Tag: air conditioning

First Clean Energy Cybersecurity Accelerator Participants Begin Technical Assessment

[From the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) News]

Program Selected Three Participants for Cohort 1

The Clean Energy Cybersecurity Accelerator™ (CECA)’s first cohort of solution providers—Blue Ridge Networks, Sierra Nevada Corporation, and Xage—recently began a technical assessment of their technologies that offer strong authentication solutions for distributed energy resources.

The selected solution providers will take part in a six-month acceleration period, where solutions will be evaluated in the Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) cyber range.

Working with its partners, CECA identified urgent security gaps, supporting emerging technologies as they build security into new technologies at the earliest stage—when security is most effective and efficient. The initiative is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and sponsored by DOE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) and utility industry partners in collaboration with DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).

“We are thrilled to welcome and work with the first participants to the secure energy transformation,” said Jon White, director of NREL’s Cybersecurity Program Office. “These cyber-solution providers will work with NREL, using its world-class capabilities, to develop their ideas into real-world solutions. We are ready to build security into technologies at the early development stages when most effective and efficient.”

The selected innovators:

Blue Ridge Networks’ LinkGuard system “cloaks” critical information technology network operations from destructive and costly cyberattacks. The system overlays onto existing network infrastructure to secure network segments from external discovery or data exfiltration. Through a partnership with Schneider Electric, Blue Ridge Networks helped deploy a solution to protect supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems for the utility industry.

Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC)’s Binary Armor® is used by the U.S. Department of Defense and utilities to protect critical assets, with the help of subject matter experts to deliver cyber solutions. SNC plans to integrate as a software solution into a communication gateway or other available edge processing to provide a scalable solution to enforce safe operation in an unauthenticated ecosystem. SNC currently helps secure heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems; programmable logical controllers; and wildfire detection, with remote monitoring for two different utilities.

Xage uses identity-based access control to protect users, machines, apps, and data, at the edge and in the cloud, enforcing zero-trust access to secure operations and data universally. To test technology in energy sector environments, Xage provides zero-trust remote access, has demonstrated proofs of concept, and deploys local and remote access at various organizations.

Three major U.S. utilities, with more expected to join, are partners with CECA: Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Duke Energy and Xcel Energy. At the end of each cohort cycle, cyber innovators will present their solutions to the utilities with the goal to make an immediate impact.

Additionally, CECA participants benefit from access to NREL’s unique testing and evaluation capabilities, including its ARIES cyber range, developed with support from EERE. The ARIES cyber range provides one of the most advanced simulation environments with unparalleled real-time situational awareness and visualization to evaluate renewable energy system defenses.

Applications for the second CECA cohort will open in early January 2023 for providers offering solutions that uncover hidden risks due to incomplete system visibility and device security and configuration.

NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy’s primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for DOE by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy LLC.

Looking Backwards and Forwards at the Same Time

Janus and Bi-Directional Smarts

The Roman god Janus looks backwards and forwards at the same time and learning to be somewhat Janus-like is very conducive in the metaintelligence (i.e., larger overview) quest.

There’s a useful French phrase, “reculer pour mieux sauter” which means like a high jumper, you have to take steps backwards to jump higher. In other words, learn to look bi-directionally at the world.

First look back, then forward.

Here’s a concrete example:

W. Arthur Lewis, the “father” of development economics, originally from the Caribbean, taught at Princeton. He won the Nobel in 1979 and wrote various classics such as Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913 (1978).

Lewis writes:

In this book we shall not be attempting to give formal or complete explanations of why fluctuations occurred. Like the captain of a ship navigating in stormy seas, we shall need to identify the waves, without needing an exhaustive theory of what causes waves.

When analyzing these fluctuations economists have identified four different cycles, distinguished by length of periodicity, each of which is named after the economist who first wrote about it:

the Kitchin (about three years)
the Juglar (about nine years)
the Kuznets (about twenty years)
the Kondratiev (about fifty years)

(W. Arthur Lewis, Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913, 1978, page 19)

Lewis gives us a quick overview of how we got to the era covered by his book:

“The essence of the industrial and agricultural revolutions in the first three quarters of the nineteenth century was in new ways of doing old things—of making iron, textiles and clothes, of growing cereals, and of transporting goods and services. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the revolution added a new twist—that of making new commodities: telephones, gramophones, typewriters, cameras, automobiles and so on, a seemingly endless process whose twentieth century additions include aeroplanes, radios, refrigerators, washing machines and pleasure boats.”

(Growth and Fluctuations, 1870-1913, page 29)

Professor Norman Stone in his masterpiece on WWI calls this late nineteenth century explosion of material change and inventions the greatest fast quantum leap in world history in transforming the world.

If one reads these lines with a “Janus mind” we wonder, looking forward from the Lewis book and its era:

  1. How does his catchy metaphor of waves in the ocean relate to fluctuations and cycles? When Ben Bernanke (Fed Chair) describes recent decades as “The Great Moderation” does he mean to imply that Lewis-type waves disappeared or got much smaller?
  2. Can computers and mobile phones really match cars and planes in profundity of impact? Or is it only the tremendous spread of mobile or smartphones in the Global South that can?

In fact, the recent economic history classic, Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth argues against the assumption of endless technical change as a growth accelerator or endless frontier:

In the century after the Civil War, an economic revolution improved the American standard of living in ways previously unimaginable. Electric lighting, indoor plumbing, home appliances, motor vehicles, air travel, air conditioning, and television transformed households and workplaces. With medical advances, life expectancy between 1870 and 1970 grew from 45 to 72 years. Weaving together a vivid narrative, historical anecdotes, and economic analysis, The Rise and Fall of American Growth provides an in-depth account of this momentous era. But has that era of unprecedented growth come to an end?

Gordon challenges the view that economic growth can or will continue unabated, and he demonstrates that the life-altering scale of innovations between 1870 and 1970 can’t be repeated. He contends that the nation’s productivity growth, which has already slowed to a crawl, will be further held back by the vexing headwinds of rising inequality, stagnating education, an aging population, and the rising debt of college students and the federal government. Gordon warns that the younger generation may be the first in American history that fails to exceed their parents’ standard of living, and that rather than depend on the great advances of the past, we must find new solutions to overcome the challenges facing us.

A critical voice in the debates over economic stagnation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth is at once a tribute to a century of radical change and a harbinger of tougher times to come.

  1. Why does one not read of the four cycles mentioned by Lewis (i.e., Kitchin) and the rest listed above in today’s business and financial press? Has there been some great discontinuity?

If you apply a “Janus mind” to the past (described by Lewis) and our sense of the future (described by techno-pessimists like Gordon) you get a more thoughtful sense of “the human prospect.”