For those community members who have been active participants and/or readers of the Energy Central platform, they’ll no doubt recognize the name Stu McCafferty and perhaps his series of articles entitled “Energy IoT Architecture.“
Through the thousands of views, dozens of independent conversations in the comments, and feedback of the community, we knew that Stu had something special when it came to the ideas he was putting out there. It turns out that the Energy Central community wasn’t alone in feeling this way, as just this year he finally published a full book (Energy IoT Architecture: From Theory to Practice), all that started with this series of articles on EnergyCentral.com.
We were eager to hear from Stu how his article series eventually evolved into a full book, what that process looked like, and how his peers on the Energy Central Community supported him in that journey. So, keep reading for a full sit-down interview Stu McCafferty conducted with us to learn from his experience, explore the ideas he was putting out there, and perhaps even check out where you can find and purchase his book for yourself!
Matt Chester: Give us the elevator pitch of your new book: what are the main topics covered, who is the audience, and why did you feel now was the time to put out such a publication?
Stu McCafferty: A lot of people say that we are in an energy “transition”. I disagree. I believe that we are in 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 not only recognizes 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 players 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 EnergyIoT reference architecture theory into real world practice.
MC: So, who are the ideal readers of the book?
SM: Our 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.
MC: The book has only been out for a short period, but I know it’s already been in the hands of some influential utility sector professionals. What has been the reception you’ve received thus far?
SM: The response has been greater than I anticipated. I have received numerous emails and texts from people across the globe – the US, Australia, Germany, the UK, Asia, and Canada – with pictures of them holding their new copies of the book. And, it has only been out for a couple of months. Honestly, I have been quite surprised.
Also, reviews have started to come in on Amazon and friendly reposts and comments on LinkedIn by some people I know and others I have never met. So far, every review on Amazon has been 5-stars, but I am sure that cannot be sustainable. Regardless, I think people have appreciated the amount of research performed, the structure of how things were presented in the book, the drawings and charts, and the pragmatic way to take a theoretical idea and turn it into something that is truly actionable. There are a lot of common-sense ideas in the book, and I think that comes across to the reader.
MC: So, what were the drivers of that book?
SM: There were many drivers that caused me to write the book, one of which was certainly the response I received from Energy Central readers when Eamonn McCormick, David Forfia, and I originally posted the series there. But, ultimately the main driver of writing the book is that I think that many people are on the same path, but they needed a common reference architecture and an explanation of how to pull all these technologies, protocols and standards, and IoT concepts together in one place.
The need to integrate behind the meter DER assets at scale is needed TODAY. The clean energy economy is here and is accelerating. Climate change is real and we are seeing policy decisions and the need to act becoming a daily conversation. Yet our existing systems simply will not scale, and many changes are coming so fast, it becomes an overwhelming challenge for all electric power stakeholders. I hope that this book can help make sense of all of this and provide a clear path to solving many of the problems our industry is facing.
The timing of the book release frankly couldn’t have been better scripted. There are a lot of companies, including Siemens where I now work, that are beginning to take a hard look at what is happening in our industry and recognizing that today’s systems will not be the ones that transform us into tomorrow. I hope that this book will give everyone a clear idea of what needs to be done, how to do it, and why we need to do it quickly. So, it was pretty lucky to get this out when we did.
MC: What was the process of writing the book? How did that go?
SM: I started writing the book full time – 8 to 10 hours a day – starting in November 2022. Sometimes I worked the weekends when I was on a roll or had a drawing that I couldn’t quite get right. Anyway, I had about 150 pages of written material with drawings by the middle of March when I started looking for a publisher. I looked at the self-publishing route, but I really felt that if I could get a professional publisher, the book would likely have a larger impact and bigger potential audience. John Cooper suggested I reach out to Artech House and gave me a contact there. I also reached out to another publisher and pitched the idea to both. In fact, I sent everything I had written so far to both publishers. Well, I did it all wrong.
The way it works with publishing houses is that you go to their website and there is a place online to provide them with an abstract proposal of what you would like to write the book about. So, I had to back up and write the abstract. Then the publisher performs a review and decides whether it makes sense to move to the next step.
After deciding to move on, the publisher then sends the abstract to industry experts to get their opinion. However, since I already had a lot of the book written, they sent both the abstract and the first chapter or two. The author is not told who the industry experts are, so it is all supposed to be anonymous to ensure that they get honest reviews. The book came back from the industry experts for both publishers with unanimous agreement to publish the book. Next step is the publisher takes the idea and expert reviews to an internal review board. After that, both publishers approached me with a contract.
I chose Artech House because they moved a little faster and they were more personable. Either choice would have been good, but I knew I would probably need some handholding since this was my first book, and I wasn’t disappointed with Artech House’s excellent support, especially from my acquisition editor, Natalie McGregor. She was pretty awesome and helped me get to the finish line.
In any event, Artech House told me the book was too short, so I came up with 3 more chapters and finished all the edits and rewrites by June. There were a few more back and forths with Artech House after that, but basically you kind of wait until they get everything laid out and you get a couple shots at final edits. The final edits took longer than I expected. In fact, it all takes longer than you might expect, but I was notified in the middle of November that the book would go to the printer in December and be available at the beginning of the year. And it was.
MC: This book started as an article series on Energy Central. Can you share what the process was in taking it from those beginnings to a finally published book?
SM: Sounds easy, right? Both publishers told me that this was a fairly common thing – that authors take previous work, typically articles, and turn them into books. However, everything in the book is fact-checked and run through a grammar checking tool which includes a tool for plagiarism. So, any content that is publicly available, even if you wrote it, must be rewritten to be original. I had done much of that already since I was adding new content and changing some of what was previously published on Energy Central. But, after the grammar check, I spent another two weeks going through sections of the book that were similar to what was online. That was the worst part and the most boring part of the whole process. The second most boring (but maybe the most important) part was the final review process. I found all kinds of things that didn’t read well or had typos or where the graphic didn’t line up with the written content. It took a couple of weeks to get through that part of the process, too – but well worth it and something no author should be casual about.
John Cooper acted as my “industry expert” editor and went through the entire book, line by line. He was incredible. Having a trustworthy expert to challenge you on your “facts” and ask “what exactly were you trying to say here” was really helpful.
In any event, I owe Energy Central and its community everything for this book. It would have never happened if it weren’t for the opportunity to publish the ideas, get feedback, and realize that there was a lot of interest. But, make no mistake, this was a mammoth effort and if you are interested in writing a book, you should walk in with your eyes wide open and recognize it is going to take a sizable chunk out of your life for a while.
But the rewards are also worthwhile. More dumb Irish luck . . . as I was finishing the book, I was contacted by a recruiter who was told about my Energy Central article series and saw it was being turned into a book. And that conversation with the recruiter resulted with me joining Siemens as the Lead Architect for EnergyIoT in the CTO Office. We are actually building what is in the book. It’s pretty exciting, and it all started with a series of articles at Energy Central.
MC: What advice would you give to your fellow Energy Central members, new and old, on how to best use our community platform to advance their careers? What’s the value that continues to bring you back and what are the best ways to tap into that value?
SM: I don't think I'm all that much different than a lot of people that are out there on the Energy Central platform. I had an idea and I worked with my colleagues, Eamonn McCormick and David Forfia to vet and extend it. I tested it with the GridWise Architecture Council (GWAC) with David’s help and at a seminar at DistribuTECH with Eamonn. Lots of head nodding and no one said it was stupid. But it was raw, just a drawing and a few slides.
So, I recruited Eamonn and David to work with me to develop a series of articles for Energy Central. We had something original that we wanted to test the idea of the EnergyIoT reference architecture. I think we had over 25,000 views and received a lot of positive feedback. I thought, maybe we’ve got something here.
Even if your ambition isn’t writing a book, putting ideas and content out there is still a great way to get some recognition within the community and in which you might even be an expert. Energy Central has a huge viewership, and within that viewership there’s a dedicated part of the community that is really interactive. And those people who interact, provide you with feedback - you learn who they are really quickly and they become friends over time. Matt, you are one of those friends. Dick Brooks is another. There are a lot of people that spend time on the Energy Central platform to encourage other contributors and provide useful feedback.
So, my advice is that if there's something that you're interested in or you're passionate about, get started by putting something on paper. Stick it out there and see what the reaction is. You know it may be positive and it may not be. I've had both, and you learn from both types of feedback. So, don't get upset about it, just learn from it. And I would say you don't have to have thick skin per se, but maybe be sure not to have particularly thin skin, right?
I've been really lucky to collaborate outside with a lot of industry experts within the utility industry. I've been exposed to operational systems across many different utilities, so I really got to be an expert in that and you just kind of think that some of the things that you're expert in that everyone else already knows. But when you write an article on that topic of your expertise, it doesn't have to be long (for example, for me to say here are the operational components of an ADMS system), but you know people are out there trying to learn and they don't know what you know. It turns out you're smarter than you think.
But once you've kind of gotten into that pattern of publishing, which is super easy on Energy Central, then it almost becomes second nature. When you’re out there trying to learn more about a new topic, you’re Googling or looking at EIA data or reading NASA’s website or diving into IPCC reports, whatever it might be, you should realize that other people are probably asking the same questions. So, use that opportunity to capture your research, stick it in a little article and post it on Energy Central. When you post on Energy Central, always follow up and post the EC link to your article on LinkedIn so you get that audience to view your ideas on LinkedIn and also to follow the link to Energy Central and find other articles that they may be interested in. You're helping build your network in two ways then, making new friends, and learning.