🎧 #009: Terry Herr of Intellimation on the past, present, and future of building analytics

“Part of what I see happening with operators is a transition from actually operating to troubleshooting and repair. Because to me, in a perfect world, when you get the automation right, you do have an automated self-driving building. And so they don't really need an operator. You need an operator maybe to change schedules and change set points, but the key is going to be keeping the sensors and the actuators working and mechanical equipment working… troubleshooting and repair… so that you get it back to being automatic.”

—Terry Herr

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Episode 9 is a conversation  with Terry Herr, President of Intellimation, a building controls and analytics technology and service provider.

Summary

• Our conversation covers the past, present, and future of analytics
• One of the hot items for the future is advanced supervisory control, which Terry calls optimization. We do a deep dive on that.
• And much more.

Mentions and Links

1. Intellimation (2:17)
2. Cimetrics, Jim Lee (7:49)
3. NIST (8:01)
4. PNNL, Mike Brambley and Srinivas (8:04)
5. KGS (9:50)
6. Flywheel BI (10:27)
7. Building Robotics, now Comfy (13:13)
8. VOLTTRON (15:09)
9. Mongo, Crate, and Timescale DB (16:05)
10. Niagara (17:38)
11. Ubuntu (17:45)
12. Pub-Sub, RabbitMQ (17:52)
13. Intelligent Load Control (18:21)
14. AIRCx (19:23)
15. SkySpark (24:16)
16. CopperTree, Cortex Building Intelligence, and Ecorithm (24:16)
17. United Technologies Research Center (31:59)
18. bueno (32:18)
19. Onboard.io (32:30)
20. Kinetic Buildings (32:56)
21. PlantPRO, tekWorx, Optimum Energy (35:02)
22. BrainBoxAI (35:37)
23. PNNL Re-tuning Resources (48:47)
24. BuildingIQ (54:49)

You can find Terry Herr on LinkedIn and at intellimation.io.

Enjoy!

Music credit: The Garden State by Audiobinger

Disclaimer: James is a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). All opinions expressed via Nexus emails, podcasts, or on the website belong solely to James. No resources from NREL are used to support Nexus. NREL does not endorse or support any aspect of Nexus.

THE ABOVE AUDIO, VIDEO, SUMMARY, AND LINKS WILL ALWAYS BE FREE. PODCAST DEEP DIVES WITH MY REACTIONS, MY TOP HIGHLIGHTS, AND THE FULL TRANSCRIPT ARE EXCLUSIVELY AVAILABLE TO MEMBERS OF NEXUS PRO.

Here’s this week’s deep dive outline:

• My reaction
• My highlights
• Why Intellimation is independent and represents many product lines
• How Intellimation’s independence led them to an open data layer
• Exactly how they implement a neutral/independent/open data layer and where Haystack and Brick fit
• Comparing three analytics leaders: SkySpark, KGS Buildings, and CopperTree Analytics
• The limitation of our current standard data model: Haystack
• State of the art automated point tagging
• Why Terry sees supervisory control as the next big thing
• Terry’s take on controlling buildings from the cloud vs. at the edge
• Where the types of analytics technology are on the adoption curve
• Where we’re messing up with building operator training for new technology
• How the autonomous building allows the building operator to focus on troubleshooting and repair, not operating
• Full transcript
• Get the deep dive