs of some customers who have the desire and ability to invest funds to provide cost and energy security. On the other hand, the utility restricts itself (or are restricted by regulation) to provide a 'standard' service to each customer (at the residential scale at least). What if a utility was able to offer a cost-reflective tariff based upon supply reliability? And a cost-reflective tariff based upon energy contract term? These demands could be provided with a range of technical solutions including the normal grid-connect through to grid-connected, storage backed, PV installations purchased through the utility. But the utility has to be prepared to deal with providing tailored services to customers on a per-customer basis! That's the quantum leap.

In many ways this has some similarities to the broadband and telephony market; although there are some flaws there too of course. However individual customers can choose a supplier based upon network speed and reliability, contract term and service cost.

The advantage that a utility has in the energy market is scale. This is only an advantage if they can match up consumers with products and demand with generation. To leverage this scale, it requires one thing, data. And lots of it. For example...

Where the majority of a community or suburb values reliability, the grid could be beefed up to provide redundancy, or a community-scale PV power station with energy storage could be installed to meet these demands. Demands that are driven by the willingness of those customers to pay for it. And it's likely to be more cost effective than meeting this need with per-household systems. When the surrounding grid suffers an outage, the community runs from it's own supply, when the surround grid supply returns, the utility will maintain a return on its aging investment.

On the contrary, where these is demand for cheap electricity at a lower reliability, then the utility has the ability to provide basic, yet robust infrastructure that tolerates more frequent outages and possibly provides demand management opportunities.

But how do you know these communities exist? How do you know what the energy demand is? How do you transition from BAU grid supply to stand-alone grid supply? How can you justify the long-term investment and reduce the risk of Grid Defection? By collecting data. And then analysing it! It amazes me how much data that utilities already collect, but don't take full advantage of it. The advent of 'smart meter' is likely to only make this worse in the short-term, but I feel it is a necessary investment.

Could a utility offer a integrated PV / Battery / Inverter unit with integrated metering and communications? On a large scale this could provide a wide range of options for the consumer and utility. Of course there would need to be agreements about data usage and privacy, etc. 

There's even options such as as the utility installing PV on my roof, paying me a monthly credit, while my neighbour is paying for it to improve his supply reliability. Now that's just not possible without a utility network or a connected customer base.

In summary, the average utility needs to step up and look at the opportunities that lie in front of them and proactively work to keep the long-term cost of electricity at a minimum. Rather than hiking prices to protect the investments that were made decades ago and stare down the barrel of stranded assets and the death spiral.

Using Static IP Addressing with Windows 2008 Deployment Services (WDS)

Ok, so WDS is a wonderful thing... when it works. And to be honest 80% of the effort using WDS is the setup. Particularly if you want to use Static IP addressing and not run it from DHCP. In an environment that uses static addressing to promote high-availability and the subnet-bound nature of DHCP means that a static IP setup offers an alternative option.
Others have noted that the static IP method is limited in that boot images have to be dedicated to particular IP address, however if you're in the position of imaging a box and then re-addressing it to it's final network, then it's not too bad.
The summary steps of setting up a Static IP based WDS Discovery Boot image are as follows:
- Create a discovery image based upon your regular (or even standard Windows 2008) boot image. This is best done via the WDS MMC snap-in.
- Ensure your image has all the necessary drivers. Again, through the WDS MMC snap-in, add the driver packages to WDS and then add those packages to the boot image.
- Customise the boot image. There's a fair bit of detail in this and that's the focus of this post.
- Create the boot ISO image using the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK).
- Either burn the image to physical media, or make it available to boot from if you're running a VM environment.

Sound simple? Ok, so let's get into the details of the image customisation...

Assuming you've installed WAIK, setup a new winpe file structure. Do this from a "Deployment Tools Command Prompt", run:
copype amd64 c:\winpe

where amd64 is the architecture of your boot image (amd64 in my case) and;
c:\winpe is the root folder of your new winpe folder structure. This folder will be home to the ISO image and the mount point for your image.

From an administrative command prompt run:
imagex /mountrw c:\winpe\ISO\boot.wim 1 c:\winpe\mount
notepad "c:\winpe\mount\windows\system32\start_static_net.cmd"

Edit the content to read:
wpeutil.exe InitializeNetwork
netsh interface ipv4 set address "Local Area Connection" static [static_ip] [netmask] [gateway_ip]
net start "dns client"
ping -n 5 [gateway_ip]
netsh interface ipv4 set dns "Local Area Connection" static [dnsserver_ip] primary validate=no
%SYSTEMDRIVE%\sources\setup.exe /wdsdiscover /WdsServer:[wds_server_fqdn]

Save and close the file.

From the same command prompt, run:
notepad "c:\winpe\mount\windows\system32\winpeshl.ini"


Edit the content to read:
[LaunchApps]
%SYSTEMDRIVE%\windows\system32\start_static_net.cmd

Save and close the file.
Now close any applications that may reference the mount folder or its files.

Next we unmount the image and commit the changes:
imagex /unmount c:\winpe\mount /commit

To build the ISO, open a WAIK "Deployment Tools Command Prompt" and run:
oscdimg -n -bc:\winpe\ISO\boot\etfsboot.com c:\winpe\ISO c:\[iso_filename].iso

Voila! You should now have a bootable WDS discovery image with a static IP to work with.

Now for a bit of explanation about the .cmd script;
- the call to wpeutil starts the windows networking an enumerates the available drivers.
- the first netsh call sets the static ip addres, no surprises there.
- the call to net start gets the dns module going, but it will take a moment to initialise, hence the following call to ping.
- the second call to netsh sets the static DNS address that will be used to lookup the WDS server name. It's important that if your DNS is not at the same level as the WinPE image (e.g. Windows 2003), then the validate=no option will allow the static DNS entry to be set without validation (which is the default).

Well I hope that helps you in your quest for WDS glory!

Darwin due to blow away again

It would seem that each cyclone season I spend up in Darwin people keep asking, "will it be this year?". Those with science credientials tell us we are 'due' for another big cyclone, but how much faith should one have in statistics?

The pesimist in me says that the answer the the question "will it be this year?" is "probably". But rather than argue about 'if' or 'when', rather the answer to the question "what if?" is probably more alarming. As I understand, post-cyclone Tracey investigations found that designing houses for category 5 cyclones would be prohibitive and ultimately have us human folk living in concrete boxes with pin holes for windows. So the decision was made to build to survive category 4. Even IF the homes that are being built to survive category 4 winds, the ability of a house to survive a cyclone is more likely to be related to its ability to survive impact damage. With the vast amounts of trees and vegetation adding to the usual smattering of commercial & industrial debris spotted around Darwin, surely it's clear that the domestic building code will only work for the lucky people.

For those who are trapped in the rental market, it would seem that leaving town when the wind blows in is the most sensible choice. As a renter, how do you know if your dwelling is up to code? And even if your landlord told you before you signed up, could you believe them? Wouldn't it be a great idea in cyclone areas for building code compliance to be posted, by law, on rental agreements?

If I decided to build in Darwin, I think I'd be taking the building code to a new level for my own sake.

Australia Day

Happy Australia Day!

No commercial overtones intended, however I'm very proud to be an Aussie. There are arguable reasons about whether people should celebrate the day. I'm glad to call it home and think its a great place to live. And I think the shear number of wanna-be refugees trying to land here suggests I'm not the only one with that opinion.

The Population Debate

As a current issue, population growth seems to all of a sudden something to think about. Quite honestly, it seems trivial. If the world is having a hell of a time dealing with the outcomes of its own effect on the planet, then surely adding more people to the pool is not going to help.

The driver for population growth may well be the issue that people really don't want to deal with. Has any of our political leaders dared to answer that question? To put it bluntly, the question people should be thinking about is why do we want more people being born into this world than are leaving it?

I think the answer actually touches on personal beliefs and opinions born from the heart. A topic that vote-buying politicians would rather avoid like 'another hole in the head'.

Asus Laptop: Part 1 - The Chameleon

With several justifications in mind, I've purchased an ASUS F3JR laptop... and of course it was on sale at 25% off :)

The experiment began less than 24 hours after purchase.. AIM: To evaluate the potential of Linux on the modern Laptop (knowing too well that I could implode the hard disk back to 'MS Wishta' at any time).

I've played with a dual boot system and Ubuntu previously and was reasonably impressed with the robust nature and gentle introduction to most things Linux. With this in mind, I burn't a copy of Ubuntu Feisty (x64) and installed from there. Of course there was a bit of research to find out what speed bumps lay ahead. The main culprit was the drivers for the ATI graphics ( I should have downloaded the text-based Ubuntu installer, but that's hind sight). There is a known work-around/fix for the ATI graphics issue and if you have a hard-wired Ethernet connection to the internet, then you can use that work-around to utilise the normal graphical installer.

Other than that there have been a few other things I've worked on since the initial install.. I have my own IMAP mail server, my music collection, Thunderbird, Firefox and ongoing experiments with running Windoze software under wine such as MYOB.

So far so good.. future things to come are finding a good WYSIWYG html editor, a circuit board layout software package and an efficient way of scanning and storing documents to reduce the mountains of paper around this place.

C Y'all.

A long distance between posts - Darwin

Almost 12 months has past since I started this blog on a very technical note. Perhaps I should get a bit more personal.. now you'd like that wouldn't you?

Where does one start?

Where I live nowadays; warm, sunny Darwin. A land of opportunity all of its own. A springboard for the those with careers and a sauna-like torture chamber for those more wrinkles than hair on their head. A place I love to be, but at times despise for it's ability to wring the living water of you.

Living in the upper part of the Northern Territory, known locally as 'the top-end', teaches you many things. Above all though are living with other cultures and appreciating that a short-drive will take about an hour or two. The multi-cultural nature of Darwin is surprising for those who have grown up in the more southern parts of Oz. In my last long-term job, I was a minority as an Australian-born employee in the engineering department. But I've enjoyed the cross-cultural issues. Such as teaching Norwegian students our slang and even the odd bit of English. In return I learned bits of other languages. Interesting things like the "real" meaning of Mitsubishi's Pajero. I've also enjoyed learning some detail about the indigenous Aboriginal culture that lives today and how it interacts with the 'whiter' Australia.

All in all it's a great place to stay. If you like most other people traveling to the Top End, it'll be just for a little while. The population is quite transient and hence many employers salivate over people who stay here for more than 12 months - perhaps with the exception of the seasonal tourism industry.

Here's looking (with binoculars) to the next post.

Microsoft To Release Six Versions Of Windows Vista - Neoseeker News Article

Microsoft Windows: The Next Generation
As the arrival of the next version of Windows comes closer, I'm becoming less and less impressed with it's offerings. It's now widely known that it will ship in no less than 6 different versions. And some quiet yet stark changes have been made to OEM licensing that are likely to increase the total-cost-of-ownership. Lastly, IBM have been reported as internally moving away from Windows for their desktop platform of choice.

Quite honestly, I think Microsoft stocks are about to plateau as major changes are seriosuly considered in the business community. Time to look at the desktop linux offerings I think!

All I can hope for is that hardware vendors take Linux seriously so that business is well supported in choosing their next desktop platform.

Billion 7402VGP VoIP setup saga...

A long long long time ago... ok just kidding.

So I bought a Billion 7402VPG for it's features.. it's many features.. It's just a pity that ther documentation is not the best and that the layout & help available with the web configuration pages is perhpas not logical to the uneducated. I should start by saying that in the end I've found the VGP to be able to function as promised... with a little persistence and patience.. and perhaps a few sleep-thin nights..

Understanding the VoIP configuration pages
The VoIP system implemented in the VGP - perhaps like many other VoIP products is relativgely simple - it's just understanding some of the lingo and how the darn thing works that's the problem. So here'e my spiel on the VGP deal.

Firstly, you can have multiple SIP accounts (VoIP provider) accounts. Just think of them as a virtual line - you can make outgoing clls and receive incoming calls on them. They just get routed over the internet. The PSTN (Plain Simple/Subscriber Telephone Network) port provide a connection to a real phyisical phone line which is likely to also be you ADSL copper phone line.

Secondly, the setup of incoming and outgoing functions is quite separate for the most part. To explain the config pages in a logical fashion it's easiest to "walk" through them as part of a setup. But first a simple but well-learnt point;

--- SERIOUSLY - THIS COULD SAVE LOTS OF TIME ---
1. Setup the VGP for everything EXCEPT the VoIP functions - then Backup your configuration to file using the System->Backup & Restore function. I've found this config file to be very useful in sorting out some quirky problems (ie. reverting to this config to start again but not have to revert to Factory Defaults.)

Ok, now back to the config...

2. As far as setup goes, it is best IMHO to setup one or more (preferably all) SIP accounts. This is done in the "VoIP User-defined Profiles" link in the "Wizard" configuration page. Don't be tempted to put details into the "Wizard" page yet. "Add" new profiles; entering the details from your SIP provider as you go. When done you should have a nice list of SIP providers with you username, etc programmed in.

3. Returning to the "Wizard"Page, the "Select Profile" links can now be used to select the profiles that you have just setup. Once these profiles have been set & applied some further settings on the "General Setttings" page such as "Silence Suppression" can be reviewed. You will see the profiles should be applied to Phone Ports 1 & 2 depending on your setup. It should be said at this point that you have just setup the incoming part of the VoiP service. Phone Ports 1 & 2 "register" with the appropriate VoIP servers so that when a server receives a call for your VoIP number, it knows where to forward/route the call. As long as registration os active, you should receive call from your VoIP provider. It also needs to be pointed out that _SOME_ VoIP providers require that you are "registered" before you make outgoing calls. My experience would suggest that SIPme does require registration while Freecall doesn't.

4. OK, the next part involves Dial Plans; dial plans for the PSTN port and dial plans for EACH of the VoIP phone ports. From my reading the PSTN dial plan takes priority over the VoIP dial plans - there's a little in the VGP Manual on this point.
Dial Plans can be simple and some can be complex. The main point being that it DOESN'T matter which phone ports are "registered" to which providers - You can dial out from any port to any provider. The examples in the VGP manual aren't a bad starting point. Once you get the hang of the VoiP Dial Plan Editor it's not too bad. There are some good articles on Billion dial plans in the Billion support forums on VoIP and some further reading on dial plans more generally in the Whirlpool forums.

IF YOU GET STUCK & WHEN IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE

Software is never perfect - except perhaps for the usual "Hello World" program.. and neither is the Billion firmware. I spent many hours trying to figure out why I could register with a SIP provider, but not make outgoing calls through them. It turned out that a reset to Factory Defaults and a clean manual setup fixed things. Playing around with the dial plans too much - particularly using the telent interface (CLI) - is asking for trouble. One post on the Billion forum which suggested this saved me from many more hair-pulling hours.

I'd certainly recommend the Billion & Whirlpool forums - post a thread and you'll be surpriseed how many helpfulfolk there are.

I hope this ramble helps...

FYI: Billion 7402VGP modem/router/ADSL2+/VoIP running firmware version 5.05.

Billion 7402VGP Tones & Rings

As with many setting on the 7402VGP, they isn't much in the way of plain english help. So here's a few things I've found:

PSTN-like dial tone settings for Australia:
Freq. 1,Power 1,Freq. 2,Power 2,On 1,Off 1,Repeat 1,On 2,Off 2,Repeat 2
400, -34, 425, -34, -1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0

Just keep in mind that you won't be able to tell if you're about to make a PSTN call or a VOIP call! I found this usefull because I have a piece of equipment that expects to "hear" an Australian dialtone before it will make a call.

Some useful - but cryptic info on other Australian tones can be found at:
http://www.741ge.com/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=40&t=5018&s=722e885458414f4026a1d7914c2f9ba2

Palm Bluetooth Setup for Internet Sharing

Found this great site which explains in detail how to setup both a Palm handheld and a PC to share the PC's internet connection with the handheld. Here's the URL: http://www.whizoo.com/bt_setup/

the Alpha...

In the beginning.. there was this post to start the ball rolling. My first Blog post. A "hello world" if you like. I hope this site becomes a great resource for you and I!