Interview with Stuart McCafferty: Leveraging the Energy Central Community in Development of His Book “Energy IoT Architecture: From Theory to Practice”
For those community members who have been active participants and/or readers of the Energy Central platform, they’ll no doubt recognize the name Stu McCafferty and perhaps his series of articles entitled “Energy IoT Architecture.“
Through the thousands of views, dozens of independent conversations in the comments, and feedback of the community, we knew that Stu had something special when it came to the ideas he was putting out there. It turns out that the Energy Central community wasn’t alone in feeling this way, as just this year he finally published a full book (Energy IoT Architecture: From Theory to Practice), all that started with this series of articles on EnergyCentral.com.
We were eager to hear from Stu how his article series eventually evolved into a full book, what that process looked like, and how his peers on the Energy Central Community supported him in that journey. So, keep reading for a full sit-down interview Stu McCafferty conducted with us to learn from his experience, explore the ideas he was putting out there, and perhaps even check out where you can find and purchase his book for yourself!
Matt Chester: Give us the elevator pitch of your new book: what are the main topics covered, who is the audience, and why did you feel now was the time to put out such a publication?
Stu McCafferty: A lot of people say that we are in an energy “transition”. I disagree. I believe that we are in an unprecedented moment within the energy industry – a “transformation” where incremental changes to our existing ecosystem will not yield the results we require to meet our environmental goals for 2030 and beyond. We need to rethink how we architect our energy systems to embrace the Internet of Things technologies, intelligent edge devices, and a new “clean energy” economy. This new approach not only recognizes the fact that many, if not most, of our grid generation, storage, and flexibility assets are behind the meter and owned by customers and third parties. Creating an ecosystem that is inclusive and integrates these assets and new players needs to be the focus of our efforts going forward – and IoT offers a compelling solution that is interoperable, scalable, flexible, and democratized.
The book is focused on this idea. It describes the drivers of imminent disruption in our industry and introduces a new IoT reference architecture with detailed drawings and descriptions of the 3-layered architectural approach. It provides common concepts supported by DOE’s Grid Architecture with “laminar” architectures and takes it to the next level by providing practical approaches using IoT methods such as communication abstraction, digital twins, messaging, virtualization, containers, and orchestration. The book describes a standards-focused approach to simplify interoperability and eventually drive towards a plug-and-play ecosystem using VPPs as a basic building block at the building level – so essentially turning customer buildings into flexible VPP assets simply and elegantly.
There are real-life examples and detailed drawings – over 100 in fact! – that help the reader turn the EnergyIoT reference architecture theory into real world practice.