Angered and motivated by my experience preparing a large state university for Y2K, I made my public entrance to the public building systems space in 2002. Y2K was a crisis when it was anticipated that any program that used a two-digit year in the date (as in 99, and it was all of them) would fail after the year 2000 (when the year might be 01). State universities build using low bidders in accord with state construction law, and the University of North Carolina had accumulated a hodge-podge of systems for building operations, steam distribution, chilled water distribution, cogeneration, and electricity purchases that barely interoperated. Worse still, the interoperations were fragile, and upgrading any one system would break the connections with any number of other systems. I simply wanted stable intersystem connections that did not break with any minor change to either system.
We were using system interoperation to address problems of smart energy. Back then, an operator would log into a utility web portal in each afternoon and download a CSV file with 24 power prices for the next day. We would then adjust the interactions of all these incompatible systems to align with the day’s prices. When the process broke without warning, we found that the file now included 96 15-minute prices. When asked, the utility replied that we should not worry, that they had no plans for 15-minute prices but had merely upgraded their software. Connections to a utility or other external system were unpredictable at best.