General Relativity and Control Systems Standards

I suspect most of my readers can just about remember light speed, the 100 foot barn, and the 110 foot log from learning about relativity. The barn had doors at each end, and one set would close the instant the other doors opened. The challenge was to transport the log through the barn. The answer had to do with light speed and collapsing space, so that as one got close enough to light speed, the log shortened, and it could fit through the barn. It was a simple enough calculation as to how fast one could go to make the log shrink how much. When each of us had completed the math, the professor sprang the surprise on us: "OK, what is happening from the perspective of a cockroach on the log?"

I haven’t been writing much recently, because I have been writing all of the time. The national smart grid roadmap is a project being completed in double time. The EPRI team is diverse and whip smart. The workshop participants are opinionated and have hundreds of millions on the line. I would be surprised of the process was not contentious.

The real problem, though, is no one thinks of the cockroach. Each player on the multi-disciplinary team sees the problem set up the way that they want things to work. Power grid engineers see homes and offices as just one more set of slow devices to turn on and off. Homes and offices see the grid as a secretive and not very reliable partner they have to work with. Green and sustainable energy folks seem to see the laws of thermodynamics as as much a social construct as are the tariffs and business procedures of the grid. Utilities executives see distributed generation as an inefficient way for middle class hobbyists to get their obsessions paid for by those less well off.

The cockroach was moving every bit as fast as the log he was sitting on. While an observer saw space, and the length of the log, contracting, the cockroach was sitting on the log and saw it remaining at 110 feet. The cockroach actually saw the barn getting shorter still, and not likely to let the log pass. However, the cockroach also saw was time dilation instead of space dilation. To the cockroach, the two doors no longer open and close simultaneously, giving the log just enough time to slip through.

And that is the problem with the smart grid. The grid operators do not see the problems of the buildings. The building owners do not see the problems of the grid, because they are hidden by the rules and market design. Venture capitalists do not see a path to profitability in funding projects with years of indecision by the utilities built into the sale cycle. “If only those others would learn about how hard my problems are…” None of them will embrace the perspective of the others; they happen to have other jobs.

Today, I have been wrestling with “Architecturally Significant Interfaces”. Grid architects tend to see the world as late 60’s open plan houses, with no proper rooms to divide the houses activities. Open up the kitchen to the dining room and living room. (I wonder how much great rooms are responsible for the tendency to eat take-out in front of the TV.) Open up the master bedroom to the great room as a loft; it is open and honest, and who cares if it scares the kids. Heck, pry the doors of the bathrooms, so everybody can interact, no matter what they are doing.

A good architecture divides the house into rooms, and thereby defines how people live there. It does not determine the furniture or the wall paint. The conceptual model of the smart grid (read it yourself, chapter 3) describes the functions of the grid and the buildings and people who participate in it. The Architecturally Significant Interfaces could define how information is handed between them; if selected correctly they will free up those in reach room to innovate, without concern for those in other rooms. If we end up with an open floor plan, we will have a mess, wherein in the name of openness we will need a family meeting to before we can decide to change anything.

Relativity—it relies on acknowledging different perspectives. Without acknowledging a few architecturally significant interfaces, the smart grid will assume a perspective held by no one. And that will be a prescription for failure.

Collaborative Energy—the Smart Grid and the End Node

A significant goal of the smart grid is to encourage rapid innovation in the end nodes, that is in the commercial buildings, homes, and industrial sites that consume most of the electricity produced. Today’s North American power grid is probably the supreme engineering feat of the twentieth century; it has made possible the greatest life style ever lived. Its reliability, though, is insufficient for the digital world. Every system margin has been pushed too thin. The introduction of any significant portion of intermittent source energy, such as wind and solar, will make things much worse.

It is time to engage the end nodes in supporting system reliability. Today’s buildings have higher requirements for reliability and quality than the grid was ever designed for. Site-based generation and site based storage are part of the solution, but they could make the system even less reliable. It is time to begin the move to collaborative energy.

The Smart Grid Interim Roadmap highlights the Energy Management Service (EMS) as the sole service in the end node (Industry, Commercial Building, and Home) that communicates with the grid for purposes of load shaping and load curtailment. Over time, the load shaping signal will become primarily economic. Load curtailment, the mandatory response to critical issues on the grid, may not ever be adequately handled by economic signals. Load shaping and load curtailment comprise the function referred to by the utilities as Demand Response. The external signals to the EMS are being defined in the OASIS Energy Interoperability TC, building upon the work of OpenADR.

The EMS marshals the energy response from the building. This may range from the simple "shut off, turn on" to a nuanced response to enterprise and occupant driven priorities. While those priorities and their management are left, as they should be, to the market, we need stadata models to free the appliance, building system, and consumer electronics manufacturers to innovate. These standards go under the currently imprecise name "energy profiles".

Energy profiles will define the interaction patterns of the smaller systems. How much energy is it using? Can it respond to a price signal? How much can it respond to a price signal? How long will it take to respond? Will it use more before it uses less? The answers to these questions must be aggregated by the EMS and offered up to respond to OpenADR signals. The EMS should be able to access the meter to verify its own operations.

This model should support multiple levels, as several building systems may present one face to the EMS, or several EMS’s in a campus may present one face to the grid. The model does not include detailed operations of the EMS, nor does it define EMS user interfaces. These areas are best left to the creativity of the market.

A key function of the EMS is to support remote operations. Third parties will use the EMS to offer remote energy management services. Today, many utilities see themselves as the sole provider of these services. Increasingly, companies such as Enernoc and Constellation Energy are challenging that assumption. With proper standards, energy managers will flood the market, driving prices down. Those left standing will compete on higher level services.

There is still time to join the OASIS Energy Interoperability Technical Committee—drop me a line and I will tell you how to join.

Do we really need "IP Everywhere" in the smart grid?

If you want to start a fight in a crowd of smart grid participants, you can begin one by announcing unambiguously how you feel about IP (Internet Protocol) everywhere. Vendors fight to gain advantage for or to forefend elimination of their product lines. Utilities become passionate to defend their AMI projects and their rate bases.

Many of these conversations are premised on (to my mind) flawed thinking. Others need to define what they really want rather than relying on a simple slogan. I am a passionate believer in both open access to information and to open interfaces. I am also against IP everywhere.

One frequent claim is that I may need to talk to any device from anywhere in the future. I need no communication protocol for the car next to me on the free way to access my carburetion strategy. It is a security feature that the pierced guy next to me at the coffee shop does not have an IP address in the credit card in my wallet. Remote access reduces accountability. Remote access creates security requirements. Security requirements create expense and complexity.

We understand this everywhere but the grid and other aspects of the Internet of Things (IOT). When integrating engineered systems, there is a pervasive urge that everything must be able to address everything else at all times. Direct control of remote systems usually reduces quality of both experience and performance. As Gail Horst has explained succinctly, a clothes washing machine already is able to operate its internal controls; it knows that it can’t respond unless it is not full of bleach. It needs to expose only enough to indicate how and when it can respond, and to receive plaints of urgency and notifications of price.

For example, the Energy Management Service (EMS) manages the internal energy use in the home or commercial building. Ideally, an EMS needs communications of price, and of how much to shed, and to make a commitment. Period.

If the occupant chooses to outsource the operation of its EMS to an external third party, then the EMS needs additional capabilities to pass messages about internal devices and capabilities to that third party and to relay commands from that third party to the systems and agents within the building. If the third party happens to be a utility, and the utility business and regulatory model includes direct control by the utility, all messages should still be through the EMS. Today, third party management by the Utility just happens to be the default set of decisions in many parts of the country.

Nothing about this model mandates any shared IP space, or any direct addressability. I would argue that this model accurately describes the *business* model. So what are the IP wars about?

IP interfaces support easy interoperability within a domain—but interoperability between what. I do not need an IP address on my disk drive, although there are business cases when I may want it. The interoperability between things is needed for those loosely coupled situations that I may want to reconfigure/reassemble easily.

Building operators and building integrators are often frustrated by their inability to directly read meter data. The utility may have carefully engineered a solution to collect meter data at fifteen minute intervals to support billing. That solution may use non-standard protocols to wring every bit of performance through a limited communication channel. The billing system may use a batch process to post this collected data against each customer hours later. That information may only be available in a web page after carefully logging in.

The building system integrator would like to access live data for shorter intervals when tuning systems. The building operator would like to access this information in real time to support demand response. These functions require reading the meter on demand. The barrier is that meter data is collected only to support the billing system, and only to meet the needs of the billing system. The problem is sharing information only after processing. If IP were used to support the existing process, none of that would change.

In between domains, there is always a gateway. That gateway may be translating from CDMA to 1000BASEFL, it may be merely performing Network Address Translation (NAT), it may be doing semantic and ontological translation. It is still a gateway from one world to another. As such, either side should barely trust it. As such, it can have different protocols on either side.

The smart grid needs information sharing and informational interfaces. It needs discoverable interfaces at the domain transition, because I don’t care how hard the CPUs are processing, I’m concerned about the 3 days of head scratching, cursing human time needed to integrate each interface (which means every home, building, and factory) when someone switches to a new version of something somewhere.

The smart grid should leverage web developed and web-derived technologies, protocols, and interactions wherever in the smart grid they can speed development, increase transparency, and ease interoperability with adjacent domains to meet business goals. It does not need IP everywhere.

Smart Cars At Loose on the Smart Grid

I have written before of the challenges of software for electric cars at home (Smart Cars at Home on the Grid). Today I want to expand the domain of those cars into the wider world. The minimal car software will have some way to make electronic purchases as it drives across the town and the country. The better car software will do much more.

The electric car may recharge while on the road. It can also re-sell power when on the road. How it decides to do this must first be based upon what the car is doing. If I am driving to the beach, a drive of several hours me, then I am not interested in accepting any offers to buy my stored power when I stop for a Bo’s biscuit en route. My car needs to know and understand my travel plans.

Cars will certainly have fast charge as well as slow charge options. Unless in the dead of night, fast charge is likely to be considerably more expensive than a slow charge. Not all locations will offer fast charges. Not all locations will be connected to the grid. Not all locations will offer the same kinds of power. As a car drives from home to work to the public parking lot to the mall, as its driver visits friends and family, then the power market rules, billing, and security change.

The car’s energy management system (EMS) may well integrate with the car’s geographic positioning system (GPS). Today’s GPS can already tell you where the nearest gas station is, and the prices at many of them. Tomorrow’s car-based GPS should find stations for re-charging, including the location of the green re-charge, the fast re-charge, all factored by the remaining charge in the vehicle battery.

Too much time, and too much energy is spent on standards for portability of car identity. Current market rules prohibit resale of electricity by non-utilities. This market rule creates all sorts of complexity and rooms full of technologists and executives discuss how to make the charges from plugging in your car away from home go back to your home energy bill. This causes too much complexity. It breaks one of the oldest household transportation rules, that the teen pays for her own gas. It adds complexity on top of the more important life-style and service issues discussed above.

Even at home, the smart electric car will need a wider intelligence. The car may benefit from accessing weather predictions. Weather is the best predictor for predictor for tomorrow’s energy prices. Weather information is the best way to predict whether solar or wind power will be available tomorrow. Weather may be the best way to predict, in this household, a spontaneous desire to drive to the beach.

Wherever it goes, wherever it plugs in, the smart electrical car will be exposing itself to strange networks, with uncertain security. If the car manages its own charging identity, then it will need to protect its identity, shielding it except from the charge processing entity. The car will need to defend itself from strangers, while allowing extended family to re-program. The car must be able to request and accept software updates while defending itself, and its own system integrity.

Within the car, the car’s user management and credential management systems must be unable to take over the cars control system. The best cars designers are already moving to service oriented architectures within the car. This will make the move to defense in depth within the car simpler.

Dumb electric cars will be just tolerable. Good electric cars will engage the wider world as well as the home of the car owner. Software and information will be at the core.