They're back

There have been signs for days, but we see a few signs most springs. On Wednesday there were a few in the driveway, but Wednesday it had turned cold. Thursday, they I just saw smaller pieces of the ones I saw the day before. There was still no sign of them this morning, when I went in to town and the farmer’s market. When I got home, though, it was certain. They’re back.

This is now a cicada swarm year in central North Carolina.

Cicada’s are the sound of the south in summer, my mind. On a hot evening in the summer, they buzz in the trees. You can hear them individually, one in that tree, two over there. So-called annual cicada are an every year event, with life cycles of two or three years, they make their appearance every summer, and it lasts all summer.

In the dog days, in the South, the evening air envelopes and caresses you, a thick sensuous mélange, part steam bath, part scents of the honeysuckle and the night blooming nicotiania. Fireflies do their mating dance, the males rising off the lawn flashing until as the females beacon them back down. Dog-day cicada’s are just a part of the enveloping warmth, not really separate, as candlelight might be part of a warm bath, separate, but inseparable when present.

These are not dog-day cicadas, today.

Periodic cicadas com earlier in the year, and they are pitiable creatures. They are slow, they are fat, they are the junk food of the avian world, and no bird can eat just one. They crawl out of the ground, and slowly up the trees, calling for a mate. That slow crawl, and that long mating song means that they cannot hide.

And yet, as slow as they are, as defenseless as they are, they are fashion plates. The have large eyes might be black or bright red., depending on the swarm. They have large iridescent wings, although I never see them fly. It’s a wonder that any survive the one or two days that they are above ground to reproduce.

What these guys do do, is they overwhelm the predators. Because the cicadas do not come every year, the birds do not, cannot, count on them. So many come at once that they overwhelm the ability of the birds to eat them. Nut trees do the same, as they have evolved for good years and bad years so some will escape the squirrels (and others). Nut trees will even communicate chemically at a distance, to align those good years and bad years; this reproduction strategy requires the whole community to participate. But good years for nut trees are not as distinctive as a good swarm of cicadas.

This afternoon, when I returned, it sounded first like the biggest motorcycle rally ever, still miles away, but revving over the hills. One year, I thought that a long threatened development along the river had started, and that dozens of caterpillar bulldozers must be re-arranging the woods. Today, after all the rough weather we have had, it sounds like a tornado, a couple miles away.

Up close, at the edge of the yard, the sound is the same as on a summer’s eve, with individuals calling from the trees. The swarm, though, now that is an eerie sound that does not let up. Yes, they’re back.

Profiling ICalendar for Transactions

The WS-Calendar specification, soon finishing its second public review, is semantically rich and supports lots of historical complexity while being designed for further extensibility. It is readily backward compatible with all existing calendar applications. The remaining problem is that this optionality, this diversity, can make it difficult to validate information exchanges for specific purposes. Today in meeting, we discussed the approaches to developing profiles of WS-Calendar for use in specific interfaces, say, those between enterprise and building systems, or in high-speed transactions such as in smart market interactions.

The iCalendar specification itself is only loosely bound with minimal validations. A Structural validation of the incoming XML is not enough to assure its suitability for a particular purpose. Additional code is required to augment schema checks with additional required validations. These validations serve to prevent errors when the data is received by applications or components that expect the information to comply with business content validation rules. If the validation rules are written in code, they are likely to be inside the application. Rules in the application are less likely to be shared. We need common, shared validation rules.

We have three approaches on the table.

In one approach, we declare the work, with all its optionality, to date to be a Platform Specific Model (PSM). Underlying this PSM is a not yet defined Platform Independent Model (PIM). The PIM defines minimal information exchanges that must be common to all conforming specifications. The PIM and the PSM are both expressed in UML, and through the UML, we can recognize the alignments we need to define simple XML transformations (XSLT) between PIM-compliant exchanges. Bill Cox has been exploring this approach.

Another approach is to build on Content Assembly Mechanisms (CAM) to define a schema dictionary that defines the restrictions. CAM can then create the schemas we need from merging the application and the base or full schema. This is yet another application, but it is open source and the approach is being standardized in OASIS and on SourceForge.

Yet another approach is the profiling done by GML to restrict geospatial schemas for individual spaces. This appears to use some sort of substitution schema files, but I cannot say yet whether that is all they are doing.

Forget Efficiency and Demand Response, Load Bank for the Grid

All the Smart Grid attention is on Demand Response, that is, on the half dozen times a year when the grid runs out of energy or has to turn to expensive energy sources. All the building attention is on efficiency, using the least energy inside the building possible. Neither approach supports renewables, or distributed energy resources. Efficiency may reduce the ability to respond to Demand Response signals. Buildings should turn to productive load banking instead.

When I am at home, my smart thermostat turns my home temperature up and down. In the winter, the temperature setting goes way down at night. The house becomes parsimonious just as the local wholesale power market goes negative. The price goes negative because it is expensive to turn up and down the power generation. I don’t see wholesale prices, so efficiency is what I do for now. In a better market, I would increase my use at night, and turn the temperature down when I get up. Instead, I efficiently use more energy by using it at the wrong time.

Load banks are familiar to those who test and install generators. Generators can burn out the circuits they are on, or the equipment on those circuits, if there is not adequate load to consume the power generated. Load banks are paired with generation to use any excess energy. Most load banks do little more than heat the air to burn off excess energy. If we can make our building systems create value while load banking, we will turn grid economics upside down.

Renewable energy, or rather intermittent generation, often generates energy when there is no market for that energy. Wind farms often produce far more energy than they can sell at that time. Just google “wind farm Texas toaster” for description of the problem. The problem is not, as many decry, subsidies. The problem is lack of markets. With no place to sell enough power when the wind is blowing, the great Texas toaster load banks wind power into heat.

Building systems should look at what they can do to use more energy, but at the right time. Ice Energy, which chills water at night to avoid air conditioning during the day, is better thought of as a daily load bank. The real impulse behind utility support of electric cars is that if charged only at night, they provide load banking while expanding their market.

I always laugh when I go to a conference “powered by wind”. I know that they are paying un-economic fees to a power source that is not the wind, which promises to buy wind at some later time. If you want to encourage renewable energy, you need to buy it when it’s available and cheap, not on some pretend market which sells you conventional power, and promises to buy wind later when it is not needed. If we instead bought energy when the wind is blowing, we would increase the value of wind energy. I the great wind farms could sell more than 40% of what they generate, they would be instantly more economic, without waiting for new technologies. Think of it as canning fresh tomatoes in summer. You don’t can tomatoes in summer to heat the house; that would suggest canning in winter. You can tomatoes in summer because that is when they are fresh and cheap.

The most efficient place to store energy is in the middle of a process you were going to do anyway. Ice Energy is effective because it stores cold in the middle of the air cooling process. My home well would be a great load bank if I had a means to store several days of water pressure. A maker of home water heaters marshals thousands of home units to provide fast 4-second load banking to meet the needs of the gird—and radically changes the net cost of water heating. Load banking that performs a useful service creates value you can see every day.

Look at your buildings, and ponder, what you can do in advance, and do it when there is a load banking opportunity. Look for ways to productively load bank your distributed energy resources rather than sell excess to the grid. Look for ways to use more energy, right now.

Demand response happens now and then. For the last couple years, with a down economy and lower industrial demand, it might not happen at all. Load surplus opportunities happen every day. If your building systems can take advantage of this surplus, consume energy when it is cheap and plentiful, to provide service when it is expensive and scarce, you can find new value streams from energy engineering, renewable energy, and building systems.

Smart Energy in Industry: Introducing MRP4

Last week, I spoke at the Department of Energy’s Industry to Grid (I2G) Summit, a pre-meeting of the ARC World Industrial Forum. For me, it felt like something of a homecoming. Several careers ago, my biggest customers were manufacturers. In the late 70’s, popular imagination held US manufacturing to be dead, poorly managed and low quality. In a famous Newsweek article, a celebrity athlete boasted of a summer in the UAW, during which he deliberately added rattles to pass the time. As often happens, a renaissance had begun some years before public perception hit bottom.

As a young programmer, I was working with companies trying to improve quality while keeping costs under control. With double digit inflation the norm, the US was beginning its great inventory squeeze. A passing familiarity with the Japanese Kanban system could take you far in industrial consulting. JIT inventory was being supplemented by JIT production. In Toronto, at the world APICS conference, we split MRP (Materials Requirements Planning) into MRP1 and the new MRP2. MRP2 reached beyond the factory floor to incorporate sales budgeting and HR planning. A year later, I first saw AutoCAD, astonishing because it ran on a PC.

Those were the roots of today’s integrated global supply chain management. Eventually MRP2 came to cover all facets of a company, and was re-christened ERP. Time-phased resource acquisition is a critical component of today’s commerce. Executives in every sector now are evaluated based on ratios determined by how lean their inventory is.

Even when it makes no sense, we apply these management principles today. For example, Coal plants used to pride themselves on weeks or even months of supply on hand. Coal is easy to store, and it does not go bad. Still, many utilities today run on same day coal deliveries; any interruption of the supply chain, of the constant stream of trains from mountain to generator, would take a significant portion of US electrical supply off line.

This last week, we saw the effects of a similar lean supply chain in natural gas. The cold snap increased demand and reduced supply, causing affecting electricity supplies in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and California. Lean supply chains are brittle. Through ERP, we have made are electricity supplies brittle as well.

Current plans are that we introduce intermittent electricity sources, i.e., solar and wind and tides, throughout the grid. Today, we backstop these with the same natural gas whose supply chain we manage so tightly. Lean supply chains and thin markets demand predictability. When smart grids fail, lean supply chains can make then fail badly, and the effects will be regional.

Pulling this back to my early days in industry, APICS propagated the essential equations for to compute supply chain decisions. In those days before PowerPoint, I used to be able to write these equations, in the style of a grammar school teacher, on the board, behind my back, while facing my clients. Many of them depended upon another, the Cost of Stock-out (COS). The simplest COS was solely lost sales per day. The better ones started with opportunity costs and factory reconfiguration and extended to lost reputation and permanent loss of customers. It is easy to undervalue the COS.

Public Utility Commissions have made affordability their top concern for decades. Utility executives strive to make their financial ratios look like other industries. Volatile energy supplies will increase the likelihood of stock-outs, i.e., shortages of basic supplies. Lean supply chains and renewable energy create a dangerous mix.

The industrial decision-makers in the audience wanted a quick take-away on what smart energy means for them. Many of them generate their own power, and are looking for better ways to bring their excess to market. Others are just beginning to consider the effects volatile prices that swing every day. To me, it was easy, they are already the thought leaders in this area. Industry gave us MRP1 which grew into MRP2. MRP3 is ERP, the dynamic management of resource supply and use that runs our global supply chains and businesses of all kinds. For the end node, smart energy is MRP4, accounting for volatility of supply, and factoring it directly into scheduling on the factory floor.