Standards Roadmap for the Smart Grid (SGIX) (v2)

Thanks for all those comments on my earlier post. I have updated the work and am re-posting.

The smart grid is more than improved top down control; it is a grid ready for unreliable energy sources (such as wind, waves, and sun), distributed generation, and Net Zero Energy (NZE) buildings. NZE buildings sometimes buy energy, sometimes sell energy, and energy use balances out over the day, season, or year. The NZE building presents particular problems as it may switch from buying energy one minute, and selling energy the next. Plug-in electric vehicles, whether hybrid or not, present the challenges similar to those of NZE buildings, with the added complexity of mobility. The smart grid requires distributed decision making, distributed responsibility for reliability, and easy interoperability to integrate an ever-changing mix of technologies.

The smart grid will be transactional, with each decision to buy or sell power a separate transaction at a separate price. The price of these transactions will vary dynamically, as a live energy market determines the clearing price at each moment for each sale or purchase. The smart grid will be open and transparent, wherein consumers can choose what kind of power to buy, and providers can prove that they are selling the kind of power they promise.

Alex Levinson of Lockheed Martin has named the suite of standards we will need for the smart grid as Smart Grid Information Exchange (SGIX). What follows is a personal view of a dynamic roadmap of the standards that comprise SGIX.

• SG Pricing: Price is more than a number. If I ask you if prices are up or down at the store, the answer is not “7”. It is not “Tomatoes are $3.00.” The price is “$3.57 per pound for the organic vine-ripened greenhouse heritage Cherokee tomatoes.” Each buyer can choose which attributes affect their purchase decision. I may choose to buy the cheapest tomatoes. I may choose to buy only organic. I may grudgingly choose the most expensive because they are the only ones in the store. SG Pricing will flow throughout the system—a model known as Prices to Devices. Under prices to devices, each system within a home or building may make its own decisions based upon budget and priority. I will be able to choose to run the fountain in front of my office only when wind power is available and below a certain price. SG-Pricing will be part of the SG Energy Market Information Exchange TC.
• SG Metering: This is a simple standard of energy flows by time slice. It also includes direction, as power may flow one way for a time, and then the other in a distributed world. To achieve transparent clearing markets, SG-Metering report what amount of what kind of power was purchased at what price at what time. If my neighbor and I buy the same amount of power at the same time, we may pay different prices because we may have made different decisions on how to buy. I may owe to my utility or to my neighbor for that purchase of solar power. SG-Transaction is in effect the accounting journal entry for each purchase or sale of energy.
• SG Energy Market Information Exchange: There is some bidding and exchange of information in advance. In my mind, this looks somewhat like commodity markets for those who want to participate. It includes elements of weather arbitrage. It includes time and reliability. It includes all of the elements of price. SG-EMIE will be developed in the Energy Market Information Exchange TC.
• UnitsML: UnitsML offers an unambiguous way to describe all physical measurements, and an unambiguous ability for a computer to look up the translation of any units of measure to any other units. SG-Pricing, SG-Transaction, and Energy Market Information Exchange will use UnitsML. UnitsML is an existing OASIS committee which will need some assistance and wider participation to complete.
• WS-Calendar: We all use ICALENDAR (IETF RFC 2445, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt) to unambiguously exchange information about time intervals. You used it the last time you clicked on an email attachment and suddenly had a meeting on your personal calendar. We need the same functionality standardized for web services. We will use it as part of pricing, and weather predictions, building management, and other decisions. WS-Calendar will be developed outside the SG effort as its anticipated uses extend into many business interactions.
• Digital Weather Markup Language (DWML): DWML is an existing specification developed by NOAA. NOAA offers a web service to which one can submit a longitude and latitude and receive in reply a DWML forecast. Most forward forward-looking energy markets are based on assumptions about weather. Most historical analysis of energy use includes recalling the weather environment. The most successful energy middleman base their business on understanding microclimates. We need to define a DWML profile for reporting as well as forecasting, to enable the exchange of actual conditions as well as forecasts. Such a profile would be used when querying local weather stations and even personal weather systems. Such a standard should include UnitsML (for internationalization) as well as time (WS-Calendar). We should encourage NOAA to develop the DWML specification into a standard; DWML also is of interest to the Emergency Response community.
• WS-DD and WS-DP: Device discovery and device profiles have been used in computer networking for some time. Device Discovery lets you find all printers on the network. Device profiles let you decide which printer to use when you want color duplexing. These functions are being standardized for the web. Schneider, one of the largest conglomerates providing systems for the grid and building is looking at providing WS DD and WS DP for all the equipment it sells. I think it will have a big role in the future world of distributed generation and Net Zero Energy facilities.
• SG Energy Interoperability: I envision this as a short, light, exchange of the information we need to plug technologies together without knowing the details. I see it as smaller than, but perhaps derived from, ISO-61850. It includes some basic safety information. It includes estimates of reliability and capacity. It may include some of the “price attributes” (Am I a source of carbon-credit eligible power?). SG Energy Interoperability includes critical Demand Response, i.e., non-market emergency curtailment of energy. A draft of the Energy Interoperability TC Charter is attached.
• SG-Load Control: The OASIS standard oBIX offers an extensible WS framework for communication with building control systems. OBIX defined a concept of Contracts, used to define higher level interactions. The ASHRAE BACnet Load Control Object offers a model for building systems to report on their energy use, to negotiate responsiveness, and to make load shedding agreements. SG-Load Control would build on the BACnet model to define a web service standards for contacts as defined by oBIX
• SG Telemetry: What is going on on the grid, and where is it failing. I recommend that we apply the watches, trends, and messages of oBIX into this critical area.
• SG Remote Operation: This one may be a literal transform from the ISO 61850 standard for substation communications. To the extent that SG Remote Operation moves into web services, it should apply interaction patterns and data models of oBIX.
• SG Curtailment. Sometimes, no matter how you plan, stuff happens. The daily temperature is 5 degrees warmer than expected. The turbine seizes. A truck drives into the transmission tower. Shed load NOW! Prices and markets for curtailment have been evolving rapidly; perhaps this addresses the grid integrity issues more directly. SG-Curtailment is part of the deliverable of the Energy Interoperability TC.
• SG Quality Of Service (SG-QOS): Participants in the smart grid must exchange information about reliability and performance. QOS information must be exchanged both as a promise and as a result. We may be able to adapt the Business Process QOS (BQOS) work from the EERP TC
• SG CyberSecurity: Security issues need to be integrated within every TC from the beginning—and not merely a veneer layered on after the fact. We need a separate security toolkit/framework, perhaps a profile from current fine-grained security standards, key management, and related areas. SG Telemetry may be an area to start defining so the broader integration of physical security, fine-grained networking and commercial security, and situation awareness technologies can be brought to bear.

Keep those comments and suggestions coming...

Watered-Down Energy

I’ve wondered here before how water intersects with energy conversations. As I write this on a plane leaving San Diego, which has been in a drought, I have just read of how a well meaning public agency has once again created perverse incentives on the use of scarce resources. A central tenet of sustainability is that we must consider the full external costs of our activities. It is ironic that incentives that result in perverse outcomes appear again and again in the plans for sustainability.

The developing plan appears to be based upon price-based custom rationing. Each household will receive a per month allocation based on a percentage of its historical use. Households who use more than the target will be charged at five times the normal rate for the additional water. This is rationalized as the "fairest" because it affects all houses based upon their "needs".

Long time conservationists are protesting. If you have been using water wantonly, you will experience a barely annoying reduction to some level of use that is still far above the norm. If you have been sparing in your water use, whether due to philosophy, parsimony, or poverty, you will now be asked to cut beyond inconvenience, or to pay costs far higher than your neighbor who has never conserved.

Some households were interviewed admitting that they were increasing their water use this month so they would have a bigger allocation when the rationing kicks in. Interference in free markets always creates some sort of gaming. In this case, the proposed solution is encouraging people to make the problem worse today. We need to be mindful of this effect as we consider proposals for DR (demand response) and other energy strategies that rely on technocrats trying to outthink the market.

One long-standing feature of water allocation here in the arid west is water rights. Legal recognition of water rights was necessary to quell some of the great battles of the wild west. Water rights are used to allocate shares of water from the Colorado between Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and California. Water rights support long term investments in farms and orchards by establishing long term access to a resource that is indispensable in the deserts of the southwest. If you buy land without the water rights, you may have no right to the water that falls on or flows across your land.

Water rights, or the lack of those rights, has caused great consternation in at least one new bedroom community of Denver on the western slope. The community has been marketed as green, and the homeowners are earnestly saving the planet by installing rain barrels under roof downspouts to support their gardens and landscaping. The problem is that they do not have rights to that water. Hundreds of homes impounding the water from thousands of acres of land will destroy downstream agriculture with longstanding rights to that water. Somehow this seems as a cruel joke to those now moving into the new development. After all, it is rain falling on their land!

Sustainable development activists have long advocated the trading of land rights. To sustain “rural character”, farmers have been urged to sign away the right to develop their land in return for permanent tax breaks on their land. In other areas, land conservancies have bought up those development rights for cash now. It is ironic that this same community now does not understand water rights.

Energy and water are about to become more entwined. In San Diego, there are perennial proposals for a massive desalination plant to remove this dependence on the constrained supply from the Colorado River. San Diego actually had one in the past, one that was ordered transferred to Guantanamo Bay by Kennedy following the Bay of Pigs fiasco. San Diego has debated a replacement, and who will pay for it, ever since.

The desalination plant will require electricity, and a lot of it. Proposals on the table range from a collocated nuclear plant to an untested wave generator. There is predictable high concern over the nuclear option, concern that seems to trump the unknown effects on the fragile coast and marine fauna that the large wave generator might cause. Unremarked in these conversations is that the San Diego power grid frequently receives power from mobile floating nuclear plants; the Navy has long kept their nuclear warships powered up when docked by selling power to the grid.

Water and Electricity just seem to go together.

I sometimes wonder whether energy rights will look more like water rights in the future. Google has demanded primacy of energy rights to nearby hydropower as part of economic development packages that put their data centers in rural areas. Is this right tradable or assignable?

Will regions that dedicate large tracts of land to allow the construction of alternative energy or for the transmission of energy demand energy rights as part of their payment? Do these rights transfer with the land, or are they separate? Should some communities demand or accept energy rights in return for assuming stranded costs and setting the electrical industry free? How will these markets develop?

Demand and Emergency Responses

Smart responses demand smart buildings. In energy, we have Demand-Response (DR). DR is the utility-centric term for making sure that buildings do not demand more power than the electric utility is able to give. DR started out as dumb control. DR is becoming live energy markets and live energy bidding. Emergency response is the fire/police/medical/hazmat personnel who come during an emergency. What can these areas have in common?

New models for DR anticipate that buildings become full intelligent partners in energy negotiations. DR rewards for each event offer too few dollars to engage the building full time attention of the occupants. DR events today (prior to significant renewable energy generation) occur too rarely to require full attention. Future DR will shun control interactions and therefore require intelligent buildings that are able to respond on behalf of their occupants.

Six cities have already rolled out Next Generation 911 (NG911) as early adopters prior to the 2010 larger scale roll-out. NG911 was designed so that security companies and even buildings can submit calls without waiting for an operator to verify information. Of course, this means that the intelligent building must know its own address and geo-location to place the call, as well as the operational information that causes it to initiate the call.

In energy markets, Demand Response Aggregators are critical in negotiating the agreements to find power when needed. This power that the aggregators buy back for the grid is sometimes called Nega-Watts (as in “Nega-watts are always cheaper than megawatts”). Capacity events that require energy use cut-back are often tied to particular parts of the physical grid. DR aggregators do not like to share their detailed customer information with their suppliers because theirs is a knowledge game, based upon understanding their customers better than the larger grid operators do.

Smaller areas of the grid are supported by distinct infrastructure. The service area for this distinct infrastructure can be drawn on a map as what the GIS (Geographic Information Systems, the digital map makers) makers call polygons. It makes sense for DR promises by DR aggregators to be reported up to their suppliers by polygon.

The techniques for identifying which polygon surrounds a geo-location are well known. If each building knew its geo-location, it would be simple to sum DR promises by polygon as long as standard definitions are used. The open geospatial consortium (OGC) has developed standards for expressing both point locations and polygons in XML, the language of the web. Anyone who has ever “pinned something to Google earth” has used the point location XML standard from the OGC.

If a building needs to know its location for interacting with NG911, and needs to know its location to participate in DR, it makes sense for the same standard to be used in Energy and in Emergency Response. Using the geo-location standard routinely for energy operations will mean that the location is well known when it is needed for emergency response.

There is another scenario that would reward convergence. Power grid failures have implications to the emergency responder at both the point and the polygon level. If a substation bursts into flames, or if a truck hits a transmission line, then a neighborhood defined by a polygon goes into darkness. If a building can initiate a 911 call, then a substation should be able to, as well. If this report includes a polygon, then the polygon may encircle point identified signal lights, and a traffic cop may need to be dispatched to each to direct traffic. Police may also wish to increase patrols in the neighborhood without lights. Emergency dispatchers may wish to correlate incoming calls with power outages.

Simple parsimony suggests that the more elegant solution has both these domains, Energy and Emergency Response, sharing the same geo-location standards from the OGC.

Energy, Innovation, and E-Tech

The culture of information technology is one of innovation and rapid change. The culture of energy is risk-adverse and slow to change. We need to move from energy to E-Tech to address today’s problems of climate, of security, and of reliability. E-Tech will embrace diversity to customize each solution for each situation. E-Tech will support rapid quick adoption of new technologies. E-tech must not be constrained by the slow adoption of the regulated utilities. E-Tech must be more tolerant of poor power quality. E-Tech must provide better support of digital systems for business and entertainment than do today’s systems.

Today’s energy distribution systems are deeply integrated and intolerant of diversity. Utilities routinely demand new components based on 20 year old technology. SCADA security relies on physical defense of dumb systems. Every decision is made to preserve a static hierarchy of systems from generator to final user.

Tomorrows energy distribution must acknowledge and accept distributed generation and diversity of technology. Every demarcation will potentially support energy flows in either direction. Net energy users will be able to negotiate with different suppliers. Todays presumption of hierarchical control will not support this.

As new technologies hit the market, new sources of energy will appear in a patchwork across the distribution networks. Some of these will be competing brands of existing technologies. Some of these will be radical variants and extensions of existing technologies, perhaps leveraging intelligence or nanotechnology to create something that is qualitatively distinct. Some of these will use whole new approaches to electrical generation, such as the bacterial system I wrote of last fall.

Other approaches will change the way energy is used. Energy storage, conversion, and recycling are all parts of the Net Zero Energy (NZE) building. If some of these approaches create excess energy that can be sold to the grid, our interface should support it. As the price, i.e. scarcity, of electricity grows, a building may wish to redeploy more and more of its energy for sale. It is imaginable that the mix of energy sources inside a building may be unique. It is certain that the mix of energy sources in each building are likely to change over time.

The current models of grid operation will not support these new scenarios. Deep process-oriented integration will be a barrier to rapid innovation. Current assumptions of a paternalistic utility providing all control will not be sustained. New models of loose integration and symmetric interactions are required.

Today, new energy technologies have an additional hurdle to get to market; they must be accepted by the utilities as a proper peer with full process revealed. This can add years to the trip to market. This presents a huge barrier to venture funding of energy project. We must remove that barrier, through adopting service oriented integration and abandoning process integration. When we do, many more energy ventures will be funded. When we do, we will have gone a long way toward making E-Tech as agile and innovative as high tech.