What Standards do we need for the Smart Grid (SGIX)

As I do periodically, I have been thinking about what standards we need for the smart grid. The smart grid is more than improved top-down control, it is a grid ready for unreliable energy sources (such as wind, waves, and sun), distributed generation, and net zero energy buildings. Net zero energy buildings are particularly troublesome because from minute to minute, they may be buy power or selling power. The smart grid will be transactional, with each purchase of energy at a market clearing price. The smart grid will be open and transparent, wherein consumers can choose what kind of power to buy, and providers can prove that they are selling the kind of power they promise.

Earlier this week, Alex Levinson referred to the suite of standards we will need for the smart grid as Smart Grid Information Exchange (SGIX). So what are the standards we need for SGIX?

• SG Pricing: Price is more than a number. If I ask you if prices are up or down at the store, the answer is not “7”. It is not “Tomatoes are $3.00.” The price is “$3.57 per pound for the organic vine-ripened greenhouse heritage Cherokee tomatoes.” Each buyer can choose which attributes affect their purchase decision. I may choose to buy the cheapest tomatoes. I may choose to buy only organic. I may grudgingly choose the most expensive because they are the only ones in the store. And I will be able to choose to run the fountain in front of my office only when wind power is available and below a certain price.
• SG Transaction: I buy what I buy at the time that I buy it. That transaction may be different because of my price decisions than what my neighbor is buying at the same time. I may owe for that purchase of solar power to my utility or to my neighbor.
• SG Market Operations: There is some bidding and exchange of information in advance. In my mind, this looks somewhat like commodity markets for those who want to participate. It includes elements of weather arbitrage. It includes time and reliability. It includes all of the elements of price. I am looking forward to GridEcon in March to begin the discussions on SG Market Operations.
• UnitsML: UnitsML offers an unambiguous way to describe all physical measurements, and an unambiguous ability for a computer to look up the translation of any units of measure to any other units. I think UnitsML will be part of pricing and market operations
• WS Calendar: We all use ICALENDAR to unambiguously exchange information about time intervals. You used it the last time you clicked on an email attachment and suddenly had a meeting on your personal calendar. We need the same functionality standardized for web services. We will use it as part of pricing, and weather predictions, and other decisions.
• WeatherML v2: I don’t actually know what version WeatherML is on – but it is not usable. Most forward looking energy markets are based on assumptions about weather. Most historical analysis of energy use includes recalling the weather environment. The most successful energy middleman base their business on understanding microclimates. We need a standard way to report weather information, in whatever detail is available, from forecasters, local weather stations, personal weather systems. Such a standard should include UnitsML (for internationalization) as well as time (WS-Calendar) and probabilities (for forecasts).
• SG Interoperation: I envision this as a short, light, exchange of the information we need to plug technologies together without knowing the details. I see it as smaller than, but perhaps derived from, ISO-61850. It includes some basic safety information. It includes estimates of reliability and capacity. It may include some of the “price attributes” (Am I a source of carbon-credit eligible power?).
• SG Metering: This is a simple standard of energy flows by time slice. It also includes direction, as power may flow one way for a time, and then the other in a distributed world.
• oBIX: The web service standard for technology-agnostic operation or distributed control systems could well have a place Remote Operation and Telemetry.
• SG Telemetry: What is going on on the grid, and where is it failing.
• WS DD and WS DP: Device discovery and device profiles have been used in computer networking for some time. Device Discovery lets you find all printers on the network,. Device profiles let you decide which printer to use when you want color duplexing. These functions are being standardized for the web. Schneider, one of the largest conglomerates providing systems for the grid and building is looking at providing WS DD and WS DP for all the equipment it sells. I think it will have a big role in the future world of distributed generation and net zero energy.
• SG Remote Operation: This one may be a literal transform from the ISO 61850 standard for substation communications.

Have I missed any partis of SGIX?

Update on 2009-02-27 11:56 by Toby Considine

There is nothing like publishing to make your spelling errors and your ommissions come to light. Some things I left out:

• SG Curtailment. Sometimes, no matter how you plan, stuff happens. The daily temperature is 5 degrees warmer than expected. The tubine throws a spandrel. A truck drives into the tramission tower. Shed load NOW!
• SG QOS: Somehow we have to exchange information about Quality of Service, both as a promise, and as a result. I hear hints that we may be able to find QOS communication standards in another standard. Perhaps one of my readers can suggest a pointer...

Energy Interoperability Standards: Smart Buildings, Smart Grid

Earlier this month, Bill Cox of Cox Software Architects proposed the formation of standard committee for Energy Interoperability at OASIS. The core of the proposed work is the definition of XML and Web services interactions for so-called Automated Demand Response, growing out of work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Demand Response Research Center. The proposal comes from the context of many discussions in and related to the OpenADR Technical Advisory Group, GridWise Architecture Council, Grid-Interop, the NIST Smart Grid project, and GridEcon (an upcoming conference on the economics of the Smart Grid - http://www.gridecon.com/ ).

The UCAIug, whose members are largely utilities and their suppliers, is an identified source of requirements, goals, data models and comments. Before chartering, the committee wishes to identify other stakeholders with other perspectives. Collaboration with other groups of stakeholders is actively being sought. Other stakeholders include energy market makers, Independent System Operators, and policy and regulatory groups.

Smart buildings are critical to the success of energy interoperability. Owners and integrators of smart buildings are invited to participate. The proposed committees work will be particularly important to those working on Net Zero Energy (NZE) buildings.

The proposed work offers a path to national and perhaps international markets for energy-responsive systems. Today, such communications are balkanized and suppliers must re-develop all core functionality for each state. A national standard is expected to speed innovation and adoption of new E-Tech products.

The original proposal can be found at http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/smartgrid-discuss/200902/msg00007.html To join the smartgrid-discuss@lists.oasis-open.org list, send email to smartgrid-discuss-subscribe@lists.oasis-open.org. There is no commitment to join OASIS or participate in a technical committee.

The discussion is part of a broader effort within OASIS to apply applying the standards and methods of e-commerce to new energy. You can read about this effort, known as OASIS Blue, at http://www.oasis-open.org/resources/white-papers/blue/.

For information or inquiries about either the Energy Interoperability committee or about OASIS Blue, contact me.

Lord of the HAN: One Agent to Rule them All

The National Institute for Standards and Technology has divided the users of the power grid into workgroups for each different area. Industry to grid (I2G), Commercial Building to grid (B2G), Home 2 grid (H2G) and even Vehicle to grid (V2G). Clearly there is a lot of overlap. The large home may have more sophisticated responses than the small office. When we are all done, I hope we have one common set of interfaces for all of them.

Each have their strengths. I2G hosts the most advanced conversations relevant for distributed generation (DG), with its long experience of local steam plants and of cogeneration. B2G, sometime called Business to grid by its members, has the most advanced expectations of the arms-length negotiations with the power grid. V2G presents the clearest models for distributed identity and lifestyle interactions. But I think that H2G has the most advanced system architecture, driven by the diversity of technology and personal preference in the home market.

The model adopted by the H2G seems the closest to a service oriented architecture relying on loose choreography. Homes have appliances and entertainment systems as well as environmental controls. Homes are values driven, and so are early adopters of generation technology that may not yet make economic sense. Homes are personal, encompassing all the different life styles, sleeping patterns, and everything else that makes each household different.

This model relies on the autonomous agents plugged into the HAN, each defending its mission, each interacting with prices from the grid. When I say agent and mission, I’m thinking of Gail Horst’s (head of grid responsiveness for appliance maker Whirlpool) that a washing machine cannot respond to the grid unless it knows there is no bleach in the current load. There is also the concept of the home agent, coordinating the responses and programs of each.

This master agent (“Your personal Energy Day Trader Friend!”) might run on your PC or MAC, use WS-DD (Device Discovery) to feel what’s on the HAN, WS-DP (Device Profile) to understand their capabilities, and instruct them as to the homeowner’s wishes. This model maps well to the findings of the Olympic Peninsula Project as well on to developing visions for the NZE (Net Zero Energy) home.

Lynne Kiesling described the inside the building energy market as the most efficient clearing mechanism with the lowest technology bar to integration at the B2G summit sponsored by NIST in Chicago last week. This makes for some extremely interesting home generation distributed generation, agent-by-agent prioritization concepts. (What if the dishwasher can never outbid the grid for the solar panel energy?)

Is HAN leading the way for B2G with this vision? The master agent for the commercial building would have to be enterprise aware, or perhaps tenant aware, depending upon model. Is HAN leading the way for I2G in this model? The master agent for I2G would need to be aware of manufacturing schedules and other enterprise functions, perhaps even labor contracts.

Do these other entities need what is architecturally already part of the HAN?

Watered-Down Energy

I’ve wondered here before how water intersects with energy conversations. As I write this on a plane leaving San Diego, which has been in a drought, I have just read of how a well meaning public agency has once again created perverse incentives on the use of scarce resources. A central tenet of sustainability is that we must consider the full external costs of our activities. It is ironic that incentives that result in perverse outcomes appear again and again in the plans for sustainability.

The developing plan appears to be based upon price-based custom rationing. Each household will receive a per month allocation based on a percentage of its historical use. Households who use more than the target will be charged at five times the normal rate for the additional water. This is rationalized as the "fairest" because it affects all houses based upon their "needs".

Long time conservationists are protesting. If you have been using water wantonly, you will experience a barely annoying reduction to some level of use that is still far above the norm. If you have been sparing in your water use, whether due to philosophy, parsimony, or poverty, you will now be asked to cut beyond inconvenience, or to pay costs far higher than your neighbor who has never conserved.

Some households were interviewed admitting that they were increasing their water use this month so they would have a bigger allocation when the rationing kicks in. Interference in free markets always creates some sort of gaming. In this case, the proposed solution is encouraging people to make the problem worse today. We need to be mindful of this effect as we consider proposals for DR (demand response) and other energy strategies that rely on technocrats trying to outthink the market.

One long-standing feature of water allocation here in the arid west is water rights. Legal recognition of water rights was necessary to quell some of the great battles of the wild west. Water rights are used to allocate shares of water from the Colorado between Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and California. Water rights support long term investments in farms and orchards by establishing long term access to a resource that is indispensable in the deserts of the southwest. If you buy land without the water rights, you may have no right to the water that falls on or flows across your land.

Water rights, or the lack of those rights, has caused great consternation in at least one new bedroom community of Denver on the western slope. The community has been marketed as green, and the homeowners are earnestly saving the planet by installing rain barrels under roof downspouts to support their gardens and landscaping. The problem is that they do not have rights to that water. Hundreds of homes impounding the water from thousands of acres of land will destroy downstream agriculture with longstanding rights to that water. Somehow this seems as a cruel joke to those now moving into the new development. After all, it is rain falling on their land!

Sustainable development activists have long advocated the trading of land rights. To sustain “rural character”, farmers have been urged to sign away the right to develop their land in return for permanent tax breaks on their land. In other areas, land conservancies have bought up those development rights for cash now. It is ironic that this same community now does not understand water rights.

Energy and water are about to become more entwined. In San Diego, there are perennial proposals for a massive desalination plant to remove this dependence on the constrained supply from the Colorado River. San Diego actually had one in the past, one that was ordered transferred to Guantanamo Bay by Kennedy following the Bay of Pigs fiasco. San Diego has debated a replacement, and who will pay for it, ever since.

The desalination plant will require electricity, and a lot of it. Proposals on the table range from a collocated nuclear plant to an untested wave generator. There is predictable high concern over the nuclear option, concern that seems to trump the unknown effects on the fragile coast and marine fauna that the large wave generator might cause. Unremarked in these conversations is that the San Diego power grid frequently receives power from mobile floating nuclear plants; the Navy has long kept their nuclear warships powered up when docked by selling power to the grid.

Water and Electricity just seem to go together.

I sometimes wonder whether energy rights will look more like water rights in the future. Google has demanded primacy of energy rights to nearby hydropower as part of economic development packages that put their data centers in rural areas. Is this right tradable or assignable?

Will regions that dedicate large tracts of land to allow the construction of alternative energy or for the transmission of energy demand energy rights as part of their payment? Do these rights transfer with the land, or are they separate? Should some communities demand or accept energy rights in return for assuming stranded costs and setting the electrical industry free? How will these markets develop?