Editor's note: In September, the author will present "Smart Grid: What It Means to the HVAC Industry" during HPAC Engineering’s seventh annual Engineering Green Buildings Conference and Expo, part of HVACR Week 2010, in Baltimore. For more information, go to http://egbconference.com/.

If you were to trace building automation systems (BAS) to their roots in the 1960s and '70s, you would see their main purpose was the management of energy consumption. In fact, "energy-management systems" (EMS) was the common term for these systems when I entered the controls industry during the late 1980s.

The more sophisticated controls have become, the more we have taken the energy-management function of building automation for granted and the more control-system vendors, in an attempt to differentiate their offerings, have focused their marketing efforts on other functions. The energy scares of the 1970s and '80s turned out to be temporary, allowing consumers to refocus on managing comfort and convenience, with little thought about wastefulness and depletion of resources.

Heel and Toe
Low energy costs have brought about "best practices" that inherently are inefficient in their use of energy. Take the air-handling unit, for instance. It draws air from outside a building, cools it, pipes it around the building, and then reheats it. At each step of the process, energy is consumed. As long as energy is cheap, one could argue, this is OK, but, to me, it seems incredibly inefficient.

Imagine driving your car with one foot on the brake pedal and the other on the gas pedal. Race-car drivers use this technique, called "heel and toe," to better control their cars, but it hardly is efficient.

So, up to this point, we have been driving our buildings with the bravado of a race-car driver. Sure, we think our buildings perform better, but they do not perform efficiently—or at least not as efficiently as they could.

Enter Connectivity Technologies
With all of the digital devices automating sensors, actuators, fans, and other equipment during the 1990s, the potential, value, and variety of control systems grew. Soon, it became apparent those systems were not designed to work together, and many multibuilding owners found themselves with systems that did not talk to one another. Out of the resulting frustration grew the open-systems movement.

At the same time, the world saw the birth and growth of the Internet, specifically Internet Protocol (IP), which has driven the expanse of the Internet and World Wide Web to all manners of applications, from entertainment to online gaming, education to e-commerce, and travel planning to social interactions. It was only a matter of time before IP was adopted as the networking protocol of choice for BAS, which is where we are today.

While it will be years before the existing stock of proprietary control systems is replaced, gateways and integration platforms make the information in building controls available on some form of IP.

The convergence of automation and the Internet is not unique to buildings. Many other industries have evolved in a similar manner. The Internet of people steadily is becoming the Internet of things—of all manner of devices, sensors, automation controllers, and machines large and small. From electric toothbrushes to cars, farm machinery to HVAC units, global-positioning-system-enabled parking meters to running shoes, smart and ever-connected microprocessor-driven devices are talking to each other using myriad IP-centric wireline and wireless networks.

Building control systems now are intrinsically connected to each other and to pretty much all other systems on the planet. This connectivity reaches complex enterprise systems designed to wring every ounce of efficiency out of the systems they control, from manufacturing, supply chain, financial, and accounting to resource management.

The Coming of the Third Industrial Revolution
There have been two industrial revolutions. The first occurred during the late 18th/early 19th century and was instigated by two major developments: the printing press and steam power. The printing press allowed information to be mass-distributed; an author's words could be read by thousands within days, a far cry from the days books were hand-copied by monks. Steam power allowed humans to be industrious beyond the strength of their bodies and that of animals; it allowed goods to be produced in a fraction of the time they could be produced by hand and enabled the production of goods that previously were difficult or impossible to make. Meanwhile, new modes of transportation by way of train and steamboat improved trade and aided land expansion and settlement.

The second industrial revolution occurred around the start of the 20th century. It was brought about by another pair of developments: (1) petroleum, internal combustion, and electricity and (2) the telephone and telegraph. Internal-combustion engines revolutionized transportation, yielding the automobile. Electricity brought power to homes and factories, changing the fabric of social activity and the world of commerce. Telecommunications by way of the telephone and telegraph enabled humans to transport information significant distances.

Characteristic of both industrial revolutions was a combination of new forms of energy and new forms of communications. These are the most fundamental components of human existence. We are on the cusp of a third industrial revolution, one brought about by major shifts in energy and communications.