To Market, To Market to Buy a Fat Watt

There is a strong tug of war, not only in the buildings to grid (B2G) arena, but in all others, about whether GridWise is about controlling gizmos or about interactions between economic agents. One is paving interstates along the old cow-paths, and one is laying out a city. When you lay out a city, you never know what markets and neighborhoods will actually develop.

Those who have worked long in utilities or in building systems have a deep impulse toward the perfecting old models of control rather than laying out the market rules for transacted energy. Like a dog to his vomit, even those that see the potential from new markets return instead to deep process interactions to better support the old model of hierarchical control. This is not a failure of morality or imagination, it just is. The effort today is to tug, often against great resistance, the traditional players in the power industry in the [to me] correct direction. And at that, many of the players in that industry don’t even show up to be tugged at events such as Grid-Interop.

This tendency lies in all sectors of energy use, including in buildings. One of the largest building shows (AHR) (Heating & Refrigeration) of the year is in Chicago the third week in January. Because so many of the installers and designers of this equipment make their annual purchasing decisions at the AHR show, the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) holds one of its semiannual meetings in conjunction with AHR each year. ASRAE is the designated domain expert for the promulgation of HVAC standards in the US, a mission that ranges from best practices in grounding equipment to ventilation standards for health to involvement in many green initiatives. As a point of reference, Legionnaire’s disease threw down a gauntlet to ASHRAE analogous to what the Cleveland Outage did to EPRI.

The problem, though, is that this show and these participants are similar in many ways, to those who show up at Utility events. Many of the absolute best are the best at the wrong thing, at the old way. This is the challenge and the opportunity. Some of them are looking for something new. Some of them are just hoping not to miss the next wave. Some will become conservative from the anticipated downturn in building starts. Some will be scared enough to try something new. There are side meetings during AHR that will wave the flag for show attendees.

Structurally, there is a problem in trying to build new markets through AHR. HVAC guys typically sell to the Facilities guys. These have support rather than strategic roles in their respective companies. It is hard for them to do anything other than minimize drag on ongoing business activities. I would like to reach further...perhaps to The Green Grid (Data Center guys) who understand a strong relationship between costs / reliability / capacity business environment....

We are currently looking at Wednesday afternoon, to pull in exhibitors whose responsibilities are done Wednesday morning. There are also a variety of talks during the week I will be at which touch on the same themes, but from the perspective of the building systems integrator...(http://www.ahrexpo.com/showinfo/)

But come March—it is not scheduled yet–and NIST will hold another meeting in Chicago. We hope that this meeting will bring in technical staff from the great commodities markets. I shut my eyes when I saw a careful list of “price and bidding models”—developed by EPRI and IEEE and ASHRAE and.... To me, we have a commodity whose price varies cyclically, and whose future cost is affected by anticipated weather. Sounds like soybeans or orange juice. Except the season is 24 hours. I want daily energy bidding to look more like a commodities exchange.

There are some attributes relevant to commodities. Soybeans are different from juice is different from pork bellies. I assume there is now a futures market in organic orange juice. Energy is a commodity, even though it has some attributes (quality, carbon, location). I began wondering, can we get advice from the CBOT (Chicago Board of Trade) or the Merc (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) about the data structures and interaction patterns they use? Or is NASDAQ, with its widely distributed network of dealers, a better model?

These groups areas certainly understand Demand / Response in a market. They understand bidding and futures markets. They understand every kind of hedge I can imagine and some others as well. In other words, if I have a personal agent sitting on my electric meter acting as my personal day trader, can I get him one of those nifty yellow coats....

So who might participate? People who understand big multi-party bidding systems, and the information standards they run on. Auditors who know what transaction information needs to be kept for instantly executing electronic bids. Anyone else who has an area of expertise near these rawest of markets. Their knowledge is what will unlock e-tech by creating the markets of transacted energy.

An Evolutionary Composite Services Framework for Energy

Future energy systems must not only support interoperability on operational, e-commerce, and security levels, but they must do so against a background of innovation. New technologies will arrive from innovators who are not traditional energy participants; it must be easy for these innovators to introduce their products and easy to integrate these products into the intelligent grid.

New business models, especially support for distributed generation and the hybrid technologies such as the zero net energy building, will demand new interfaces. These business models require symmetry, with each participant both a buyer and a seller of energy. Cost effective local energy storage will create new interaction patterns that we cannot know until we create the incentives that encourage market adoption. One thing is certain, the interface between the intelligent grid and buildings and industry will be different tomorrow, than it is today, and different still in another year.

Electric cars will have a significant position in our society far before we have worked out the market mechanics. The market mechanisms will extend beyond the simplistic “all cars will charge only in the middle of the night” to support on-demand rapid charging and selling stored energy back to the local home, business, or utility. The final market must support social scenarios such as holiday travel and new businesses such as the renewable energy parking deck. Again, we will face rapidly evolving interfaces for the near future.

We can most easily meet these challenges by creating a composite framework that supports diversity. These services will support the different types of business interactions surrounding the intelligent grid. These include but are not limited to:

• E-Commerce services to define the two-way buying and selling of power
• Capability and Capacity services to negotiate how much power is available at what quality irrespective of the underlying technology.
• Weather and similar services provide situation awareness to buildings and grid operators. Weather is critical to predicting energy consumption as well as to predicting renewable energy generation capacity. Situation is awareness is just as important to building and industry participants in new energy as it is to central generation and transmission facilities.
• Tariff and Regulatory interfaces, whether for long transmission, or for carbon negotiations, will guide energy markets beyond mere electrons.
• Security Services to control operations and protect privacy.
• Safety Services to provide situation awareness to linesman responding in emergency and other scenarios.
• Operations Services, supporting either third party operation of site-based generation capacity, or site-generation as a forward deployed utility asset.

Each of these seven interfaces will evolve over time. A user of one service may care little about another. As services become the basis for system-to-system interactions, keeping each service separate simplifies interaction patterns so each can evolve rapidly.

Rapid evolution and deployment are critical to new energy plans, particularly if we are to meet ambitious goals for more renewable energy, more distributed generation, and more electric cars. E-commerce and Security services can be based upon existing IT standards. Operational Services, where appropriate, can be based upon existing standards for substation operations. Weather services can be developed in different venues through the work, perhaps, of NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Composite services will speed the development and deployment of the smart grid.

Composite services will also disconnect the different business processes from changes in other areas. Each business process is concerned with only a single service on its partners. As that service definition evolves over time, newer system will need to interoperate with version-based diversity within domain, rather than in all domains.

Energy systems are big infrastructure. Big infrastructure lasts for a long time and touches many things. Scale introduces diversity if installation. Innovation introduces diversity of interaction. Long life introduces diversity of versions. An Evolutionary Composite Services Framework provides the best platform for providing function and performance despite these three sources of diversity.

Distributed Generation and Lightweight Integration

Distributed generation is a big part of the anticipated new grid. Distributed generation refers to having many small sources of power on the grid. A traditional power company can own distributed generation or someone else, perhaps the building owner, can own it.

Wayne Longcore has described distributed generation today as akin to the early days of personal computing. The big centrally managed power plants have the role of the mainframe, the site where all real power generation occurs. Pocket generation plants, including solar generation on household roofs, are akin to the poorly networked early microcomputers, only able to get on-line with great difficulty, and unable to do much in the big grid. In fact, today, grid operators often cannot tell if some homes are selling power back to the grid. I guess this means that industrial sites with in-house cogeneration are the equivalent of the old minicomputers. Some readers might recall minicomputers and large workstations made up much of the early internet.

Wayne’s point was that users of the sluggish single-purpose computers of the day would have had trouble imagining the internet revolution of the 90’s. They would have had even more trouble imagining a conference like the one Wayne was speaking at, where most people carried several small computers, more powerful than the minicomputers of the day, ones able to play music and videos and surf the web at speeds unimaginable just a little while ago. After all personal computers were toys. Just like micro-generation today.

Pervasive communicating computers required the development of many small light-weight protocols. IP defined inter-computer communication. TCP defined how communications travel a wider network. DNS defined the way to find computers at a distance. Distributed generation will need many small protocols as well. The power of these protocols is that different brands of computers, or even quite different types of systems, can use them, making no distinction between mainframes, personal computers, or, now, even phones.

One protocol we need for distributed generation is a small lightweight pluripotent protocol for connecting small generation to the web. Today, grid operators expect to see a large and complex interface, specific to each type of generation, just as they do on their own substations. While new variants are derived from old, it can take as long to develop a new standard as it does the technology. The sheer number of these standards makes it difficult to integrate new generation points.

Zero Net Energy Buildings will have a mix of generation and storage systems. In most places, any building with storage is not allowed to sell energy back to the grid. Under today’s rules, a building with some solar power, a wind generator, and a diesel generator would need three separate interfaces to sell back to the grid. There is no defined interface for the myriad of low-voltage DC generating systems soon coming to market. These may not sell power to the grid, but may offset other internal needs, and thus influence power sold by “normal” generation. If each of these scenarios needs to be connected to the grid using current approaches, we will not connect many of them.

We need a common lightweight protocol to support agile integration of these new point sources of power to let distributed generation develop. There are some facts that grid operations needs to know about each substation, and it needs to know them about generating buildings as well. The grid needs this information not only for safety, but also for interoperability. But it does not need to know everything about the underlying technology, technology which may change over time. It certainly does not need the information to operate the underlying technology.

I will write about what I see as the requirements of this interface soon.

Enterprise to Grid in Atlanta

I have been working toward the Grid Interop event in Atlanta this week and have had little time to post. This is the second Grid Interop event,sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the US Department of Energy (DOE) and organized by the GridWise Architectural Council. Aside from my own presentation there, there are numerous events and reports that I am as associated with that also have their end point there.

One of these is an open work shop on standards for e-Commerce, the Enterprise, and the Grid being hosted by OASIS and NIST in the evening. We hope to come out of it with a common road map for the key standards ahead. All are welcome, not just conference attendees. I thank Clasma for their assistance and the venue.

Tuesday, 11 November, 7:00pm-8:30pm
Hyatt Regency, Peachtree Center, Atlanta

Facilitated by William Cox, Cox Software Architects LLC and OASIS Technical Advisory Board

Other planned attendees (confirmations pending):

Toby Considine, University of North Carolina and OASIS Technical Advisory Board
Carol Geyer, OASIS
Joe Hughes, EPRI

Theme

For Smart Grids and Smart Buildings don’t reinvent—for timely and efficient technology we must select existing work and....

• Repurpose
• Reuse
• Realign

Goals for this Round Table discussion:

• Share context
• Discuss Motives and direction
• Examine eCommerce and Security standards and appropriate domains for use
• Establish action plan for standardization and implementation

Talk about OASIS and other Standards and Specifications such as

• Web services
• XML Vocabularies
• Security
• Messaging
• Transaction management
• oBIX for smart buildings
• WS-Device Discovery
• Distributed Management

Come away with a deeper understanding of how and when we can move Smart Grids and Smart Buildings standards forward to rapidly benefit from broadly deployed practices and standards.

AGENDA

First items total 15 minutes. Brief overview and introduction

• Standards and specs
• IRP issues
• Standards ROI
• SOA and Semantics
• Buildings & evolution
• OASIS Blue Initiative
• Markets

• Facilitated discussion