The Sound of Breaking Glass

I love the sound of breaking glass
Deep into the night
I Iove the work on it can do
Oh a change of mind
Oh change of mind, sound of breaking glass
All around, sound of breaking glass
Nothing new, sound of breaking glass

Nick Lowe

Security in the built world is most critical at precisely those times when the demands for performance and interaction are greatest. Buildings may lose their communications with the outside world when partially destroyed. The power grid may require ad hoc reconfiguration when its communication lines are down.

The built world traditionally has found security in isolation. Building Control Systems are isolated in a mechanical room and not plugged to the internet. Fire system annunciators are often limited to one-way communications. Access is often all or nothing, with many systems secured only with the default account and password from the manufacturer.

If a system is all or nothing, then it has little need for nuanced identity management. In traditional building monitoring systems, pretty graphics sell the system, but operators look primarily at tables of values. Without service definitions, the systems rely on operator knowledge to put the pieces together. Without service definitions, monolithic security is the only choice.

Considering the requirements of using building systems for situation awareness during emergency response can lead to the wrong conclusions. The mind leaps to all-out conflagration, wherein all security should be cast aside to allow the fire department unfettered access. Yet emergency response also includes the arrest of the lurker on the third floor, and the minor spill of chemicals in the manufacturing wing, and the ambulance responding to the heart attack in the secured executive suite. In many scenarios, the responder will be granted limited access, for limited times, to only a portion the available sensors and surveillance cameras.

Power systems have different requirements for emergency security. The intelligent grid will both support and require reconfiguration more readily than it does today. Distributed generation raises the real possibility that both sides of a downed power line are hot, increasing safety risks during emergency repairs. Improper interactions with the downstream systems can incur liabilities for equipment damage, equipment not owned by the utility and not professionally monitored.

Infrastructure emergencies often coincide with reduced communications. Reduced communications can disable federated identity management, or even single provider single password checking. Many systems handle this problem with forward caching; user accounts and identity tokens (passwords, biometrics, et al.) at the access point. For example, a campus access control system might forward cache the keys of all residents of a dorm, enabling the door to make mostly correct decisions even when disconnected.

Forward caching fails at precisely those times when the emergency is greatest. During the night with four fires, the fire department from the next county responds to the building. After the great ice storm, line crews from three states away are restoring the substation. During the worst fire, the battery in the incident commander’s PDA fails, and he switches to an unregistered device. The tightest, best security fails when you need it most.

Medical systems define what is called a “Break Glass” incident. Break Glass might rely on a standard account and password, one that might never change. By using the Break Glass password, the system is alerted to log fully every action taken. Break Glass incidents also trigger an audit alert. Post incident audit might require, for example, an explanation of the event, as well as an administrative review of all changes made to the system.

I think both building systems and energy systems, including SCADA for Transmission and Distribution can make use of the practice of Breaking Glass.

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.

Distributed Generation and Lightweight Integration

Distributed generation is a big part of the anticipated new grid. Distributed generation refers to having many small sources of power on the grid. A traditional power company can own distributed generation or someone else, perhaps the building owner, can own it.

Wayne Longcore has described distributed generation today as akin to the early days of personal computing. The big centrally managed power plants have the role of the mainframe, the site where all real power generation occurs. Pocket generation plants, including solar generation on household roofs, are akin to the poorly networked early microcomputers, only able to get on-line with great difficulty, and unable to do much in the big grid. In fact, today, grid operators often cannot tell if some homes are selling power back to the grid. I guess this means that industrial sites with in-house cogeneration are the equivalent of the old minicomputers. Some readers might recall minicomputers and large workstations made up much of the early internet.

Wayne’s point was that users of the sluggish single-purpose computers of the day would have had trouble imagining the internet revolution of the 90’s. They would have had even more trouble imagining a conference like the one Wayne was speaking at, where most people carried several small computers, more powerful than the minicomputers of the day, ones able to play music and videos and surf the web at speeds unimaginable just a little while ago. After all personal computers were toys. Just like micro-generation today.

Pervasive communicating computers required the development of many small light-weight protocols. IP defined inter-computer communication. TCP defined how communications travel a wider network. DNS defined the way to find computers at a distance. Distributed generation will need many small protocols as well. The power of these protocols is that different brands of computers, or even quite different types of systems, can use them, making no distinction between mainframes, personal computers, or, now, even phones.

One protocol we need for distributed generation is a small lightweight pluripotent protocol for connecting small generation to the web. Today, grid operators expect to see a large and complex interface, specific to each type of generation, just as they do on their own substations. While new variants are derived from old, it can take as long to develop a new standard as it does the technology. The sheer number of these standards makes it difficult to integrate new generation points.

Zero Net Energy Buildings will have a mix of generation and storage systems. In most places, any building with storage is not allowed to sell energy back to the grid. Under today’s rules, a building with some solar power, a wind generator, and a diesel generator would need three separate interfaces to sell back to the grid. There is no defined interface for the myriad of low-voltage DC generating systems soon coming to market. These may not sell power to the grid, but may offset other internal needs, and thus influence power sold by “normal” generation. If each of these scenarios needs to be connected to the grid using current approaches, we will not connect many of them.

We need a common lightweight protocol to support agile integration of these new point sources of power to let distributed generation develop. There are some facts that grid operations needs to know about each substation, and it needs to know them about generating buildings as well. The grid needs this information not only for safety, but also for interoperability. But it does not need to know everything about the underlying technology, technology which may change over time. It certainly does not need the information to operate the underlying technology.

I will write about what I see as the requirements of this interface soon.

The Song of Atlanta

I wake up unusually early, and unusually alert. All senses are wary, and I am waiting for something, for anything to happen. The city is all around me, humming its early morning song.

I am staying uptown in Atlanta, at my friend Paul’s flat in Buckhead, in the city to speak speaking of standards, and surfaces, and transacted energy. It is not really any noisier than home. There is no river roaring in the background. There is no early morning siren of an ambulance coming north from Scotland County to the teaching hospital in town. It is really much quieter than Bynum in summer when the cicadas and katydids are fiddling their mating tunes into the hot humid night.

What noise there is here is less personal. I can’t pick out the sound of Donnie’s truck on the street. I don’t have one ear cocked for Thalia’s car in the drive. Each noise is less personal, and therefore less important.

The pattern of sound is different, though. Pattern is everything. In the dog culture of Bynum, every ear is cocked to hear the sirens from the south as they hit the courthouse circle, miles away. Each canine wants to be first to raise the mournful howl that accompanies the ambulances passing. They all do it in unison; they all learn to do it within months of first living in town. There is something unworldly, yet fully grounded in that sound, something so fully based in place that it is reassuring, and restful; it sends one back to sleep rather than to wakefulness.

Here the sounds are different, and I do not know the pattern, and they defy categorization. It’s not just the cars. My parents’ house is above the interstate, with traffic noise that does not quit. If you look to the west, from that high hill, you can see where the freeway ends, its off-ramps curling into the beach-side neighborhoods like a rive fading into a delta. Weekend visitors usually exclaim on the sounds of the surf, and how well they slept because of it. It must be some trick of the valley that brings the shore sounds so far inland. But there is no trick of the valley, and there are no sounds of the shore; only the freeway below hums, its individual cars blended into one swirling sound that ebbs and flows, yet never dies down.

But these sounds are not mine. They feel like something ready to happen, and I feel alert, as if I just heard a stick snap in a silent northern forest late at night. I get up and shower, because I am not going back to sleep. Paul, the perfect host, rises, makes some coffee, and bids a cheery adieu before shambling back to sleep. He needs no alarm, because these sounds are his sounds, and he can hear what time it is.

But to me, they are the sounds of a strange city, and of a day speaking, and of people to meet and names to remember. To me, they say be alert, and be ready. It does not matter that nothing that I plan to do today starts for hours. It does not matter that none of these sounds being information to me. For I am surrounded by the sounds of the city, humming its early morning song.