In this interview, we talk to Stuart McCafferty, author of the book Energy IoT Architecture: From Theory to Practice. We discuss the motivation behind writing the book, the target audience, the most useful aspects of the book, the challenges of writing the book, and advice for other engineers who are considering writing a book.
Stuart McCafferty is the lead architect in Siemens Smart Infrastructure Chief Technology Office (CTO) responsible for the Energy as a Service (EaaS) Platform. He is also a Cleanie Award-winning thought leader for his numerous articles on climate change and the electric power industry’s opportunity to solve it using modern technologies, IoT architectures, clean energy systems, energy markets, and practical approaches. He has a BS degree from the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA).
1. What was your main motivation behind writing your book?
A lot of people say that we are in an energy “transition”. I disagree. We have entered 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 must recognize 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 participants 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 Energy IoT reference architecture theory into real world practice.
2. Who is the main target audience for your book and what will they appreciate the most about the book?
The electric power industry is really complicated: the way it’s structured with markets, the operation of transmission and distribution systems, policies and regulations that aren’t homogeneous. It’s really hard to understand everything from utility operations to policy definition to how electricity is priced. It took me 15 years to get my head around all that information and I continue to learn every day.
I wrote the book for a variety of stakeholders – utility architects and system operators, policy makers, professors and students, cloud companies and other energy industry innovators, and just the average Joe trying to understand how the electric power industry works and how they might participate in the future.
If you are a student or a young professional looking for an exciting and profoundly impactful industry, the Electric Power Industry is it! This book was also written to support college professors to create meaningful and useful curriculum for students in Electrical Engineering, Software Engineering, and Power Engineering programs.
3. What do you see your book being most useful for?
This is arguably the most exciting moment in the history of the Electric Power Industry since the early days of Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla. Change is happening, but it is challenging and sometimes even chaotic. A blueprint is needed to pragmatically implement a full energy transformation to easily support two-way power flow that directly addresses climate change issues to decarbonize the grid and build a much more inclusive, clean energy system. This system needs to be designed from the Edge in – not from the utility Enterprise out. This change is likely to come from new technology-savvy actors that implement smart, highly scalable IoT solutions that abstract the complexity of grid assets and energy systems to make integration simpler and more reliable. And the change will almost certainly come from the Edge.
My book is organized in a step-by-step way for architects, engineers, software developers, and students to understand why and how to implement an Energy IoT platform architecture.
4. How did you find the writing of the book? Do you have a specific process or are you quite methodical in your writing approach?
I worked with my colleagues, David Forfia and Eamonn McCormick, to publish articles at Energy Central and LinkedIn to get feedback and fine tune the initial idea on Energy IoT. I got feedback from several experts like Dick Brooks, John Cooper, and numerous others that we were on to something very interesting to the electric power industry. That process took half a year.
When I decided to write the book, I halted my consulting work completely and focused completely on writing and drawing. I spent 4 months at least 8 hours a day and usually at least one day during the weekend. I treated writing the book like a project, and I had to show progress daily. I enjoy both writing and drawing, so most of the time, it was pretty fun to do. But, on those days where you feel burnt out or are working on something that isn’t as interesting as other topics, I just grinded it out and reminded myself that the end game was to get the book done and published.
5. What challenges did you face when writing the book and how did you overcome them?
The main problem I had was staying committed to writing. Make no mistake, if you are writing a book, it takes discipline and commitment. There are days where writer’s block hit you and you just can’t put words together in a sensible way. Sometimes on those days I would go to the whiteboard and just draw.
The other problem that was frankly a surprise, was that when you finish all your writing, you are not done. Your book will be reviewed by other technical experts and by Artech House personnel. They will find things – I guarantee it. And, even after they have completed their reviews, you need to read everything you wrote – slowly – and you will find things, too. This takes weeks to complete. To me, this was the most boring part of the whole process, but it was also the most important part. I am so happy I spent the time and made the book much better after thorough reviews and my own personal edits at the very end.
6. What advice would you give to other engineers who are considering writing a book?
I chose Artech House because they move fast and were more hands-on than some of the other publishers I spoke with. Also, Artech House is focused on technical books and specifically targets technical readers. And, truthfully, when I wrote the book, I knew it was somewhat niche and never make the bestseller list. I am quite happy I made the decision to go with Artech House.
The biggest nugget of advice I can add is that I wrote numerous articles on Energy IoT and published them at Energy Central. Out of that, I received feedback – mostly positive with one or two negative comments – that helped shape the book. I highly recommend finding a place to test your concepts online. LinkedIn is a great place to publish and get feedback. I published articles in both LinkedIn and Energy Central, and it was enormously helpful not only for the feedback, but also for getting allies that helped promote the book once I was published.
7. What are you working on next?
Since finishing the book, I moved to Siemens Smart Infrastructure CTO office and am the lead architect for Energy IoT and the Lean Energy Management Suite (LEMS). I regularly find myself going back to my book to refresh my brain on things sprinkled throughout my book. So, we are actually BUILIDING what I proposed in my book, Energy IoT Architecture: From Theory to Practice. It is my dream job to actually take what I wrote in the book and turn it into an actual product. Stay tuned as we begin to roll out at different Siemen’s customer sites.
Learn more about the book on our websites
ARTECH HOUSE USA : Energy IoT Architecture: From Theory to Practice
ARTECH HOUSE U.K.: Energy IoT Architecture: From Theory to Practice
More Power engineering content here Power Engineering – Artech House Insider
