[mnbbrown]

Decarbonising buildings and massive warehouses..

It's a very fun mix of hardware (for data collection), and crazy SQL queries to model energy flows between buildings, solar, batteries, etc. Considering just one building is pretty easy:

consumption = imported - exported + generated - stored + dispatched. carbon = carbon intensity * imported cost = tariff * imported

but then you add a site with a couple of buildings, solar on one of them, grid limited exports, etc modelling these flows is challenging. Like consider the case where one building got 10% of it's imported power from another building's excess solar, then calculating carbon becomes more difficult.

and once you've figured all that - then you have to figure out what makes commercial sense to do next.. install a battery, expand solar, move onto a TOU tariff, do nothing - and that's a whole other world of optimisation problems.

[thoughtpalette]

Also somewhat working in this space. Building a BMS (Building management system) to manage and control everything in commercial buildings. Think Homekit for commercial. There's something like 70% of buildings don't use one and they can be much more environmental friendly.

Utilizing https://project-haystack.org/

[mnbbrown]

That’s cool!

Very familiar with BMSs but the lack of open standards and protocols has been extremely frustrating - makes me appreciate how good we have it with HTTP, etc.

Lots say they support BACnet but that’s only if they’ve been configured and the points exported, etc.

Haystack is a great step forward for labelling too but adoption seems fill with complexity :)

[thoughtpalette]

Have had to implement the BACnet spec for scheduling, and wow, that BACNet Standards PDF is huge :'}

Haystack definitely has it's challenges. My main concern is it's not very client-side friendly when attempting to use haystack-core types. But it's a cool framework.

Would love some modern toolsets in the space.