RoSy outlook for distributed autonomy within systems

I feel I must be one of the last people to discover the open source Robotic Operating Systems (RoS). RoS is more of a framework than an operating system. The framework could be atop any operating system. In practice, for now, it is on Linux. (There are some interesting DotNet / Mono extensions, but those appear incomplete). ROS is providing the base for open source robotics, and the effect of robotics on all our lives will expand because of it.

RoS engages my imagination because it is inherently distributed. “Service Oriented Robotics” as a phrase that is used. Replacing the step-by-step commands that have ruled robotic manufacturing, ROS developers aim at tasks such as “Go upstairs, go to my room, find my stapler on my desk, and bring it back”. This must be decoupled into applications for climbing stairs, navigating a floor plan, identifying a stapler, and picking that stapler up.

Just as smart energy looks to fractal dis-assembling of power grids, RoS looks to fractal dis-assembly of robotic tasks. There are multiple ROS services for a robotic hand, decoupling the technology and the mechanics from the request. As ROS-capable systems get smaller and cheaper, there will likely be RoS applications for each knuckle on a hand. A RoS-enabled knuckle can more easily incorporate advanced features such as haptic feedback leading to a “gentle touch”. Gentle touch and heavy lifting can be different limbs responding to the same command.

Robotics is outside of my wheel-house. Service enabling of the internet of things is in. Service oriented energy is in. Fractal microgrids as described by the Galvin Initiative seem natural, and they will have their decision-making local, where they can respond to the needs of site, and the owner, and the situation.

Robotics started out with fixed activities under direct control. In the larger systems, one can still see the single control even as they grow more autonomous. The future is distributed service oriented robotics. In the same way smart grids started with planned sequence to control transmission. It evolved into fixed sequences to control energy consumption, centrally operated, by OpenADR and by EnerNOC and by Constellation. It is slowly evolving into centrally orchestrated DR services.

Even Microgrids are often simply the old architecture, and the old protocols, but just a little bit of isolation. Duke is pushing microgrids barely distinguishable from their distribution networks. Oncor salutes service orientation while extending the old technologies. The real advances are among those building those “smart hands”, autonomous microgrids that make their own decisions and technology choices. >Eventually, just as in the smart knuckles, the same service orientations will arrive in the end appliances and systems of the end nodes.

When I was young, in my Dinosaur age, I was fascinated by the Stegosaurus, and its hind-brain bigger than its fore-brain. That was settled science then, although controversial now. I enjoyed imagining a slow placid creature able to defend itself with some nimble, precise tail-bludgeoning.

The microgrids of the future will leverage distributed energy and local storage to for some precise tail-bludgeoning in the smart building—the far away head will not even be sure what is going on.

NERC and Utilities Commissions are unintentionally hindering Distributed Energy Adoption

For significant use of distributed energy to arrive, it must be managed and used locally first, the variability and storage managed locally, and only then traded with others. This mode of operations is termed a microgrid. Legacy business models that assume irresponsible end nodes require direct control of energy distributed in residences. Commercial sites are treated as bulk generators subject to NERC regulations that require months of filings for each configuration change. It is time for a new regulatory and operational model.

The microgrid model lends itself recursion. Twenty home microgrids on a neighborhood street can federate themselves as a microgrid. Such microgrids should manage variability internally first, trade power first amongst themselves, perhaps incorporate additional storage as a group, and then trade with the larger distribution network. A similar logic flows up through the larger neighborhood, the district, and potentially the town.

In a similar manner, a commercial site could produce and store energy locally, manage variability locally, and trade with the larger grid only to rectify systemic shortage or surplus. Perhaps the initial microgrid is the office park. Sites and facilities with the office park then evolve themselves into microgrids, to gain additional energy surety and local control.

At some point, these microgrids that are aggregations of microgrids reach a scale comparable to the bulk generation that current NERC requirements (I’m thinking CIP 5) were written for. These include cyber-security, and configuration management and filing configuration changes way in advance. These standards are important to manage stability of the overall transmission grid. These regulations do not recognize that failure modes for these composite microgrids are quite different than for bulk generation.
Managing these composite microgrids will require changes in thinking, similar to those seen in IT for storage and for cloud computing.

A composite microgrid shares failure characteristics with a RAID array. 30 years ago, one paid a premium for disks above a certain size and above a certain data throughput. Today one pays a discount. The reason is Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), although that acronym has morphed into independent disks over the years. RAID technology multiple disk drive components into a logical unit for the purposes of data redundancy or performance improvement. By the late 1980s, it was recognized that the top performing mainframe disk drives of the time could be beaten on performance by an array of the inexpensive drives developed for personal computers.

Although RAID technology was developed for price and performance, it was soon recognized that it offered superior failure characteristics. A drive could fail without any externally-visible loss of data. A replacement drive could be added to an array with only a temporary reduction of throughput. RAID arrays properly managed nearly eliminated catastrophic loss of data.

It is an interesting side note that the first control of electricity took the insignificant charge generate by two pieces of metal separated by salt water (an electrolyte) and made it useful and predictable by stacking many such pieces of metal and paper soaked in electrolyte. This type of technology was initially called simply a pile (or voltaic pile), but was later renamed a battery by Ben Franklin, invoking an artillery battery. So it would be appropriate, albeit confusing, to say that a microgrid can consist of a battery of microgrids.

While batteries and RAID arrays offered more capacity and greater predictability, it is the reliability and failure modes I want to concentrate on here. Just as a RAID array does no fail when a single, perhaps inexpensive component fails, so a microgrid does not fail when one of its components fails, or changes in capacity. Cloud data often uses hybrid RAID, in which RAID arrays are themselves components of or RAID systems. In these, entire RAID arrays can fail without reducing throughput or availability.

An analogous increase in redundancy, availability, and resilience is the expected outcome of the aggregate recursion architecture for microgrids, or what some are calling more elegantly, fractal microgrids. Just as RAID architecture enabled data centers to incorporate inexpensive “unreliable” disk drives into mission critical systems, so reliable aggregated microgrids can be built upon small, inexpensive microgrids that are currently prices out of the heavyweight NERC-required processes.

A similar logic encompasses residential control standards. To prot the distribution grid, utilities are granted direct control of low-level devices inside homes. This results in two systems that never meet, the home-based distributed energy system and the home based energy use.  Homeowners realize this out to their dismay when they have no access to their distributed generation when the grid is down.

The model of the home microgrid instead rewards the customer to install local storage. Solar installers could develop businesses around optimizing cooling when the sun is shining brightly. Such development will never happen so long as utilities commissions mandate direct control, or require a heavy process for connecting microgrids.

We need new lightweight regulatory models that embrace the coming microgrids.

Odds and Ends: Looking to 2015

I have been quiet here for too long, and have made a New Year’s resolution to get back to writing. Many of my recent projects I cannot write about, for competitive or contractual reasons. Still, there are some big themes coming to light, ones that I have been writing about for years, and that are now hitting the market.

Microgrids, broadly defined, have been a place with a lot of demonstrated movement in this last year. The most expensive thing about the obsolete grid is the assumption that everything happens centrally, and that the local node does not have any responsibility. This might be true if our world was run on incandescent light bulbs and ceramic space heaters. In a digital world, aggregate load and rhomboidal curves are growing problems, ones that cost a lot of power and shorten the lives of a lot of equipment.

Storage remains the most important enabling technology for alternate and distributed energy. The storage symposium at the California Energy Commission on December 1 brought some powerful choices into the open. Grid-scale storage is important, and will grow more important. I think that neighborhood scale, and even commercial building scale storage will have more effect in the long term. Look to announcements in the mid-year.

Smart water and smart energy continue to entangle themselves. Pumped water is pre-consumed energy, stored for future use. Reliable distributed energy fits naturally with reliable distributed water pumping, which is the key to avoiding sewage spills. This challenge has been met with portable generators and other technologies that require nimble deployments of work forces. Batteries with up-front capital costs and life spans of only four or five years, don’t make sense here. I look to experiments with 25 and even 45 year storage systems in 2015.

Golf courses have a reputation as despoilers of the environment, with over fertilization and chemical pest control leading to run-off and despoliation of habitat. For years the best practices in turf management have made that reputation un-true for the best run golf courses. Look to a combination of distributed energy, energy storage, water pumping, and the DC club house to appear at selected locations this year. Golf courses may be just the right size to lead the way in new microgrid approaches.

New players keep cropping up applying digital signal processing to power distribution. Early players, some of which I have written about before, have struggled to connect work in their labs to customer service oriented organizations. Early adopters are scared off by costs that have not dropped yet, and not quite understanding the offerings. New players like 3DFS are preparing production offerings. One of these guys is going to make it big, particularly in light industrial or commercial settings which rely on motors.

The high cost of per-site integration remains a brake on microgrid deployment. Semantic integration is going to be critical to reducing this integration cost. Maybe this is the year…

I hope to be more diligent in writing this year. Keep those notes coming.

tc

Start with a Zombie Fortress

In smart energy, it is easy to get distracted by utility incentives and demand response and other tariffed actions. Utility tariffs are set in stone months or years before an actual set of market conditions arise. Demand Response events miss the supplier’s pain-points while ignoring opportunity for the building owner. “Running a meter backward” is a silly demonstration project that works only so long as very few people do it. All of these are regulatory fantasies that violate the laws of economics and physics. For a smart energy engineer, it is better to start with a more realistic fantasy.

Smart Energy starts with a Zombie Fortress.

Many today who are uneasy about politics and culture and technology dream of a place to get away if things fall apart.  Zombies have no politics, no ideologies. They are mindless, and ugly, and the perfect nightmare for a time when any judgment potentially offends. The coming Zombie Apocalypse is the perfect non-specific eschatology for our time.

The Zombie Fortress is where you go to be safe from the world. Folks can share their desire for a Zombie Fortress without getting into discussion of politics with their friends. The Zombie Fortress names a non-political escape, a bolt-hole to go when everything goes wrong. (Some might claim that the editor of Automated Buildings has retreated to a Zombie Fortress.) Plans for a Zombie Fortress cannot assume that the grid will work, or that the neighbors will be a useful source of supply or resilience.
The challenge of the Zombie Fortress is to live a full life within the site-generated power. System efficiency is critical, certainly, but it is swamped by the power usage efficiency; the operating margin must go as close to zero as doable. This means no power spikes, and no wasted power. Systems must be negotiate so that intermittent systems do not run at the same time. Any extra power, moment to moment, must be pre-consumed or stored.

Above this is a policy layer. If you habitually use power into the night, that is the basis for the power storage goals. Weather reports may set to pre-consumption goals. Systems must decide how important they are and run, or not run, accordingly. Engineers will be in short supply after the Zombie Apocalypse, so the systems in the fortress must integrate themselves.

But maybe the burning times have not yet come. For now, you decide to use the Zombie Fortress as your Party Pad in the in the mountains. Maybe the Fortress cannot produce enough power each day to keep the lights on, the water pumped, and the environment comfortable during sustained use. If the Fortress plans, if it it stores power all week, though, it can support a two day weekend. Maybe a three-day weekend requires two weeks of storage.

But you want to throw a big party. The last party was automatically base-lined by the Fortress. You contact the Fortress from afar, and ask when it will be ready. The Party Pad / Fortress informs you that it will need four weeks to accumulate enough stored energy, five if you send in a cleaning crew during the week in advance. This is the right level of owner interaction.

Transactive energy within the fortress is the simplest integration strategy devised. Traditional integration requires detailed knowledge of all systems, solving what economists call the knowledge problem. Transactors don’t need knowledge of their trading partners, merely common agreements. New systems must merely introduce themselves to the market. Each system, to participate competently in the market, needs to understand its own patterns of use and load shapes.  Operating parameters are created by setting budgets for systems and functions.

Proposed regulations are already making some power producers nervous about next winter. More intermittent power sources are going to make the power grid a less reliable partner. The Galvin Perfect Power Initiative states the reliability comes from within each node, and resilience from a node’s neighbors. The Zombie Fortress is the ideal node to participate in a smart microgrid, whether it encompasses the back-country bolt-holes, or an in-town neighborhood. Zombie fortresses are self-aware, at least so far as energy use, and ready to trade.

Don’t plan for short term inducements and temporary incentive. Design systems the self-integrate with other systems in the facility. Design systems able to negotiate with their peers for predictable load curves, effective pre-consumption, aggressive storage and full use of “excess” energy

We need systems designed for the Zombie Fortress.