Tomatoes and Energy

Ahh, Saturday morning at the farmer’s market. Wonderful smells, and bright colors, and seasonal delights. The local peaches have just come in, and it looks like this year’s crop is making up for the failures of the last two. The nightshade family has just come into full mid-summer explosion; every kind of tomato and pepper is piled high on the tables.

Mid-summer abundance is a time of choice. Winter tomatoes are commodities; local spring tomatoes at the farmer’s market red and flavorful, fresh from the hot-house. Late summer tomatoes come in red and gold and chocolate brown and even in surprising stripes. They come in small bites and in one slice per sandwich double-handfuls. They are low acid and high acid, are recently designed or heirloom favorites. With multiple producers all competing you can get any attributes you want, along with helpful suggestions and advice thrown in for free.

Several people have written or called this last week that they do not like my call for a universal B2B (Business to Business) interface for energy-using and producing systems. The most cogent comments advocated P2B. I also tended to agree with their vision. But I still call it B2B

Everything at the farmer’s market is personal; but only the most naïve of the local city folk think that it is not all business. It takes just a few minutes from the market opening to achieve price equilibrium for “ugly” or “canning” tomatoes. Prettier tomatoes soon reach equilibrium, and compete on special qualities; “heirloom”, “low-acid”, or “no sprays”. Farmer’s markets are all personal, and all business. Just watch them establish new market clearing prices at ten minutes before noon….

The home and the individual energy user, the Person in P2B, should have all the abilities and responsibilities that the business has. Some home users are gradually moving to sophisticated always-on homer servers; others are doing the same with always on servers in the clouds. Many homes use more technology than many small businesses. Many individuals have much more sophisticated understandings of energy than do many businesses.

Like the farmer’s market in mid-summer, I want the vendor communications in energy markets to include more than price. I may want to contract for today’s shaky power or for true digital-quality power. I may want to buy only local sources of power, or only power at least a thousand miles away; let NIMBY (Not-In-My-Back-Yard) and short transmission advocates both express their desires in the market place. Just as the farmers sell no-spray and certified organic produce, let the market interface describe renewable status, carbon cost, and even bird kills.

A single robust B2B standard for two-way negotiation can be applied to new market models. There is no reason that a negotiation with your neighbor’s power generation, or that run by the neighborhood homeowner’s association, be any different that the negotiation with the traditional utility.

Even within your home or business, there can be a negotiation. If your drier submits a lower bid for energy than does the grid, perhaps your home generation should sell to the grid, or to storage, rather than to the drier. As the home owner, or as the business manager, you can of course set the rules for the internal market. As an enlightened despot of the home market, you can override the market rules when you want to.

Energy that interacts only with the established energy market is hard pink winter tomatoes, available at the same price even in summer. New energy needs farmers markets with plenty of choice. These markets are B2B, even if the agent lives only as a minimized program on your Mac.

Business Exchanges on the Grid

Notes on SmartGrid Domain Experts Workgroup, NIST, August 5, 2008
NIST (National Institute for Standards and Technology) started by making a strong claim for ownership in this area, citing Title XIII, 1305 of EISA 2007. NIST set out an aggressive agenda including a preliminary report at GridWeek on 9/24 and a NIST workshop on developing standards at Grid Interop in Atlanta November 11-13.

NIST wants to have in place tight working relationships with the target SDO’s (Standards Development Organizations) in place before 2009. NIST and the GridWise Architectural Council are working together to direct the standards direction toward e-commerce and interactions with building operations and with the building occupants. Some of these standards will be e-commerce focused, some will be looking to the Building Information Models, and to the energy models they support. I am excited that this might push these design approaches into continuing use during operations.

B2G Breakout (Building to Grid)

We quickly agreed that goal of the SmartGrid standardization efforts is to design the information exchange and informational interoperability to enable healthy markets to emerge around energy use in buildings. Success was defined as enabling buildings to trade their energy.

The group was in violent agreement that we needed to work on business to business interactions, and not on machine to machine interactions. Services inside the building would be coordinated by the business processes of the occupants. Grid messages would go to the business agent of the occupants. Interactions, including pricing and bidding, would be between the grid agents and the building agents.

But market development for what? The problems that need solving quickly include real time pricing and automated demand response. The solutions should encourage the development of distributed generation and local energy storage. The Pricing Models and Buying Models for Energy should also work inside microgrids such as the building or neighborhood.

We spent a considerable time defining the characteristics of live pricing. There was intense interest in moving beyond static prices to curves, i.e., if the prices move like this tomorrow, I will commit to energy consumption in a curve that looks like that. Automated contract execution and on-line exchange of tariffs are both desired.

One thing that everyone agreed is that automated metering infrastructure would never meet its potential unless full live real-time access to all meter information is made available from *both* sides of the meter should be the standard. Parties could then collect the data in accord with the schedule that made sense to them.

This has been about the business exchange – soon I will write about the attributes of these transactions and product differentiation on the grid.

Clouds and Rain

I always enjoy reading Dennis Brandl, who writes in the nearby field of factory control systems. The challenges of factory systems are both greater and less than building systems. They are greater because, well the systems are larger, and more complex. The challenges are simpler because no factory needs to be convinced that better control of factory automation offers benefits. One constant, though, is that most such systems have developed in a silo outside of traditional IT, and so are slow to adapt the protocols and service architecture of today’s Web 2.0 world.

In the July issue of Control Engineering, Dennis Brandl’s discussed his take on cloud computing as it applies to factory automation. Cloud computing goes alongside software as a Service (SaaS). Traditional network diagrams linked up to the larger network outside the scope of the drawing, depicted as a cloud. Cloud Computing is a name for putting computing services, whether traditional, such as CRM applications, or modern, such as SaaS, on computers up in the wider network.

Brandl extends the metaphor of computing services in the clouds by distinguishing between different clouds. Brandl divides cloud computing into cumulus, stratus, and cirrus, clouds, respectively the lowest, the mid atmosphere, and highest clouds. He then discusses which computing processes belong in which clouds, with the highest clouds being the least connected to direct control processes. This is useful because it lets talk about distinguish between clouds.

Traditional control systems have no clouds – only towers in the sky. Whether or not it makes sense, building systems from one building or many have traditionally gone up to a central point; they have been a silo reaching up into the clouds. For Brandl, nearly everything is a cloud; only the core control processes are on the ground. I think this is right; for buildings, only the core processes, those elements on the traditional low voltage protocols such as BACnet and LON, are on the ground.

In the UNC Enterprise Building Management (EBMS) project, we restrict all low level controls to the building. All communications outside the building are using internet protocols. Each building has its Enterprise Building Local Gateway (EBLG) speaking traditional standards and proprietary protocols on the building side, and web services on the outside. We keep the EBMS close to the buildings as a business decision, but there is nothing on the architecture that would prevent us from moving this service up into the higher up stratus cloud layer, or even up into the high flying cirrus layer.

The middle tier of stratus clouds is outside Facilities Operations and hosted in the wider enterprise. For UNC, the Registrar’s Office, in the stratus cloud, could submit room schedules and head counts for every classroom down to the buildings.

The remotest services all belong in the Cirrus clouds. Demand/Response, Energy Markets, third party maintenance, all are Cirrus tier cloud services. We have long used building analytics products like Packrat at UNC, bolted onto the silo. It would be far better for these services to live in the cirrus clouds, under the direct control of someone with the in-house expertise to process the data into information. Building analytics should move up into the highest clouds, with the highest expertise.

Keep some clouds close to you, ones in which fast response and control are the most important. Let some clouds drift up into the atmosphere, where forces out of your control may determine their performance and availability, but where superior resources or specialize knowledge can be purchased. And put services where enterprise identity and line of business interaction are the most important in the stratus layer.

Just remember, changing business conditions can move any cloud up or down. The protocol for communication to any cloud layer should be the same; internet ready, secured, and standards based, ready for e-commerce. Nothing but web services belongs anywhere in the clouds.

(http://www.controleng.com/article/CA6574700.html)

Welcome to the TAB

I am looking forward to this week to my first meeting with the OASIS Technical Advisory Board (TAB). OASIS, the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, is the home of oBIX, a web service standard for communicating with building systems. Two years after delivery of the 1.0 specification, OBIX has a growing deployment list. We have more than 70 oBIX servers in the UNC EBMS project (search on blog for more information) and oBIX runs the entire Olympic district and all stadiums that you will see on television this week. So far, oBIX is exposing web-ready interfaces to control systems, but as of yet, just a few businesses have embraced what such an interface could mean to e-commerce enabling building services.

When running for the TAB, my platform urged the attention of e-commerce players to this area. OBIX needs to better learn the lessons of exposure and the interaction patterns of modern global business. How well we solve these problems will determine whether the smart grid is something just a little better than the old electrical grid, or whether the full force of entrepreneurial innovation is released on the problems of power management, energy storage, and evolving local distribution. The same infrastructure, if done right, will radically improve the quality of maintenance and operations in buildings and change the ways in which buildings interact with society and the environment around them.

Examples include:

• Every building a day-trader in energy markets on behalf of its owner.
• Knowledge-based maintenance of buildings based upon remote analytics and virtual maintenance companies
• Energy markets driven by clearing markets in different energy sources replacing regulated cost-recovery models.
• Policy-based security extended from enterprise IT to physical access control and intrusion detection
• Buildings as a source of situation awareness during disaster and emergency response.
• Life-time self-commissioning of autonomous building systems

Nothing really happens very well, or happens for very long, without economic interactions that support it. For 100 years, the need for large cartel production and distribution efforts, not only in the electrical grid, but in other energy sectors, have insulated the ways in which we harvest, store, and convert energy from the full force of market-driven innovation.

I’m hoping we can fix that.