When do you want that?

One of the most fundamental acts of negotiating services is when something should occur. One would guess that this has been already well established, well completed. I know I assumed so when I was talking about the fundamental information that we needed to add for scheduling in oBIX 1.1. “You know that thing you click on to put something on your calendar? It is an ICalendar format. Corporate scheduling systems already use it. People already use it. The conference room is already scheduled using it. Let’s use it for scheduling building systems.

I made promises. We’ll be done quickly. Why don’t you use it to add scheduling to OpenADR? Why don’t we use it for scheduling prices. Sounds good, but this simple function, surprisingly, is not yet ready for use.

VCAL is the original. It was developed as part of the Vision personal information manager. VCAL spawned VCalendar, developed by the Internet Mail Consortium. VCalendar spawned ICalendar, with the stamp of approval from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). This nice standard is complete, but predates XML. Because the first significant application using ICalendar was the iCal program on the Macintosh, many people call the standard iCal. Information containing scheduling information in the iCalendar has the designated file extension “.ICS”.

ICalendar defines different payloads. The Event defines something that begins and ends. The TODO has a due date, and can specify periodic reminders before that due date. The Journal takes up no time, but enables one attach

Within the IETF, there was a draft proposal for a data transformation of iCalendar to XML in 1999 as the iCalendar XML DTD; it expired uncompleted in 1999.

Microformats developed the intriguing hCalendar format, but this has been rejected by many groups, for usability issues; it still may be the best format for moving things into web services.There are concerns and incompatibilities surrounding the use of HCalendar, though. See http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2008/06/25/bbc-rejects-hcalendar-microformat-because-of-accessibility-concerns/

There is a calendar XML format, but it seems designed to transmit a monthly calendar for printing, not formats for exchanging schedules.

All this leaves me in a quandary. Schedules, and exchanging schedule proposals, will be absolutely essential to building services and to demand response and to energy technology. And yet we do not seem to be able to standardize on an XML format for web services.

What would you do?

Divvying Up Grid Interoperability

The NIST Grid Interoperability Workgroups began by splitting into work groups along traditional market segments. I think the initial cuts (I2G, B2G, H2G&V, T&D) (Industry, Building, Home (and vehicle) to Grid, and Transmission & Distribution) were necessary, I think keeping them makes it far too easy to pave the cow paths, to streamline existing market models while allowing minimal room for new markets to develop.

As I look across the groups, they feel to me as if they are split up incorrectly. The home deserves the same DR possibilities as does the office. A hospital may want the same grid information as does the data center. The privacy liability incurred by the utility developing intimate knowledge of the home operations may be as great as they would incur in a bank.

Background

I was talking to representatives from The Green Grid yesterday. The Green Grid is about Grid Computing, not the Power Grid. Grid Computing is the most efficient process ever defined for converting electricity to raw business process, with a hundred % waste as heat.

The Green Grid concerns are the immediate supply chain issues for its raw materials and support requirements, primarily energy and cooling. The Green Grid questions, which it wants to ask to each battery, each power strip, each switch panel, each transformer in each substation, and even the grid as a whole:

• How much more capacity can you give me?
• How reliable do you feel ? Any risk you will fail in the near future? (same question whether battery or empty diesel fuel tank or overheating transformer or extreme DR event on the power grid)
• What price is the current power? What about the additional capacity? (This should arguably factor cost of diesel, or natural gas, or even inefficiency of battery, but that is another question.)

These same questions are essentially the same as they ask the building’s cooling systems.

These questions are also the questions I might want to ask the thermal storage in the basement, or the PE power on the roof. If I am using waste heat from the Data Center for re-heat in my AC, I may want to ask the same questions. These are the generic questions to ask an energy resource within or without the building, whether in the off-grid home or in the site generating neighborhood, or in the office.

My memory stick is an instance of a USB storage device, and so has a user interface on my computer that presents the same as an internal disk drive. In the same way, these are all attributes of sources of energy, and make no pre-suppositions about the devices or process behind them. This kind of interface enables interoperability while not preventing future innovations, even radical new technologies.

I think we should incorporate the The Green Grid abstractions into the DEWG interoperability suite. But where?

My Proposal

I have proposes that we consider the interactions into a few business/semantic groupings. Grid interoperability should consist of surface interactions; deep interactions are a barrier to scalability and to innovation. The semantic grouping I propose are:

Capability & Reliability: (The Green Grid interactions, to be used in building system domains as well) Capacity / Capability / Availability (including time windows) / Anticipated Reliability / Marginal Price

Market Operations: Power Use curves, Negotiation & Contracts, Offer and Acceptance, Scheduling options, Periodic price curves. Settlement. Contracted Curtailment? DR

Multi-party & Mobile transactions: PHEV, Non-Utility vendors, identity, transactional charge override

Operational Information: does not need to flow across domains, primarily T&D for this discussion. Allied domains, say, inside building systems aligned on results rather than procedures.

Security: borrow compositional security from other domains.

Billing & Charge Processing: borrow from other domains

Attributes & Amenities: Carbon, Wildlife, Location…Optional attributed for later definition and market building.

Do I have them all?

Free markets are Live Markets

The Wall Street Journal looked at Texas Energy price increases this year and got nearly everything wrong.

The big changes in electrical prices in Texas this year mirror the price changes in all energy markets. It is unclear to me how people think that *any* industry, no matter how regulated, can repeal supply and demand for its primary supplies. Some are arguing that these price changes argue for extended market regulation. The regulated energy market is not the natural order; we have a regulated market structure only because nothing else made sense in 1908 when the current model was created in Chicago..

Renewable energy will not work until we break the dependency on the perfect grid. The current grid requires spun up power plants, always ready, to achieve reliability. This spin reserve is an effective tax on every renewable energy source because unfortunately renewable ==> unreliable

You can gain reliability by combining a number of unreliable sources, as long as the reliability profiles for the different sources are different. This requires scheduling and wide area service choreography, and perhaps even architectures with full ontologies, as some laughed about yesterday on another thread. Those interested should just google Kombikraftwerk.

There is an interesting combined power generation scheme currently underway in the inland empire area of California, that combines remote web control of household systems, including homeowner intervention (Don’t regulate anything today – my wife’s parents are in town and I do not want to listen to my mother in law complain!). What is unique about the system is that it is only installed in house that also have solar panels, and the excess output is sold back to the grid at prices as if it was one large distributed solar PV generator, a virtual power plant. This business model, and many others, only works with the extra incentives of live time-of-day pricing.

Many observe that live pricing does not work very well with the home and office infrastructure we have. Well, the internet did not work very well with the phone infrastructure we had 20 years ago. Live prices will be what creates the infrastructure of tomorrow that will work differently.

One difference will be home storage of energy. Energy storage need not be limited to batteries or lakes in the mountains. A tank of icy slush in the basement is a fine energy store if your major energy use is daytime cooling; cool it at night and use it for Air Conditioning during the day. Your heat pump to make the slush is also working more efficiently when it is cooler outside. At a 20% price difference between 2AM and 2PM, that slush might start looking pretty good. At a 50% difference, everyone might have one. We do not know what folks will come up with, and without market information on value and scarcity, we won’t.

It is these new markets that make live pricing important. New business models will change technology decisions.

Local storage becomes an additional use for any locally generated power. This increases the benefits for both generation and storage. This continues to make folks less sensitive to grid fluctuations. This ecology of local energy requires live pricing to thrive.

The New Privacy Advocates

Last week, I wrote of a new concern with privacy arising and data archiving that young adults now have in “she never wants an electric car”. Regular commenter Michaela notes

My sample of two (my daughters 13 and nearly 16) have a very different point of view. . . . They are big Facebook and MySpace fans. They say It’s a trade off worth the giving up privacy to keep up with their friends. . . .they are much more aware of it than most kids (or adults for that matter). They don't care. Their only concern is really keeping info from Mom and Dad :).

Michaela is certainly aware of the issues, and has explained things to her daughters. This also described my daughters at that age—but things change a lot. Soon they will get burned by more than Mom, and they will have a keen understanding and awareness of privacy.

Living in a college town, one can see this new progression. The freshman come in as digital libertines, sharing their information with everyone. In the next few years, they will hear through the grapevine of friends who missed out on an internship because of Facebook. Scholarship athletes have been tossed off the team because the coach saw the tagged pictures from the big party. Even getting up early to de-tag pictures may not be enough – coach may have reviewed his team even earlier. Some of the best parties are no declared “cell-free zones”, but to little avail.

Last weekend, I read of someone, now nearly 30, whose high school buddies emptied their photo collections onto Facebook. These pictures of long ago parties now show up first for when potential employers search for her. She now begins each week search and de-tagging pictures of her long ago self from the net.

Like the former libertine who turns socially conservative, these formerly promiscuous with personal information become some of the most protective as they gain experience. Unlike the privacy advocates of old, they really understand how long a digital shadow they cast, and become fanatical about protecting their digital image and owning their own digital footprint.

They will not tolerate the so-called privacy of, for example, today’s Automated Metering. In many areas, the utility shares usage data with no one, including with the tenant except in ways that the utility controls. This is claimed to be in support of privacy. The new data-mining savvy consumer will demand direct control of this data themselves, and want to decide how and when it is data mined. They will trust neither the utility or the government to make these decisions for them.

Secondary school is a time of pushing many limits. It is at an age where Mom and Dad know little, about privacy or about dress. At as Mark Twain is said to have observed: “When I was fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have him around. When I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”

Some of this generation will be remain digital libertines—but not many. Most will want their own data, will expect to control their own data, and their metadata as well. When in control, they will share it as they please.

Note: It was very tempting to use an extended analogy about tight clothes in middle school and knowledge about exactly where and when to flash a little lace at 30, but I controlled the impulse…