Standards Buzz: WS-DD, DP, IPSO, et and Internet 0

There sure is a buzz in standards this week, especially in standards that can help change our relationship to the built world: buildings, systems, and energy. I’m watching them and trying to put things together. I haven’t yet, but this is what I am seeing.

• A new OASIS group has started to standardize web services for device discovery (DD), Device Profiles (DP) and SOAP over UDP. DD and DP are already used by many printers. The committee includes the Operating System (OS) makers (of course), the Printer makers (of course), the enterprise software makers (well that’s more interesting) and other device makers, including Schneider Electric, one of the largest makers of building systems, meters, and electric grids. When the oBIX committee (the Open Building Information Exchange) was formed, we had numerous industry-specific sub-committees. Several of these had to disband after Schneider had bought up a quorum. It is intriguing to see Schneider now back, in enterprise web services standards, working with such players as SAP and Microsoft.
• IPSO is a new industry alliance promoting the use of IP (Internet Protocol) for smart objects, where smart objects are all the systems sensors, meters and so on that make up the hidden world of engineered systems. They are creating what they are calling “the Internet of Things” connecting physical objects with the global Internet. IPSO aims to tackle energy distribution and consumption, home automation, and work environments.
• I see these converging with the Internet 0 efforts to bring full connectivity and networking to devices “too small to be networked”
• NIST, as I have written before, is fast-tracking efforts to define interoperability around the power grid.
• SOAP over UDP is an effort to bring the full power of compositional messaging, with all that means for the enterprise to a lighter weight stack appropriate for small devices. Interoperability to me means interoperability with the business and people that inhabit the homes and offices.

I do not know where these fit together. I do think they are pursuing the same goals in the same way.

To me, these initiatives will become more interesting when they start using more compositional technologies. Perhaps Service Component Architecture (SCA), will be used to connect disparate systems together into common service definitions. Perhaps Policy Based Event Management will be used to let companies craft fine-grained responses to external conditions.

Right now, I wake up every day and wonder what will be in my in box.

She never wants an Electric Car

My daughter explained to me yesterday why she never wants an electric car. She has been reading about Shai Agassi’s and Idan Ofer’s efforts to build an electric car while building up an electric car infrastructure. She resents the “Gillette” (or Polaroid) model: sell them the handle cheap and sell them blades forever. She does not want to be even more dependent upon the power grid. She also mistrusts giving a single player access to her driving information.

Many of today’s twenty-somethings have deep doubts about our information society and its long-term stability. Cultural messengers from Al Gore to Rap to Ron Paul communicate a society whose wheels are ready to fly off. The local food movement is at least as concerned with relying on fragile connections to far away locations as it is with transport costs and produce freshness.

My daughter likes the idea of being able to pay cash for fuel and leave no records. Her generation has few illusions about privacy and a reflexive understanding of her exposure to data mining. She is refusing to use Chrome because of the ever intensifying record keeping it manifests.

Her generation sees the amorality of large institutions in part through the lens of the collapse of the intellectual property deal. The deal has been that by revealing secrets and participating in trade, individuals would get short term government enforced exclusivity. The deal was that to encourage creative works, the author would get a brief exclusive use of the work. That deal has been broken by patent trolls who never develop products, but merely wait to hold for ransom those who do. That deal was broken when Congress, corrupted by liberal application of corporate money, retroactively extended copyright on old works.

Once the deal was broken, the new one-sided deal has been enforced by data mining for IP addresses and enforced by technically illiterate courts. Even when the data mining is done incorrectly, the courts have allowed the RIAA to assert points of law and points of fact by raw assertion, turning personally identifiable information into vulnerability to a shake-down. And so this generation mistrusts data-miners even when their motto is “Do No Evil”.

Power companies are proposing models of central control and data tracking to manage the smart grid. Smart car models are developed around automatic tracking, for billing purposes. Regulations stipulate that privacy concerns are paramount; those privacy rules are used to prohibit homes and businesses from seeing their own data, their own energy use.

Current practice has taught the college age generation about privacy as well. Privacy is an inviolable contract, one that prevents parents paying the bill from even finding out what classes are being taken, yet privacy concerns are tossed out when corporate interests are involved. This year’s Congress proposes that unless campuses track data to support the RIAA, that all federal funding be denied. No student today believes in the enforcement of privacy laws.

She does likes the idea of fuel stills, so she can be self reliant. She would welcome the self charging electric car, on that would let her go off grid and off the records. She mistrusts a rigid reliance on our infrastructure; while happy to use it, she does not want to have to rely on it.

This is the citizen of the future. This is the middle aged consumer of the 2030 challenge. If we want to define successful new energy markets, we had better keep her in mind.

Canute, Energy, and Natural Laws

Politics has been unusually intense this week, and many new themes of varying worth have echoed around the public square. One meme that surfaced held that belief in creation invalidates one for higher office. The argument runs that if a candidate is unable to understand natural law and science, as evidenced by creationism, then they are unfit to govern in the modern world. This week, numerous politicians showed ignorance of other natural laws and natural systems, ones whose effects are more immediate. I am more concerned with the immediate harm caused by those who ignore natural laws, as they did this week, that have been confirmed by repeated experiment.

The laws I am speaking of are those of supply and demand, and that price should reflect scarcity and value, rather than cost. Those who ignore this iron law can always make things worse.

King Canute was surrounded by a flattering court who magnified his power and magnificence in their speech, claiming that he could control the forces of nature. When some claimed in their over-the-top praise that he could control the tides, Canute decided to teach them a lesson. Canute had his throne carried to the beach at low tide, had a proclamation read requiring the tide to stay out, and held court surrounded by the flatterers. Predictably, all were soon flooded; one can only hope that some of the advisors were swept away. I hope Canute received better advice thereafter.

This week, government actions that created wide-spread shortages and economic dislocation in the Carolinas.

Local gas markets were stirred up with the prospect that hurricane disruption of gas production would soon cause shortages. Panic buying created runs on gas stations as drivers topped off their tanks before the weekend. Many convenience store owners increased their prices, a healthy response that reduces demand and encourages drivers to allocate gas use only to high value activities during a time of scarcity.

The governors of each of the Carolinas (and perhaps elsewhere) invoked emergency powers to prosecute those who raise prices. The predictable effect was that stations began running out of gas. The economic dislocation spread, as local service companies, unable to fuel their trucks at any price, began holding off all customers until next week. Tradesman were effectively laid off for the day. The underemployed now have full tanks that they do not need, and the regularly employed stayed home. The governors Easley and Sanford demonstrated that both parties can make bad situations worse through ignorance of natural laws.

Somehow energy befuddles public agencies, public discourse, and, obviously, governors. Energy companies, for the most part live in a bizarre world wherein prices are determined by approved costs rather than by value delivered. Decisions, on technology, and on resource allocation are made by fiat.

As I drive by stations with no gas, I know that neither the hurricane, not the station owner, nor the distributor is to blame. I blame Easley, and the latest of the many uneconomic decisions he has sold to the state of NC. I wonder when the pundits who are so forceful in arguing about evolutionary biology will consider whether own economic innumeracy poses a greater risk.

The local governors are all wet. Unlike Canute, they do not recognize why.

Interfaces for the Power Grid

This week has been crazy busy, but I managed to submit the following to the B2G interoperability group at NIST

Each interface around each process of the grid should allow bi-directional buying and selling. The interface should support discoverable diversity, allowing the standard to grow over time. Ideally, the interface would be the same for different forms of energy, allowing the same economic interface to be used for buying standard power from the grid, solar energy from the neighbor, or thermal energy from the data center in the basement. I should be able to set my heat pump with gas pack to switch not only on peak efficiency, but on the price for each fuel.

The interfaces should be non-hierarchical and composite. Remote power generation, the local sub-station, and the campus micro-grid should have full peer interfaces; my decision to buy from a remote plant or a local storage facility should be through the same interface.

So, what are the characteristics of this interface?

E-Business Interfaces
Offer and Acceptance

Price is clearly the first component; price is how we indicate value and scarcity. Short of a surprise malfunction, every brown-out is a failure of pricing. As pricing may occur in the context of an auction or negotiation, prices must go two ways, as an offer, as a bid, as a request for quotation.

Price Scenarios

Note: in the scenarios, day (or tomorrow) can be replaced by week, month, year or any other period one wants to contract

• Your current power costs is this much
• Power costs this much tomorrow.
• The price curve for tomorrow is…
• The price for up to so much power (perhaps as a per cent of yesterday) is x, for over that amount y, for an arbitrary number of levels,
• One-time urgent offer with no bid.
• One-time offer to be bid until market clears
• Demand Response is either a new auction or it is a RFQ for power buy-back already negotiated.

Transaction Scenarios

• Your instantaneous use is…
• I want to purchase this amount of energy tomorrow.
• If the price curve for tomorrow looks like this, my purchase will look like…
• We accept your offer as above and wish to enforce it.
• Short term request to relinquish previously agreed to power.
• Short term request for additional power bids
• Long term request for significant give-back, say a summer furlough
• Failure to perform will result in power costs of…
• Other Transaction Details
• Penalty for underperformance [as producer] is…
• Penalty for underperformance [as consumer] is…
• Contract is enforceable, and consumer use will be throttled to meet agreement.
• Contract was authorized by …
• The following power qualities are critical to this contract….
• This security token / ID / account overrides normal billing process (especially for electric cars)
• Qualities of Power Delivered

Other qualities of power must be transmitted along with price. In some circumstances, these other characteristics might trump all other considerations, as projected reliability might concern a data center as much as price. It may be a condition of contract that the supplier notify the buyer of changes (or predicted changes) in a “critical quality” (see Other Transaction Details) as quickly as they would of a DR or other rapid response scenario.

More may be discovered in the future, but an initial list might include:

Quality of Power

• Predicted Reliability of Power during time of contract (perhaps derived from EERP).
• Additional capacity in critical bottlenecks. This attribute may be a quality of a substation, or it may, stripped of price and transaction, be a quality of an internal UPS or electrical panel.
• Remaining power at current or predicted burn rate. This may describe diesel generator, or fuel cell, or …
• Remaining Time / capacity to fully recharge storage.
• AC or DC
• Carbon accounting of supply
• Environmental accounting (wildlife, habitat, renewable, etc) of supply
• Geo-location of supply (allowing Buy Local and NIMBY to each affect markets with their dollars)

Should power stored in a battery report its effectively higher carbon load when it is sold or consumed?

Other Market Issues

All interfaces should support many-to-many interactions. A customer should be able to select from any of several aggregators if available. A customer should be able to buy from specific generators beyond the local T&D if desired. There must be a way for the buyer to discover power sources that meet the characteristics he desires and to negotiate with them. There may be times when local transmission conditions want to find emergency load use rather than emergency shedding.

Market Fables

These are use cases, but they have been selected to push away from traditional scenarios. Traditional use cases have already been well handles by others. What follows are edge cases, designed to test the limits. If we do our work well, what Fred Krupp calls the “winners of the race to re-invent energy” will be able to innovate in ways I cannot anticipate.

The Electric Car

In the evening, the electric cars come home, drained from a day of driving. Perhaps they were doubly drained, used to carry their office buildings during the afternoon brown-out. What will people want from their cars next….

• To sit in the garage overnight, slowly charging.
• To be ready to drive 15 miles in twenty minutes when I go get one last kid from athletic practice.
• To be at least half charged and ready for anything in two hours when the baby sitter arrives and mom and dad head out for an evening on the town.
• To quickly get to at least a 40 mile range in case I get an emergency call from the nursing home, and thereafter just be sure to be ready for the morning commute.
• To get a charge for 15 miles by 8:15 when I head to choir practice at church. Better make that 25 lest we stop for coffee afterward.
• It's two hundred miles to the beach and we plan to take full advantage of the expensive week-long rental by getting there tonight! Kids, grab your bags, we are leaving in 20 minutes. Oh, and the car needs a full quick-charge, no matter the expense.

The above require a wealth of power signals. Some of them (capacity of current storage) can be transmitted back using the same interfaces as we have for capacity of a house battery. Not all interactions will be with the home base of the car.

When parking downtown, I want to plug in my car. I may want to choose between a quick visit, for a cup of coffee, and an all-day back-to-school shopping event.

The Green Garage™ offers locally generated wind power for re-charging at its own special rates that vary with the wind. Having been burned once, I want to check prices before I leave the car.

When I go over to your house for dinner, I want to plug in. Being a polite guest, I of course want the charges to go onto my own bill.

The whole family gathers in the next town for Thanksgiving dinner. All cars are drained, and need to recharge over the next five hours except for the college kid, who arrives at the last moment, and leaves as soon as he can. Grandpa decides to overrule all normal agreements and cover all the charges for cars plugged in at his house.

The Transacted Household

Zero Net Energy Buildings will be built around local energy generation, storage, conversion, and recycling. These diverse systems will be too complex to manage as control systems, and will have to be interact as agents exposing services. In this model, we will leave them to negotiate power usage among themselves. These devices should use the same economic interfaces rather than detailed control interfaces.

I could ask my dishwasher to run itself, and manage its own budget for the month. I could also set service standards that the dishes always be clean before dinner the next day. This leads to a relatively simple and consistent user interface.

I could tell my solar panel to sell to the grid whenever the price is above a certain amount, and to store any excess energy. The grid might consistently outbid the dishwasher—and that’s OK. If so, the dishwasher would still run only at night.

I could tell my whole-house storage system to buy power at any price until it has four hours on hand. Thereafter it might buy whenever energy is below a target price. I could even let it take bids from the household systems and devices, or from the neighbor. This system would need to charge an appropriate mark-up based upon its inefficiency of storage.

The right sort of abstract business interface between the power grid and our buildings can also be used between buildings, or within buildings.

Third Parties

There must be ways to delegate authority and rights cleanly between parties. Intelligent buildings will move toward knowledge-based maintenance based upon building system analytics. This service will be supplied by remote specialists. These specialists will need access to live use rates and pricing to supply business-ready information (Change the filters on the 3^rd floor; at your energy prices, it will costs you $146 per month until you do). Today, it is difficult to assign rights to such “privacy” sensitive information.

Conclusion

My chief concern is that we do not over-integrate and thereby stifle future innovation. The Grid’s interfaces needs to be lightweight, composable, extensible, and able easily to interoperate with the service, security, and e-commerce standards of business and the internet.