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...

If you want to join the public discussion at OASIS, send a message to

smartgrid-discuss-subscribe@lists.oasis-open.org.

Whither Grid Standards

On last Friday’s phone call about advancing the OpenADR specification to a national and perhaps international standard, we agreed to continue the discussion in an open forum at the OASIS site (www.OASIS-Open.org). OASIS, or the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, has long been the home for the underpinnings of e-commerce, for web security, and for service oriented architecture. OASIS is also home to a number of domain-specific standards, such as LegalXML, Open Office, and OpenDocs as well as the foundational web services registry UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration).

OpenADR (Automated Demand Response) is a California developed specification developed for the regulated electricity providers in that state. Demand-Response (DR) refers to live negotiations between the grid and its end nodes (buildings) to reduce demand before a shortfall causes problems. DR is a very important first step on the road to transacted energy, and solves some big problems in the short term.

One effect pulling OpenADR to OASIS is a perception that it is largely an economic transaction. The end nodes of the power grid contain far too diverse a mix of systems for grid operators to control well. As Gale Horst, who works in the Whirlpool Corporation Research & Engineering Center, has observed, a washing machine cannot respond to a grid request to shed [electrical] load unless it determines that the grid unless it has determined that there is no bleach in its current load of laundry. Every system in a home or business has similar rules that matter within its own domain. For all but the smallest response, DR will require an economic incentive and decisions from the agents running all the systems.

Even before OpenADR began discussions within the OASIS framework, a number of standards potentially useful to the new intelligent grid were underway. oBIX created a specification normalizing the operations and reporting of control systems as web services. The WS-DD and WS-DP committee, standardizing web services for device discovery and device profiles, includes members not just from software and printer makers, but from a maker of electrical switch gear as well.

There may be several of what I call micro-specifications that come out of this. As far as I know, there is still no standard way to exchange scheduling via web services as there is ICALENDAR in email. Such a specification would be useful not only for transmitting schedules from OpenADR to building systems managed by oBIX, but also would be useful in forward pricing of power generally. It would also be useful in a number of other standards, such as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language).

Emergency signaling is an important area or work within OASIS. One critical area is standardization of location. These standards include addresses, geographic points, and geographic territories bounded within a closed polygon. DR specifically, and utilities in general need the same information. When a DR aggregator reports the commitments he has received up to the System Operator, the operator would like the information aggregated by territory. New standards for emergency communications anticipate buildings submitting alarms directly into 911 queues. Components of the power grid could do the same, notifying police to increase patrols in blackout areas and to send officers to direct traffic. It would be very useful for the power grid and for emergency response to use the same standards.

New business models will encourage a move from hierarchical command and control operations to symmetrical peer to peer negotiations on the power grid. Renewable energy sources will decrease reliability. Distributed generation will create more power sources not under the control of traditional utilities. Zero Net Energy buildings will make each end node both a buyer and seller of power. OASIS standards such as WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management) may find a place in the new grid.

The panoply of WS-Security standards, including federated identity management, would require more room than I have here – but OASIS is their home.

There is no replacement for the IEEE and IEC standards at the core of deep control; increasingly, we will have interactions that are more arms length and economic than that.

To join the smartgrid-discuss@lists.oasis-open.org list, send email to smartgrid-discuss-subscribe@lists.oasis-open.org. The list is open to all, and there is no commitment to join OASIS or participate in a technical committee implied. For a general discussion of applying e-commerce standards to new energy, you may be interested in reading http://www.oasis-open.org/resources/white-papers/blue/

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.

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