Monday Morning at the Smart Grid SDO Workshop

Seven pre-meetings and a plenary into this workshop, it already feels like I have been here for a week. It has come a long way; everyone from the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to the state-side National Association or Regulatory and Utility Commissioners (NARUC) is on the same message. Smart grid interoperability standards must provide a platform for innovation. We must support more players and new entrants into energy markets. We must not make decisions in one domain that constrain the other domains.

Even before the conference started, I was talking to new people bringing their skills and knowledge to the problems of energy. Last night, I spoke for a long time with Greg Schwartz of CalConnect on the problems of coordinating activities across our daily lives, whether class schedules or energy prices, whether building systems or industrial operations. He identified his biggest problem as one of institutional awareness. CalConnect has key technical members in Oracle, Microsoft and Apple. Increased awareness is needed so that their calendar standards people will be given the time to finish the cross-cutting web services of scheduling.

The FIX Protocol consortium is here in force. FIX, a standard for financial information, provides the underpinning for the world’s major trading operations, from stock exchanges to commodities. The support and cooperation of FIX can help us get to transactional energy much faster.

Even at breakfast, I was talking to someone from the ASE, the automotive standards group. While she is here (Carolyn? - I wish I was better with names) to discuss the issues associated with electric vehicles. As the conversation continued with themes of competitiveness and knowledge drain, we turned to integration strategies. Cars have been under incredible cost and integration pressure, and have used service oriented integration of control systems to improve integration while reducing complexity. Detroit may be the place to hire engineers experienced in service oriented control integration.

George Arnold is emceeing the morning; anyone who has been following the smart grid process knows where he stands: informational interoperability, cooperation among the SDOs, and above all, speed of standards development.

Aneesh Chopra, the federal CTO described the goals of the administration and how they tied to this effort. He named key overall goals of enabling technical innovation, improving global competiveness, and open government. The meme he rode the longest was "verbs not nouns". Too often new systems and new standards are nouns. "Now we have a system". "Now we have a standard." He wants us to focus on effective use of standards. How many people can use each interface. What new uses or approaches to energy use these standards?

Now I may always here the same thing, but I heard "light, loose service oriented standards" in every bit of his talk.

Well that was the first half of the morning. More later.

Plumbing and the Man about the Net Zero House

Maybe the ongoing attempt to over-domesticate males is a barrier to sustainable energy. Maybe Swedish feminists are simply insensitive to carbon issues. Maybe Gaia just needs a man about the house. Maybe the essential appliance needed for the net zero energy (NZE) house is a urinal.

A report last week from Ohio University describes a catalyst capable of extracting hydrogen from urine. More efficient generation of hydrogen would be a great step to more effective energy storage, one without the major shortcomings of today’s batteries. Hydrogen storage would not wear out through regular re-charging the way today’s chemical batteries do. Hydrogen storage combined with transfer technologies such as micro-beads might solve the fast re-charge problem for vehicles that do not use carbon-based fuels.

More efficient multi-purpose energy storage is the most important single issue for the smart grid. Want to shift load to reduce the requirement for new generation? Want to manage peak transmission? Storage is essential. Current social and political decisions mandate the use of more unreliable power sources in the grid. Providing instant remediation of gaps in power generation at the grid-level is difficult and expensive; there are reports that efforts to use fast starting gas generation to backstop wind have used more natural gas than if the wind had never been hooked up. Efficient storage, especially distributed storage in homes and buildings, would be offer a profound benefit to grid operation.

Efficient local storage would also make site-based generation more sensible. Selling electricity back to the grid rarely makes economic sense. Expensive grid upgrades can be needed to improve monitoring and guarantee power quality; these costs are usually foisted onto other rate payers. Because the grid cannot rely on the local storage when it needs it, utilities may still need to build the generation to support peak capacity.

With efficient local storage, site based generation would be placed in storage rather than sold back to the grid. Solar generation would go into storage all afternoon. Wind generated electricity, no matter what speed the wind is blowing would simply go into storage. Expensive-to-fix issues in power quality and availability could be simply eliminated.

So what if urine is part of the answer? The problem, of course, is that we typically dilute urine into a lot of water before flushing it away. If the approach in the report pans out, perhaps each home should have urinals to enable the storage system.

Our society’s on-going war against nature has been trying to re-write the old riddle "What does a man do on two legs, a woman do sitting down, and a dog do on three legs?" Man’s ability to stand while micturating has been declared aggressive, oppressive, and unsanitary. Sitting and standing, and whether a teenager preferred the former was recently a critical issue in a custody battle. Legal discussions of this case have been surprisingly impassioned. Maybe they have not been impassioned enough.

Maybe we should be planning for urinals in homes. Water-free urinals are an effective if controversial means to reduce water consumption. Up to 40,000 gallons per year in water savings are claimed for each public urinal that goes waterless. Home urinals could be the foundation for home-based hydrogen generation and storage.

You should install a home urinal. It’s for the planet, after all.

General Relativity and Control Systems Standards

I suspect most of my readers can just about remember light speed, the 100 foot barn, and the 110 foot log from learning about relativity. The barn had doors at each end, and one set would close the instant the other doors opened. The challenge was to transport the log through the barn. The answer had to do with light speed and collapsing space, so that as one got close enough to light speed, the log shortened, and it could fit through the barn. It was a simple enough calculation as to how fast one could go to make the log shrink how much. When each of us had completed the math, the professor sprang the surprise on us: "OK, what is happening from the perspective of a cockroach on the log?"

I haven’t been writing much recently, because I have been writing all of the time. The national smart grid roadmap is a project being completed in double time. The EPRI team is diverse and whip smart. The workshop participants are opinionated and have hundreds of millions on the line. I would be surprised of the process was not contentious.

The real problem, though, is no one thinks of the cockroach. Each player on the multi-disciplinary team sees the problem set up the way that they want things to work. Power grid engineers see homes and offices as just one more set of slow devices to turn on and off. Homes and offices see the grid as a secretive and not very reliable partner they have to work with. Green and sustainable energy folks seem to see the laws of thermodynamics as as much a social construct as are the tariffs and business procedures of the grid. Utilities executives see distributed generation as an inefficient way for middle class hobbyists to get their obsessions paid for by those less well off.

The cockroach was moving every bit as fast as the log he was sitting on. While an observer saw space, and the length of the log, contracting, the cockroach was sitting on the log and saw it remaining at 110 feet. The cockroach actually saw the barn getting shorter still, and not likely to let the log pass. However, the cockroach also saw was time dilation instead of space dilation. To the cockroach, the two doors no longer open and close simultaneously, giving the log just enough time to slip through.

And that is the problem with the smart grid. The grid operators do not see the problems of the buildings. The building owners do not see the problems of the grid, because they are hidden by the rules and market design. Venture capitalists do not see a path to profitability in funding projects with years of indecision by the utilities built into the sale cycle. “If only those others would learn about how hard my problems are…” None of them will embrace the perspective of the others; they happen to have other jobs.

Today, I have been wrestling with “Architecturally Significant Interfaces”. Grid architects tend to see the world as late 60’s open plan houses, with no proper rooms to divide the houses activities. Open up the kitchen to the dining room and living room. (I wonder how much great rooms are responsible for the tendency to eat take-out in front of the TV.) Open up the master bedroom to the great room as a loft; it is open and honest, and who cares if it scares the kids. Heck, pry the doors of the bathrooms, so everybody can interact, no matter what they are doing.

A good architecture divides the house into rooms, and thereby defines how people live there. It does not determine the furniture or the wall paint. The conceptual model of the smart grid (read it yourself, chapter 3) describes the functions of the grid and the buildings and people who participate in it. The Architecturally Significant Interfaces could define how information is handed between them; if selected correctly they will free up those in reach room to innovate, without concern for those in other rooms. If we end up with an open floor plan, we will have a mess, wherein in the name of openness we will need a family meeting to before we can decide to change anything.

Relativity—it relies on acknowledging different perspectives. Without acknowledging a few architecturally significant interfaces, the smart grid will assume a perspective held by no one. And that will be a prescription for failure.

Parsimony and Security

I have been thinking about security and parsimony lately. Security is not merely about confidentiality or even identity. It is about predictability and integrity. Challenges to predictability and integrity occur not only malefactors, but from those who develop, test, and maintain systems. Even interoperability is a part of security, introducing new sub-systems, or upgrading old ones, can introduce unanticipated interactions and failures.

Introducing any interface not actually required introduces new attack vectors and increases the complexity of testing. An interface that is only used rarely is only tested rarely. Any non-essential interface is a site that will be delegated to the junior developer; primary interfaces will be tested fully while the non-essential interface becomes a back door.

DOS/Windows is the poster child for security and reliability problems. Upgrade problems and incompatibilities were legend. Many of these arose when little used and long deprecated interfaces were eliminated or changed. Some interfaces existed only to support development and testing, and were never even documented. As thousands of developers competed for advantage, these interfaces got used. In an ecosystem of systems with far more variety, we will be better served to never introduce these obscure interfaces.

The other challenge presented by DOS/Windows was the sheer number of interfaces. One bit of code might support a dozen interfaces. Code added to fix one problem would get replaced as code to address another security based on an earlier code fork would reintroduced the problem. Complex interfaces require complex maintenance.

An oft-heard and little understood truism is that security must be designed in. This can be interpreted to require planning for encryption and isolation at every interface. This task can be fiendishly complex and require that only the most sophisticated programmers work on each system. As we know that we cannot guarantee such attention, this is poor security design. Complex procedures embrace their own failure. Better security design offers fewer chances for missteps, and better chance for sustained success.

For the smart grid, this means fewer interfaces and simpler testing. The smart grid has defined inflection points, places where responsibility or ownership or business processes change. Such inflection points define business processes with specific requirements for shared identity and authority. These business interfaces define the risks and the costs of failure. They should be few, simple, and well-defined.

We may anticipate site-based generation is either PV or Wind. We could, in theory, include wind speed as a required part of the wind source interface for the grid. A house in a tidal swamp may have some sort of novel generation strategy that appears, in most respects, identical to energy generated by the morning and evening winds that characterize the weather between the California coast and desert. By excluding wind speed, in this example, the same interface would serve for the wind generation and the tidal swamp generation. Simpler, sparser interfaces are what enable diversity and innovation. Coming back to security, the unused wind speed interface in the Tidal generator, if mandatory, is the one that will be untested and eventually a security hole.

Anything we put on the smart grid will be there for some time. It will be upgraded numerous times and coexist with other version levels. The interfaces should be few, because they will be there for a long time, and implemented and patched by many programmers.