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/

EBMS Takes its First Steps

I have written before of UNC’s Enterprise Building Management System (EBMS). EBMS talks to legacy systems in more than a 100 buildings on the UNC campus. EBMS uses a half dozen variants of web services to monitor and operate building systems using nearly every brand and every internal protocol. All data is normalized and brought into an industry standard database, currently we are adding 42 million transactions a day to that database.

Phase II of EBMS is finishing up before the end of the year. The system is going through final tuning and acceptance testing; the developers from Cyrus Technologies are still sleep deprived but have that light in their eyes that coders get when the end of a death march is in sight.

While commissioning the system, we found errors in our old proprietary system, including sensors that had always supplied bad data. Building integrators had “solved problems by the expedient of not displaying bad data. In at least one case, this bad data explained years of expensive maintenance and replacements. When EBMS is complete, our operators will have a single web-based console for all of these buildings.

We are just beginning to get other sources of data into the EBMS database. EBMS now includes historical weather data. Metering data for all utilities in the building is just starting to flow in. Even though we have in-house utilities providing electricity, and steam, and chilled water to the buildings, we have had as much difficulty getting live information as if we were getting information from a third party. The barriers have been political, or perhaps more fairly cultural. Still, the information is now flowing in.

One of the final steps for the developers was setting up an OLAP framework for looking at the data. Online Analytic Procession (OLAP) is using multi-dimensional analysis of data to find underlying patterns. OLAP is typically used in business reporting for sales, marketing, management reporting, business process management (BPM), budgeting and forecasting, and financial reporting. OLAP has not traditionally been available for building operational data. We now have an OLAP framework in place for 100 buildings.

This week, we are interviewing candidates for a new position, for a new role in this, or perhaps any, organization. We are hiring a full time data analyst, looking for experience in quality management or marketing rather than in mechanical systems. This positions full time job will be to look for anomalies and patterns in the operational data.

Perhaps we are moving toward predictive maintenance based upon analysis. Perhaps we are finding sub-optimal building response arriving from technology choices made years ago. Perhaps we will be able to understand the relationships between different departments and how buildings perform for them. We are entering the era of knowledge-based operations.

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.

SCADA Security, Building Systems, and First Response

The security of the "internet of Things" and the security of the wider internet are about to collide. The Systems that have been hidden or off line will be on-line. Embedded systems, building systems, power supply and distribution must all change their security model. Eggshell security, the hard shell on the outside and no internal security, will be torn apart not only by the Smart Grid, and all its participants and influencers, but by new models for energy interaction as microgrids, pocket generation, and on-site storage increase the number of participants.

It is hard enough to define security for systems that are always on, always connected, always in a web of trust. Federated Identity Management is difficult, but relatively well understood. Outsourcing of system operation, cannot outsource the location of these systems; cloud computing is still grounded in the physical locations of the systems in the building, and as part of the grid . Crises in power and building systems are often interrelated, and failure of one may cut off access to the federation of security providers.

In a system of systems, in which the systems are expected to respond best when the challenges are greatest and the actors are least known. The ventilation system for space holding hazardous materials must communicate its import and explain its mission precisely when the unknown fire fighter logs in and connections to other systems are lost. The microgrid generating enough power for net outflow must accept commands from a stranger precisely when and because the ice storm has ended outside network connectivity.

Take a theoretical mixed use neighborhood and its substation, filled with zero-net energy buildings (internal storage, generation, conversion of energy), its microgrid generation on the parking deck, its demand/response ready buildings, and its electric cars. Consider the linesman, properly, as yet another class of first responder. Is the power line up or down. Is the downstream connection hot or not? If my office is powering my house, who has the authority to interrupt the flow, and what is the liability for damage upstream? What does the firemen know about whether the self generating, power-storing building is on the grid or not?

We will need new architectures for building system security, ones that share information freely with emergency responders, but know which information is pertinent the enough SCADA, ones performant enough for power, but with federated security at each junction. We will need new definitions for security, ones that understand external identities and roles, but that also understand how to interact when the same event that compromised power integrity has cut off access to external identity and role providers.

We will need now architectures for SCADA, ones performant enough for power, but with federated security at each junction. We will need new definitions for security, ones that understand external identities and roles, but that also understand how to interact when the same event that compromised power integrity has cut off access to external identity and role providers.

We need ways to express the variety of security decisions that these interactions will require, ways that degrade gracefully with communications, and ways that can be pre-cached for almost-as-good decisions.

These security must be able to interact with local business systems. For the first responder, they must provide access to the right information and to the right control systems. They must have access to the local business agreements for the provision of power, and for the liabilities for non-performance. They must be able to distinguish between what is show by necessity, what can be shown for curiosity, and what will be shared only with a warrant.

Security is fundamentally a problem of situation awareness. The situation involve multiple systems and multiple contexts. It requires federated identity management across the multiple organizational participants that will fail gracefully to temporary local "good enough" security. It requires business policy aware forward-caching of decision making frameworks on a building by building basis.