Smart Buildings, Smart Energy, and the Road Ahead

I arrived in Chicago for the AHR show with the early Sunday morning budget flight crowd. I was not surprised that most of the van worked with HVAC. I was gratified to be recognized by Terry Reynolds of Control Technology. Terry told me that he was using oBIX in his jobs. “We are just starting to crack things open” he observed. We compared notes on projects ranging from the UNC EBMS (Enterprise Building Management System) to the New York City public school energy management system.

He went on to ask me of  what is going to drive adoption faster. I think there are five elements of smart energy that are now on the horizon.  Each of them will accelerate the deployment of open systems for energy-using and supplying systems. Each will also expand the use of oBIX.

WS-DD and WS-DP are going to bring automatic discovery and configuration to embedded energy systems. Most people use these technologies already. Their use in building and energy systems is new. When you have plugged your computer into a network and found the printers, you have performed device discovery (DD). When you further found that the printer supports duplex printing, but not color, you have used a device profile. The WS stands for Web Services and these protocols are being developed into standards at OASIS.

The fascinating part about WS-DD and WS-DP is that one of the world’s largest makers of electrical switch gear and building systems, Schneider Electric, is part of the standards committee. Sooner or later, we will have profiles for building systems just as we do for printers and digital cameras. Just as they do now for cameras, these profiles will describe functionality and use, rather than sensors and actuators. Perhaps these profiles will delineate predefined oBIX contracts for performance. If so, this will at last make it safe for business applications to interact with building systems.

WS-Calendar is an effort to formalize and standardize schedule elements for web services. Interactions with business functions always begin with agreeing on a schedule. Business interactions with the smart grid will always begin with a price and a schedule. Schedules will award the developer of autonomous systems; just as the use of ICalendar schedules the interactions of autonomous people. When I invite someone to a meeting using ICalendar, the responsibility to get up in the morning, eat breakfast, drop of the kids at school, etc., is the onus of the other meeting attendees. In the same way, responsibility for preparation of a meeting space, including economic negotiations with the grid for energy, will fall to the building system.

New standards to provide situation awareness to first responders will lead to the WS-ready standardization for techniques to visualize building system operations. 911 operators and first responders will be able to query building systems. There will be an open source SVG-based framework to tie floor plans to sensor data, and to provide a source of meaning to the underlying sensor data. (SVG is a standard displaying scalable graphics in a way that can use standard interactive web techniques such as AJAX. SVG is available on Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and many cell phones; Google is even making an SVG plug in for Internet Explorer.) Once we have a code requirement to visualize building operations in an open standards-based way, it will be natural to use the same interface for maintenance and operations.

OpenLynx is an open source oBIX server, available on SourceForge. Peter Michaelic has defined it with a pluggable architecture; any underlying protocol can be plugged to the inside and exposed as oBIX on the outside. OpenLynx reduces the barriers to providing standards-based web services to any underlying system.

OpenADR is a developing standard for Automatic Demand Response. Demand Response is what utilities call the interactions to manage demand by sending messages, including price signals, to their customers. Utilities have a growing interest in what they call fulfillment, i.e., they care not only that processes are followed, but that contracted energy goals are met. This means that building systems, and their operations, are about to be linked directly to corporate revenues.

When I was in high school, I learned to swim out and wait for the big wave. They always came in sets, and the first wave of the set was not the biggest. So I would tread water, and count the swells. Each of these efforts is currently underway. Together they will remove the barriers to standards-based middleware for building systems. I’m counting energy swells and waiting for the big one.

Natural Gas and Perfect Power

We are misusing natural gas in our power plants. Guided by strong emotions and the search for the quick fix, we are reducing the long term reliability and sustainability of our energy infrastructure. When well meant but bad decisions reduce the common good, we call it the tragedy of the commons. Technology and modern public interest groups let us recreate the tragedy of the commons on a larger scale.

Perfect Power is what Kurt Yeager and the Galvin Electricity Initiative call their version of the smart grid. Perfect Power assumes that the national power grid will not and cannot be made reliable enough for the digital world. Attempts to make the grid reliable cost a lot of money and waste a lot of power. Attempts to make the grid reliable interfere with the grid being the most efficient market place of energy possible, and able to accept innovation, diversity, and change. Perfect power reliability starts in the home and building, which must be responsible for their own reliability and quality. Groups of homes and buildings can band together in microgrids to enhance that reliability and provide each other with robustness. These microgrids can then buy from the grid when their needs and desires warrant, and when the prices are good. The grid, freed from the mandate to do what it cannot, will become easier and less expensive to operate.

Net Zero Energy and Distributed Generation are different perspectives on the perfect power vision. Buildings that are able to store, generate, recycle, and convert energy, can buy when they want, can sell when they can, and are reliable whatever the grid provides. Microgrids expand the options for energy storage, recycling and re-use even we add distributed generation. Distributed generation can get us past the restrictions of the regulated “natural monopoly” of power.

I have written before that I wanted my home heating system to see gas as well as electrical prices. Regular readers know that I recently installed a hybrid system that switches from heat pump to gas furnace based upon outdoor air temperature. This automatic cut-over is based on computed heat-pump efficiency. The cut-over should be based upon the current price of each energy source, factored by each system’s internal performance diagnostics.

At my annual Caroling Party, conversations naturally turned to the new purchase, who installed it, and was I satisfied. One party-goer was concerned that the high efficiency furnace was still producing greenhouse gases. I mused that even if the power company was better than the 95% condensing furnace, the local fuel did not suffer from the inefficiencies of converting heat to electricity, and of then transmitting it for many miles, and then converting it back to heat. Local efficiency numbers, from local energy use, are simpler and easier to understand.

Another guest, a long time gas company engineer, pointed out that natural gas has its own Demand-Response system. Demand-Response refers to the approaches and technology used by the electrical providers to manage peak capacity by seasonal, daily, and emergency communications with its customers. During periods of peak use, the pressure in the natural gas distribution system can drop to low levels. If it drops too far, pressure valves automatically shut off in homes and businesses. These brown-outs are much more expensive to recover from than electrical black-outs. Utility employees must turn off each gas meter before a local loop can be restored lest appliances with pilot lights become explosion hazards. Gas companies handles these low pressure incidents by calling large industrial customers and negotiating reduced use.

All of the same AMI/AMR conversations of the power grid apply naturally to natural gas distribution. The costs savings and efficiencies of automated cut-off of service can offer even greater benefits, when needed, to the gas company than they do to the electrical company. Gas distribution can benefit from dynamic pricing for capacity management just as does electrical distribution. If I had dynamic pricing, then I could factor it automatically, along with electrical pricing, into my home heating operations.

All of the concepts above apply to generation as well. Perfect power and E-tech will include conventional generation as well as exotic technologies such as gas-based fuel cells. Natural Gas will need many of the same service interfaces as electricity.

Stability and robustness in ecosystems comes from diversity of species. Stability and robustness of energy in the home and office will come best from diversity of energy sources, including those from outside the building as well as those generated internally. There are few sources of energy that are easy to transmit to each site of final use. We should not waste them all in central generation plants. We should use them to expand the robustness and diversity of energy in each building and in each microgrid.

The Talmud and the Smart Grid

I received an animated Christmas card in e-mail from a leader in demand-response last month. The e-card used flash animation to explain demand-response. The flash animation told a tale of demand-response during a holiday season. Santa and his sleigh flew into a transmission line, causing power shortage. DR aware equipment rapidly responded to signals sent out. DR-aware Christmas lights dimmed just a little. DR-aware electric menorahs turned off every other light. The animated card told a story that demonstrated that demand-response could be efficient, effective, and doubly offensive.

Demand-Response (DR) is an approach to power management developed by the electrical power industry. Peak power is the most expensive power. It is usually generated by the most polluting power sources. When consumers demand is greater than the system can provide, brown-outs and even black-outs ensue. If consumers in buildings, homes and industry could respond rapidly to signals that the grid was nearing capacity, it would greatly reduce the costs, both monetary and environmental of providing electrical power while improving reliability.

The menorah is part of celebrating Chanukah, also known as the festival of lights. Chanukah celebrates the re-dedication of the Jewish Temple following the defeat of the Seleucid empire. When the temple was re-dedicated, there was only enough sacramental oil to light the Temple’s eternal flame for one night, yet the lamp burned for eight days until acceptable reserves could be found. One might consider this in itself to be a miracle of DR.

Jewish tradition recounts a great dispute between Hillel and Shammai as to the proper order and means of lighting the menorah. The dispute swung on a fundamental question of faith and the practice chosen illustrated that faith. Modern practice follows Hillel, and the lights are lit in a particular order on particular nights. A quick explanation can be found at http://www.ou.org/chagim/chanukah/machloket.htm. Clearly blacking out every other light on the menorah in response to DR is offensive to tradition.

There is another offense from the misuse of the menorah. The Talmud prohibits using Chanukah lights for anything other than publicizing and meditating on the Chanukah story. For this reason, there is an extra light on the menorah, used to light the others. The extra light also provides ambiguity; if one were to read from the lights—something prohibited—then it's not clear whether the light one's reading from was from the Hanukkah lights or the extra light. Clearly using lights on an electric menorah, other than the extra light, would be for neither publicity or meditation. I see no reason why the extra light could not be used for DR—but not the others.

Acceptable DR must be based upon local control and local autonomy. Central control will never be sensitive to the local concerns in each home and each building. Failure to take those concerns into account will cause resentment. It is easy to come up with other scenarios in which an engineered demand response would be offensive in other traditions at other times. Resentment will limit response by limiting participation.

To be truly affective, grid-scale power management must respect local autonomy. The best way to do that is by economic signals to communicate scarcity and value. After receiving these signals, each business and household can decide.

Smartgrid Basics: The Supply Side Problem

Last week the Smartgrid-discuss group opened up within OASIS, introducing power grid technologies to the architects of e-commerce and internet security standards. Some of the latter are trying to understand the problem, and learn the jargon. I wrote this as one of a series of posts introduce the issues in a simplified, almost cartoon form.

The North American power grid is the world’s largest robot. It was imagined in the 30’s, designed in the 50’s and has been built out and patched ever since. Some very bright people have done extraordinary things to retrofit the system with digital descendants of the original analog controls. It is very much less stable than folks let on. It suffers from an instability condition that occurs periodically and has for years. This condition was occurring when a tree branch took a transmission line and thereby a third of North America on August 14, 2003. That underlying instability occurs an order of magnitude more frequently today than it did then. Something has to change.

The archetype for modern power markets was established 100 years ago in Chicago on April 1908. At that time, power demands were low, and electric metering consisted of pens on mechanical turntables that spun as power was used. These paper sheets were collected and read periodically. Modern power marketing was established a natural monopoly with regulated cost recovery, much as telecommunications used to be. The regulated cost recovery market is only slowing to take advantage of digital metering using two way communications. Many new installations are still being designed as asymmetric interfaces, with the demand side, i.e., the building inhabitant, excluded from direct communication. New business models must support transparency and symmetry.

The Carterphone law suit established that third party equipment could be attached directly to the phone system, and Judge Green tore down the natural monopolies. The model of 25 year depreciation of black handsets owned by the phone company began to erode. New business models, beginning with fax, continuing to modem-based communications began to arise. Today deep process interactions running through slow moving standards bodies prevent the attachment of new types of systems. Innovations must be approved as expenditures by 50 public utilities commissions. Today’s need for rapid innovation in energy generation, storage, and conversions demand more agile business models.

In 1908, there was no exchange of power between local markets. There was no dynamic pricing. Consumers still use power as if it were a static resource; wholesale prices oscillate though each day. In many parts of the country, power prices are actually negative at regular times each week. Most goods can stay in the warehouse overnight; electricity cannot. We can win great savings by smoothing power demand. Without price signals, end users in buildings and homes have no incentive to help.

The grid is built for peak capacity. 17% of the grid’s generating capacity is used for less than 110 hours a year. This capacity is the dirtiest and by far the most expensive generation. These plants may even be spun up but idle, ready to be called into use if needed. The system as a whole bears the cost of this very expensive peak load. If consumers in buildings, homes and industry could respond rapidly to signals that the grid was nearing the need to use these resources, it would greatly reduce costs, both monetary and environmental. The power industry calls this Demand-Response, and as of yet there are no standards. OpenADR is a good start.

Power Grid operation is like Windows 95. I say that as someone who considers Windows 95 one of the supreme engineering achievement in software. Windows 95 had to support every bit of software that had ever been written, including some horrible mistakes. Windows 95 had to create an environment that made it possible for new markets using 32 bit software to develop, while running all the old software. Windows 95 had to support old drivers and memory management based on the old 840K and 32K memory thunking, while switching to virtual memory management in mid-boot if no such drivers were found. Windows 95 was a shaky bridge built over a chasm, made entirely of bent toothpicks and wet tissue paper. It would be easier with structural steel and suspension materials, but that easier job was not the task. It was a wonder that Windows 95 could work at all. Today’s power grid, and SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) strategies, and system operations are like Windows 95, tied down to backward compatibility and hampered by the reasonable decisions of long ago. Perfecting Windows 95 led to the increasingly unwieldy Windows 98 and Windows ME. Sometimes it is better to do things that aren’t so hard.

In summary, inquiries about how it is done today are not always useful. Paving the cow paths to handle heavy traffic is not the best way forward. The GridWise effort is to find something new, and that something will support new markets that we do not today know or understand. It must do so while stabilizing the grid even as we add de-stabilizing new energy sources. It must promote better control even as we accept new players and more point sources of generation.

What is the model? If we do this right, that question will be like asking what the new economy would look like before the DotCom boom...

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