Comments by Ken Sinclair
Publisher - AutomatedBuildings.com

Lighting Community

November's theme plays on both the noun lighting and verb lighting to provide two different meanings. Which way did you read it? The community of folks who provide lighting control? or the action word for our job to provide lighting control to several communities?

Hurricane Sandy has been a very graphical demonstration of how we need to control quickly all our electrical building loads to prevent further damage when disaster strikes. We have the ability to shut down and reroute power quickly to where it is needed for real emergencies when transformers and substations vaporize. As we all know in the industry all this electrical stuff stops working once you let the smoke out...smile. Our ability to control millions of square feet of connected buildings in an organized start up or remotely requested to not start at all is huge. Do the power supply/distribution folks understand that we can do a restart in any program manner or not at all once power is restored? I think not enough of this knowledge is in their hands and heads. Temporary back feeding from other electrical sources can occur if major loads can be managed for an emergency situation. This of course does not just occur for lighting but for all the rolling stock connected in our buildings. Connecting and controlling is what we do as an industry. Our building rolling loads (Electrical Motors) require many times the run current to start so are very critical in a return of power and emergency power management. As an industry we need to work on adding empathy to our smart grid to achieve a wise electrical grid that can adapt quickly to whatever.

To cut though all the administrative and political crap that goes on in our electrical supply and demand industry let us all just list our controllable electrical loads on our building web sites, plus how much we need for occupied emergency and unoccupied emergency mode. This way this information can be used by the folks on the ground that need to restore power as quickly as possible in a disaster. We need to provide a contact number for emergency so we can be part of the equation.

What else did Sandy teach us?  Likely best to have your building’s web site hosted in a city other than yours in case of an emergency.

Good articles and interviews about what is happening in lighting control in this issue plus lots on all other aspects.  As always this new issue is a nest of great articles, columns, reviews, new products, interviews and of course the steady stream of news.

[an error occurred while processing this directive]Last month's theme of connecting connections communities continues through several articles. We have provided a connection page to the communities that will be part of our education event Why we need to be part of several Connection Communities

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