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.

Working with the Wind in Chicago

Chicago has long been known as the windy city, for its promises of its politicians and the quantity of its conventions and conferences. Next week, there will be a lot of wind surrounding the AHR Expo, the largest conference anywhere dedicated to the efficient movement of air, and thereby the biggest energy-related conference of the year. Numerous engineering and energy related conferences and meetings will be in town to take advantage of the more than 50,000 attendees. I, too, will be blowing into town, giving some talks, participating in some meetings, and planning still others. This may be the last time I am in Chicago until March, so drop me a line to schedule a meeting if you want to discuss plans or alignment while I am there.

The GridWise Architectural Council (GWAC) has put together several sessions as part of an AHR conference track explaining the mission of the GridWise Alliance and opportunities created by the smart grid. On Monday, I will speak on academic energy initiatives, their problems, and their promise. Many academic leaders have signed the American College and University President’s Climate Initiative, committing their institutions to change how their schools are operated in ways that are verifiable and repeatable. Unfortunately, these efforts often are characterized more by proper feelings than by proper actions, and the results are often poor. Examples abound of efforts such as the Oberlin College Lewis Center, designed to be a net zero building, yet actually producing poor performance for years before retrofits finally delivered on its promise. Other green initiatives, including some at the University of North Carolina, have made performance worse. Efforts that address only new buildings using new standards without providing for cost effective inclusion existing buildings will have little effect.

This session will provide an overview of the initiative and its participants. I will discuss existing and developing standards for making building operations and energy use visible beyond the confines of the traditional campus maintenance and operations organization. I will describe efforts to make building operations responsive to the academic and research activities, and how these actions interact with growing campus concerns over security and emergency awareness. A clear understanding of these issues is needed for any college and university to meet these goals. A clear understanding of the problems and developing standards will help the energy professional compete and perform better in this market. These same knowledge and skills apply to the challenges of new national energy initiatives and will help the professional respond to anticipated Obama federal infrastructure programs.

On Tuesday, also at the AHR show, I will be teaming up with Ken Sinclair, editor of the Automated Buildings e-zine, to aim a little farther out. We will discuss the vision of interactive buildings as full participants in the smart grid. Building-to-Grid (B2G) interactions will create whole new business models outside buildings. Developing communication standards between building and grid will make the economic consequences of each operating decision visible. These communications will be critical to the development of Net Zero Energy (NZE) buildings. Economic service interactions will create new markets for building-based equipment and new models for building system integration. Come to this session to learn what these new markets will look like, and how today’s system designs are changing to prepare for them.

On Wednesday and Thursday, I will join a couple of Department of Energy (DOE) summits on the new standards. Wednesday afternoon, the B2G Summit will bring together an impressive group of thought leaders in technology and policy to brief the HVAC and BAS industry on the business opportunities from the smart grid. The conversations between and after sessions at the Summit are always as informative and useful as the sessions. On Thursday, the DOE Commercial Building Energy Alliances have announced their own summit for HVAC, Refrigeration, and Controls Suppliers. The summit will focus on retrofitting existing buildings. The summit will address all products related to energy efficiency in buildings, except for lighting. Drop me a line if you want to catch up with me at either of these events or to schedule a discussion on how these standards might work into your plants.

The activity I am personally most excited by, however, is meetings to plan GridEcon. GridEcon will explore the economic and market requirements of the smart grid. None of the smart technologies I write about will be adopted without a firm basis in economics and markets. The primary benefit of informational interoperability in building systems and in smart energy systems will be the creation of dynamic markets, markets that reduce technological friction and reward innovation. GridEcon will take advantage of the great Chicago-based markets in commodities and weather, and of the technologists behind their trading systems, to help create the market rules we will need. Watch for future announcements of this conference which will be in Chicago in mid-March.

See you in the Windy City!

Smartgrid Basics: The Demand 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 the second of a series of posts introduce the issues in a simplified, almost cartoon form.

Building systems have traditionally been invisible and uncontrollable. They have been managed to reduce costs with no real focus on the service they are providing. They have grown up in sandboxes, using their own peculiar protocols. These protocols are deep and technology specific, and often without effective interface. These systems are operated, when they are operated by process specialists.

Building occupants rarely have a precise understanding of how these systems affect their business. They may know exactly what a too-hot or too-cold call costs. They know that tenant dissatisfaction may lead to un-renewed leases. They may suspect that under ventilation may lead to sleepy occupants, but can rarely put any exact price tag on that. This makes them conservative about making changes in building operations.

Demand Response (DR) is emerging a critical tool for dealing with peak load management. Peak loads are by far the most expensive and dirtiest electricity we have; their costs, on both bottom lines, swamping others. Demand response is moving from direct control to economic incentives, but underneath, today’s integrations are process centric rather than service oriented. Energy providers order or pay energy customers to turn off things on just a few days a year, to manage the peak. We encourage only the crudest, least effective energy savings, while denying the market the energy signals that would cause better.

At the commodity system level, DR is already moving to services and agents. Agents defend their own mission while responding to the outside world. Washing machines know not to respond to grid signals until they determine that the current laundry is not soaking in bleach. Refrigerators know not to respond if they have just finished a defrost cycle. These systems know and understand what services they provide and so are ready to be responsive. Building systems are not.

We will get larger DR when we talk to the building occupant. We will get better participation when the occupant remains in control. The occupant will not allow DR when the in-laws are coming for the weekend. The occupant knows the family overspent at Christmas and is willing to respond to any and all incentives. The access control system may know that only three people on the fourth floor came to work today. Human resources knows that the sales force is on a retreat. Together, they can choreograph far greater response from the building systems then ever will be permitted as an automatic response from control communications.

Demand Response must be about economic signals to a business entity. When thought of in this way, there is no need for different signals to Industry and to Business (and to home and to vehicle). The business may choose to automate this. The business may benefit from templates for response, whether developed by EPRI or by ASHRAE, which reduce the risk of considering participation. These choices and these templates are not part of the interface.

The interface should not does not concern itself with the underlying technology and control protocols. It should not be based upon BACnet, or OPC, or LON any number of other low level control system protocols. The interface must be one that enables business decisions. Control systems should offer up service interfaces for choreographed response. Whatever offer and counter offer DR requires, whether amount of load shed or maximum load used or time to respond must be in the interface, but no deep process.

The smartgrid to building/industry/home interface is about how the Service Oriented Building can respond to the Service Oriented Grid. Just as in other services, the underlying processes should be hidden.

If you want to join the public discussion at OASIS, send a message to smartgrid-discuss-subscribe@lists.oasis-open.org.

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.