Podcasting Open Source Smart Energy

The week before Christmas, I was interviewed by Phil Windley of itconversations.org. The conversation started out about schedules for the internet of things, but was published under the title Open Source Smart Energy. I was coming off a cold, and sounded like a frog croaking, but I enjoyed it, especially because the interview also let me meet Udell, whose work I have long admired. The conversation covered many of the high points of smart energy, including enterprise interaction, demand response, microgrids, and transactive energy.

Jon is a noted blogger and podcaster himself; known for both his own Interviews with Innovators Friday Podcasts as well as his own work with IT Conversations. Jon is known for his work with Calendars, especially the Elm City Project. Elm City look to turn computers calendars on their heads, from the collections of specially formatted emails most of us use now, to shared resources that one subscribes to. Jon advocates that the calendars published on the web, for community organizations, businesses, schools, clubs, museums, et al., be machine readable. Once they are machine readable, other web sites can aggregate and publish then in combined formats.

Elm City calendars are always up-to-date and do not rely on local copies of schedules published long ago. Elm City sources take control of their own public presence and schedules. These schedules can be aggregated, re-published, and re-purposed. Jon’s vision of the social use of calendars influenced my own views on schedules for the internet of things and smart energy.

For the impatient, here is a quick guide to the podcast:

• First 40 minutes, WS-Calendar and VCards and developing notions in the open source world about directories for services.
• 32 minutes: VCards for Services and Directories.
• 45 Minutes: On-Line appliance communication models.
• 48 Minutes: ASHRAE SPC201 and Minimal Knowledge for smart energy
• 49:50 to 1 hour: Demand Response, Consumer Choice, Decomposition or Energy, and the Open ADR Alliance
• 60 to 65 minutes: Microgrids
• 64 Minutes: Transactive Energy

For me, the most interesting focus was on building a community of open source using the interactions based on minimal knowledge that are at the heart of smart energy.

Sharing Agendas with Buildings and Other Things

Schedules for things have always been different from schedules for people. With things, schedules are step-by-step. Turn this switch on at 2:47. Start cooling at 3:00. We schedule people by results. Be at this meeting at 9:00. Complete the annual reviews by December 20. We expect people to schedule time to get dressed, walk the dog, drive to work, get some coffee, and be in the conference room at 9:00. In IT, we call this a Service orientation, as we request the service (be there on time) rather than the process.

The schedules of our lives have a service orientation. People all over the world may receive the same notice of the same teleconference. One click and it is on our calendar. That click is the same; the message is the same no matter what software we use. That message does not acknowledge that I have a dog, that you have a cat, and that he has to take the kids to school. These messages use the semantics described primarily in iCalendar (rfc 5545)

Because so much of Smart Energy requires scheduling markets, for a time, or for a duration, the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel specifies using the OASIS specification WS-Calendar, which expresses iCalendar for use in services. WS-Calendar has already been incorporated in the specifications Energy Market Information Exchange (EMIX) that is used to exchange messages concerning the market value of energy over time. WS-Calendar is also used in the e-Commerce specification for smart energy, Energy Interoperation. The code base for Bedework, an open source enterprise-class calendar server, includes services for updating and synchronization using WS-Calendar. WS-Calendar hasn’t yet gotten to buildings.

Buildings are filled with systems that use different technologies and barely communicate with each other. Some building automation systems expose nothing more abstract than a list of tags and values. Others are linked to full three-dimensional Building Information Models (BIMs) with included energy models. None of them exposes a consistent interface for service interactions.

The Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (CalConnect) working on approaches that may change this using the internet standards vCard and LDAP. VCard was developed inside the same PIM consortium that developed iCalendar. You probably know it as the format for business cards attached to email. The Consortium has recently specified vCard v4, including a standard XML serialization. Schedules and meetings have long been associated with vCard on calendar servers.

The Consortium is working on a schema for representing resources for calendaring and scheduling using vCard and LDAP. Many are used to scheduling resources when, for example, a conference room is invited to a meeting. The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is in common use not only for internet directories, but also as an integral part of many security systems. These standards together enable a standard way to search for and schedule resources within a calendar server.

This opens up a number of interesting possibilities. A building automation system could expose a calendar server interface based on open source code. Rooms and systems could be represented by Resource vCards. Enterprise servers and simple clients could search for these Resources using LDAP, and schedule them using WS-Calendar. These schedules would be semantically different then control system schedules as they would be service oriented rather than process oriented; don’t begin cooling the room at 9:00, have the room cooled by 9:00. Building systems and enterprise calendar systems like Exchange could synchronize resource schedules, again, using existing open source code.

This hides a lot of complexity while supporting considerable diversity. VCard supports simple hierarchies, so all rooms in a given zone can be linked. For a simple upgrade / retro-commission, the commissioning agent could simply create resource records and integrate them with the underlying systems and tags. For a modern building with a BIM in place, the resources and relationships could be generated automatically. Plans are underway to specify how to backlink such Resource vCards back into the BIM. Whatever the underlying technology, the BAS would present a common simple scheduling interface.

I am particularly intrigued by the possibilities tied to the standard use of LDAP for resources. Secure searches for a Resource across multiple BAS-Calendar Servers could become the norm. The matching Resources could share free-busy information, or availability information, or even the new VPOLL information.

BIMs are large databases and can be difficult to navigate. A standard that defines how to generate vCard Resources as an interface to BIM can take advantage all of the vCard and WS-Calendar functions. The LDAP for Resources specification can make BIM more valuable by providing a means to submit LDAP queries for specific BIM information. VCard and LDAP can become a standard means to access portions of a larger BIM.

Standard calendar interfaces to building systems and services can build on existing notions of calendar security. In an enterprise calendar, you may be able to see full details on another’s calendar, or only if they are free. You may be authorized to accept meetings for another’s calendar or see nothing at all. As calendar servers and mail servers are often linked, an administrative assistant may receive all invitations sent to someone he supports. These well understood and well developed security specific interactions would be available to BAS servers in this model.

Increasingly, the internet of things will integrate with the internet of people. This will only be successful when we make things look like people to the systems and users they will interact with. WS-Calendar, vCard for Resources, and LDAP are part of this.

Planning for Abundance

So what if things did change? What if distribution and electricity were not the be-all of commercial and domestic energy?

Some colleagues and I were discussing the improbable demonstration in Bologna on October 28, the demonstration of Andrea Rossi’s e-cat system. As I write this, responses range from exuberance to cries of fraud and, guardedly, some comments that he might have pulled it off. E-Cat, which is protected today by trade secrets rather than by patents, claims to create a reaction between Hydrogen and Nickel to create Copper…and a self-sustaining amount of energy. Dr. Rossi aimed to demonstrate a 1 MW generator; he demonstrated something less than half of that; and reasonable skepticism runs high.

However that plays out, the question is one I have pondered before. The E-Cat system creates heat. That heat is used in the usual ways to create electricity. If you had an unending heat source behind the house, then it is unlikely you would use it all for electricity.

I have a friend in the center of San Diego who is going off the grid using a fuel cell. It may not make economic sense, but he dislikes his local power company. He wants to be self-reliant. He plans to run his meter backwards because he can. He is using conventional off-the-shelf technologies. What he is pondering most, though, is the heat.

His conventional fuel cell generates heat from combustion, and spins a little turbine. He then must she the heat, and run again. On campuses and industrial sites, we take advantage of this heat for cogeneration. He wants to do the same.

Being in San Diego, he first began considering shedding heat into his Jacuzzi. His plans then moved to thermal exchanges with his domestic hot water system, and with the heat exchangers in his HVAC. He lives, though, in a temperate area, and uses most of his energy for cooling. For these, he uses conventional heat pumps, which use plenty of electricity.

His fuel cell, though, generates heat first, and electricity second. Absorption Chillers might make much more sense for him, but today, there are few sources for no-maintenance absorption chillers for the home. Some use them to cool as a use for solar thermal, but that market is aimed more at the energy hobbyist than at the high-end set and forget consumer.

For years, I have though that every data center is a thermal energy source. But last Friday, as something that appears to be the descendent of cold fusion was publicly demonstrated, albeit with close control over how well the public could observe, I thought about abundance, and how we might re-arrange our homes, or offices, and our cities around cogeneration everywhere, and around harvesting what we call waste heat today.

Today, the heat that makes our electricity is far way. For each of us, we start with electricity, and layer thermal energy on top. But what would we do, what equipment would we make, if we could each of us, in each building, start with thermal energy, and layer electricity on top.

Schedule & Commissioning and the Future of LEED

As Chair of WS-Calendar, I receive a number of inquiries about the incorporation of time and schedule into other specifications. In particular, the wider visibility of VAVAILABILITY is attracting some interest. Occasionally these include fragments of xml, and inquiries as to how to apply this information.

WS-Calendar recently completed its third public review and will soon be published as Committee Specification 1.0.

NREL has recently released a report recommending tagging standards for building systems. This tagging standard is part of a larger recommendation on proper commissioning standards. The same report (http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy11osti/50073.pdf) posits that a properly commissioned building system interface be able to offer up a light-weight building model, linked to these standard tags. This creates standard semantics for the building system as a minimum commissioning requirement for a future version of LEED.

Continuous commissioning is today limited by a market friction between changing the service provider. Initial set-up costs require analyzing the building system tags, reviewing the [paper] plans, and interpreting the variations between design and as-built drawings. A properly commissioned building should have resolved these issues already in ways that are re-useable by others. There is a growing sense that buildings should continuously update these energy models to maintain LEED certification.

Energy models predict energy use, and building systems are responsible for the energy use in buildings; these systems typically do not change much after commissioning. A changing energy models is caused most often by a change in business practices. Live energy models must be mappable to changing occupant business practices.

Business processes, though, are primarily linked to spaces, not to the systems. Some systems, i.e., food service equipment, may be linked directly to the business process; it may be that even these processes are stated most clearly through space use schedules. In a building with dynamic management of business processes, the energy models may need to be just as dynamic.

My work in communications for smart energy is concerned with communicating the volatility of energy supply and demand with prices. Facilities that understand their energy use will be able to control economic risk through committing advance purchases of energy on a schedule.

Operational scheduling of building systems in BIM promises to refine our understanding of energy use throughout the day. Linking building spaces to building systems will link energy use to business processes. Continuous commissioning makes energy models relevant throughout the life cycle of a building. Smart energy will create new value propositions for those who understand the schedules when they will use energy.