Charles Raymond Patrick Considine, RIP

1908 - 2010

Home is the sailor, home from sea:
Her far-borne canvas furled
The ship pours shining on the quay
The plunder of the world.

Home is the hunter from the hill:
Fast in the boundless snare
All flesh lies taken at his will
And every fowl of air.

'Tis evening on the moorland free,
The starlit wave is still:
Home is the sailor from the sea,
The hunter from the hill.

A. E. Houseman

I thank everyone for the kind words, the emails,the prayers, and even the posts you have shared with me. I am not surprised, but still strangely numb. A banal moment, it comes to everyone on this earth sooner or later, but no words can describe the impact of the loss of one;s father, when it comes.

Smart grids will get worse, so dumb buildings must get smarter

The grid will never be as good as it was. The old grid had reliable surplus energy based on predictable energy sources, and adequate safety margins. The smart grid will have none of these. We are replacing predictable coal, nuclear, and hydro with intermittent energy sources. We cannot build the consensus to build transmission capacity to bring energy from far away. The grid’s reduced safety margins make even moderate adoption of intermittent energy sources risky. By every measure, the quality of the North American grid will get worse. That’s the plan.

So why make the grid smart? Well, we want to be able to know how bad the grid is faster. So we will add sensors, and track operations closely. One of the early power companies to install smart grid sensors distributes power on either side of FirstEnergy. FirstEnergy is the utility whose slow response led to the great Northeastern Blackout of 2003. FirstEnergy was pushing too much power over transmission lines causing them to overheat. Overheated wires stretch, in this case stretching all the way to hit untrimmed trees. The adjacent power company could see this coming, and even called the FirstEnergy control room to urge action before a crisis came. We want smart grids so the grid will be less like Cleveland in 2003, and more like its neighbors.

Most general public reports, though, gloss over what response FirstEnergy could have made. In essence, FirstEnergy could have prevented the great blackout by voluntarily unplugging half of Cleveland. That is what smart grids will do; they will turn off half of Cleveland to keep problems from spreading. With the quality of the grid getting worse by design, smart grids will turn off their customers regularly. Turning off customers to protect their own infrastructure will become a regular activity of power companies that operate smart grids. As the saying goes "Fun for the boys, but hard on the frogs". The power companies are the boys; in this model, most of us, in homes, buildings, and industry, accept the role of "frog".

Buildings, and their owner/occupants, have four choices. They can stay dumb and fail regularly. They can get a little smart turn off by the grid whenever the grid makes a request. They can accept that the grid is an unreliable partner, and try to isolate themselves from the grid. They can partner with the grid and make intelligent cost-based dynamic decisions about whether to use the grid, shed load, or rely on internal energy sources.

Being a little smart is what the more advanced buildings do today. Homes have just enough smarts to obey some simple commands&emdash;they are as smart as a well-trained puppy. Some commercial buildings are the same&emdash;let’s call them the trained killer whales, larger and more impressive, but still doing just what they are told. We call these pet tricks “managed energy”.

If we fail to establish business models and standard communications between smart grids and smart buildings, more and more people will opt out of the grid. Already, 135,000 buildings with utility electric meters on-site have opted to be off the grid; that number has been growing at a compounded 30% each of the last five years. Less reliable power will accelerate this trend. Government over-reach on access to cellular “operations data” pushes this approach as well—and the long-conditioned reflexes of the utilities to rollover even before they are asked (see grow light arrests, OpenADE requirements) will encourage those who can afford it to get off the grid. This model will keep site-based energy expensive and development slow.

Clean, lightweight communications of electricity scarcity and abundance are the prerequisite for partnering between grids and end nodes. These signals must be limited to market signals and no more; the universal abstraction for scarcity and value is price. Standards build markets, and national standards for economic signals will create national markets for every sort of systems that use, stores, or manages energy use. National standards will reduce integration costs, speeding the adoption of new approaches in existing buildings.

In smart grids, the only question is will we turn off our own end nodes, or will we let our electricity suppliers do it for us. If we put our suppliers in charge, smart grid efforts will be slower and more expensive, and less effective. If we put our suppliers in charge, we will accept the complete loss of privacy in our homes and offices. If we do it ourselves, the transition will be quicker and less expensive. If we do it ourselves, we maintain autonomy over our lives and preserve our essential rights.

We have a choice. Either we choose for ourselves or someone else chooses for us.

Idle Thoughts on Smart Grids

Musings from the GridWise Architectural Council, Orlando, 2010

After a week at the AHR show, and meeting with ASHRAE, and sitting in on B2G (Building to Grid) summit, I was back in the building zone as I sat in on day one of the GWAC meeting. The GridWise Architectural Council (GWAC) is a voluntary organization of people concerned with the future of energy. The Department of Energy sponsors meetings of the GWAC, a commitment that keeps the group in meeting rooms, coffee, and pastry. The DOE also provides administrative support through Pacific Northwest National Labs (PNL).

The GWAC is immensely influential in the development of the North American approach to smart grids. It draws members from many industries and not just the best thinkers of the utility industry (although its members include those, too). The GWAC often meets at the end of conference or show tied to a different field of energy, to cross-pollinate their approaches. This week, they met after the AHR show. I have never had the time and resources to commit to a GWAC membership; the members make a serious commitment of time. When one of their open meetings is in the same town as me, I always attend if I can.

What follows are mental doodles from my meeting notes, none long enough to warrant their own post.

Is Demand Response the worst marketing phrase ever?

Demand Response is the girlfriend (or boyfriend) who you dated for a while, but dumped because she only talked about her problems. If utilities want to people to care about DR, they have to come up with some better way to talk about it. Until they do, energy suppliers are going to continue to have a hard time engaging their customers.

Is Customer engagement “the disruptive technology”?

The system designs of electrical grids have been defined by deep integration and process interactions. Service integration and service orientation were unknown. The services, both between supplier and consumer, were undefined. Even within the consumer realm, the services were not defined. Rarely does a commercial owner hope to buy electricity on any given day—electricity is not a service. . . Lights, warmth, computing, music, even flushing toilets, now, those are services.

What will it take commercial building owners to embrace energy response

A building owners business is to operate a building efficiently without, at a minimum, annoying his tenants. If he knew a way to use a third less energy without annoying them, he would be doing it already. Annoyed tenants may not renew their leases. It is safer to avoid this risk.

If a building owner could see how each part of his building would respond to DR, and knew which tenants would be annoyed, this risk is removed. I think the killer app of demand response can apply all service degradation only to those tenants who are habitually late on their rent.

Why does the smart grid have no formal architecture?

This was a real challenge when developing the national roadmap. We did not want an architecture, for a good architecture is ultimately an expression of a particular business model. When we developed the national roadmap, we wanted to support any number of business models, both those known today, and those we might find in the future. How would a traditional “architecture”, or perhaps even a TOGAF-style instantiation of Intelligrid, handle, say Google becoming its own virtual utility buying directly in multiple ISOs? We deliberately left architectures undefined.

We had to socialize the services as “reducing the size of interoperation domains” to enable innovation by reducing the requirements to form cross-domain interactions

Why does it seem that there is a fundamental contradiction between the smart grid and new technology?

When integration and interoperation are the biggest challenge, then diversity is the biggest controllable expense, and technical innovation is the biggest controllable risk; it is most easily controlled by preventing the introduction of either. The smart grid must introduce both.

The real question, if properly constructed, is not how we create The Smart Grid™, but how do we define Service Oriented Energy (SOE), of which the Service Oriented Grid is just one arranged subset. The SOG interacts with another entity, with quite different purposes, the Service Oriented Building, The SOB exposes some of its attributes and behaviors through SOE interfaces.

From this, we derived the existence of an Energy Services Interface (ESI). The ESI is the external face of any building or microgrid. What happens behind the ESI is of no concern to the grid other than how it effects how the node behind the ESI comes to market.

Can you really keep your mind on smart grid all the time?

No. During most of an excellent talk on new energy generation from FPL, I was thinking, “It won’t be carbon that destroys the biosphere, but alternative energy, specifically, through the slowing of the Gulf Stream by ocean current generation and slowing of the trade-winds by wind turbines…”

Answering the call

I have been dreading and expecting this call. My mother said, “I hope you can be here. I hope your travels will put you on the west coast soon. I wish you could be here. Will you be out here any time soon?”

My father has been quite ill, and confused for some time. He has already lived 5 years longer than any male in his line, and almost ten years longer than his own father. I was born when he was 40, his seventh son. I wrote about him here on his 90^th birthday. He has not been what he was for years. For an occasional moment, he could fix his mind on the here and now, and his attention was penetrating and forceful. The confusion would come back.

I visited him at Thanksgiving, avoiding the Christmas confusion of visitors. We talked then, and he asked what I was up to. Occasionally he would look straight at me assert “You are the one that went away to North Carolina and didn’t come back” Soon, we would start over again. Soon he would retreat to the supermarket romances that have been his refuge in recent years.

My father was always full of surprises and talents. He had experiences that it is hard to imagine today. In the 30’s, he would jump the train in Burlingame, riding to work at 4 at the meat packing plant before school. He sang in the chorus, as a spear carrier, in the San Francisco Opera. He had a band in high school, and through college, playing summers at the lodge in Yosemite. In the thirties, a date was a girl and a ferry ride across San Francisco Bay, a milkshake, and a return trip on the ferry,

He dropped out of Cal at 20 because he had found his girl, but not before founding the American Society of Industrial Engineers. Even at that age, he was not sent to war; he was declared essential to the war effort, and worked in shipyards speeding production, except when he was loaned to the mustang airplane factory always behind schedule.

I remember his stories setting up the production line for a system so secret that no one was allowed to know all the details. It was made in four parts of the factory, each component delivered sealed to the next for inclusion. Years after his retirement, he talked of his work with one of the computers I had only read of, and hadn’t known was ever on the West Coast. When the war was over, he took his dream job in the Midwest, signing on to make college rings in a small town.

The quiet life did not last. His wife moved him to San Diego, where she grew up, and he was one of the early accountants in California to opt for the new CPA designation. He grew his business by doing the books for every parish he could find, and by teaching at SDSC. He always lived in the country on weekends, moving his growing family through a series of cattle ranches in the back country. San Felipe. Rincon. Chores for the kids. Five years before I was born, the family moved full time to a ranch near Mt Palomar, and he became well known for the create application of tax law to real estate.

In the summer, family trips would always begin at the Starlight Opera, Broadway musicals under the open air, and then into the car and drive through the night, travelling through the desert when it was cool. I remember driving down Route 66, stopping at a nameless hotel, and the phone ringing after dinner. A client, with a critical problem, had called every hotel in Arizona to find him, and he talked until far after when I was sent to bed. During this time, he always had several children in college, and the rest in private school.

This was not enough to keep him busy. On Tuesday and Thursday nights, he would pick us up from school, after 5, feed us, and drive north, to sit in the parked car while he completed his PHD in Mathematics at one of the Pomona schools. He learned a language each year to travel abroad to Europe and to Asia. Later, he gave as many as 50 seminars a year, on taxes and real estate and finally estate planning. He had friends all over the country, some who would pay to see him again and again, whenever he was within several states. The man was tireless.

One summer, as a surly college student, I worked in his accounting firm, and travelled with him on seminars. Everywhere I was annoyed at how people liked and admired him. Later, whenever my kids troubled me, my mother would laugh and say I had the children I deserved. I wish I had taken better notes.

In his retirement, he opted to read every book mentioned as a classic, or mentioned as important by a classic. He read the Greek philosophers, and worked his way up chronologically through the first 600 years of Christian philosophers and theologians.

So in recent years, when he sat, and slept, and read supermarket romances, he was not the same man. I would explain enterprise responsive buildings, and dynamic energy markets. He would look at me intently, warn me not to do any business with utilities (they move too slow, and don’t understand risk and profit!), look longingly at his book, and ask me to start again.

Last week, he went downhill fast. The odd thing was that with each dip down, he seemed to bounce further up the next day. My brothers who visited him on the up days reported that he was working crossword puzzles again, and quickly. The next day the reports again would be dire...

Tonight, I was in the airport in Orlando, after the AHR conference and one day of the GridWise Architectural Council. I had technical writing to do on the plane, to further the development of the market oriented interfaces of smart energy. With a half hour before boarding, I called my Mother to chat, and to let her think of something else.

“I hope you can be here. I hope your travels will put you on the west coast soon. I wish you could be here. Will you be out here any time soon? The brothers are taking turns sleeping in his room each night. Will you be out here?”

So I write this flying west from Orlando, rather than north to Carolina, with a suitcase full of already dirty conference clothes. Strangely, the first phone call was to the kennel, telling them I would not pick up Rusty any time soon. Suddenly I have no schedule, but my life and time, like my father’s, are in God’s hands. A moment long anticipated, long expected, long resigned to, is still momentous when it comes.