Smart Operations are a necessary part of Smart Energy. Maybe GBXML is, too.

It is easy to think we are playing the end game, but we are really working on the early stages of smart energy.

Smart grids may end at the edges of the grid, they may know no bounds, i.e., ZigBee and SEP, or they may end at the meter. Beyond the meter may be a collection of dumb systems, a minimal collection of defined systems with defined responses, or a micro-grid with its own economy, and own dynamics. I think that every node a microgrid is the future.

I was pulled back to thinking about buildings as I prepared to speak at the AHR show in Orlando next week, and by an announcement about an upcoming seminar on GBXML (GB = Green Building). GBXML is a format designed for the exchange of engineering information, particularly that related to energy use and energy efficiency, during the design process. GBXML may be the key to understanding microgrids in buildings.

The challenge when we treat the end nodes as micro-grids is categorizing and measuring the services they provide. These may be relatively clear in the data center, but even there, understanding HVAC support services is relatively obscure to the IT operator. Going a step further and treating the data center as the district energy center for thermal distribution is hard to understand, harder to account for, and therefore difficult for most enterprises to work with. What are the services in the end nodes?

So, after a building has been partially renovated a few times, and has three EMS (energy management systems), each managing a dozen zones, what effect is there on which part of the business when load is shed in a particular way? Which departments, or tenants, are even affected? Do tenants have QOS agreements, and if so, how are they affected.

Full-fledged BIM (Building Information Model), as defined in NBIMS and BuildingSmart, is too fat, too heavy to use in everyday operations. GBXML is a light-weight one-off of the IFCs in BuildingSmart. It was developed to model energy use, and to exchange energy models within buildings. GBXML includes formal definitions of geometries and spaces, and common models for the components of the energy using systems in buildings. It might just be the map between the design, the operations, and the services. GBXML might just be BIM-Light.

Somewhere between the intriguing, but not yet all that useful Microsoft Hohm and Google Energy, there needs to be a path for buildings as service providers. Understanding services in buildings requires understanding tenants, and their purposes. Perhaps Building Service Profiles link to the spaces in the light-weight BIM (GBXML) and therefore to the tenant services.

Energy profiles linked to the Building Service Profiles, then, become the links between Demand Response and graphical, tenant aware interfaces for building operations.

Last week, I received an announcement of a GBXML seminar in building design (http://www.gbxml.org/events.php). So far, efforts such as LEEDS have not yet delivered on the vision of sustainable energy-efficient high-performance buildings. The unhappy truth today is that most "green" buildings are poor energy performers within a couple years of delivery. Commissioning is a one-time act with no visible links to ongoing operations. Maybe using GBXML to both define the services of buildings and to operate/visualize their operations will not only enable stronger DR, but will lead to better every-day operations.

I am convinced that long term models for distributed energy, and for rapid innovations in energy use, come in this area. All the early incentives of DR, and the early visualizations of Google Energy and Hohm, are merely the tip of wedge for DER and smart energy in the end nodes. We need an interface between design, construction, operations, and smart energy. GBXML may be the most important enabler of net zero, near grid, and off-grid facilities. It may be what we need to apply the facilities capability management approaches pioneered by the Coast Guard to the policy-based net zero security and survivability of the NZ Army base.

I recommend that you check out the seminar on GBXML if you are interested in the real potential of smart energy.

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How should green builders prepare for smart grids?

Brian Duggan from West Coast Green asked me at GridWeek what green builders and sustainable construction companies should do to prepare themselves for the smart grid. What new construction methods should they use? What new smart-grid aware control systems would they need to install. My answer—nothing.

My answer was that before a building can collaborate with a smart grid, it must know what it has and know what it can do. Knowing what you have begins with information technology (IT), and knowing what you are building, and that begins with design.

Sustainable builders should embrace the use of building models and of building information models (BIM). BIM produces designs that more effectively engage the owner, earlier in the process. This leads to fewer retrofits, fewer changes, and less waste. I cannot imagine how anyone can claim to be committed to sustainable construction if they do not use BIM.

Energy models, an important part of LEEDS and other sustainable business practices, often have little to do with the actual design. Even when they do, they are only rarely updated to reflect design changes or value engineering. An energy model can be created directly from a BIM. As the design is updated, the energy model can be regenerated. Instead of being a separate and largely irrelevant check off, with BIM, the energy model becomes a recursive method to commission the design.

BIM-based construction shares information with the design to do a better job. BIM-bidding uses reduces uncertainty and risk—and thereby cost. Because the collisions are resolved in advance in the three dimensional model, subsystems and components are built off-site in controlled conditions. Casework, fire control systems, plumbing, duct, really any component can be cut, fit, and assembled off-site to achieve higher quality with less waste in less time.

Duct for example, can be pre-assembled, sealed, and insulated in shop conditions rather than in the field, perhaps the street, as is often the case in traditional construction. Higher quality ductwork is quieter and saves energy throughout the life of the system. The resulting components are installed faster and with minimal interference with other trades.

BIM today has little to say about the critical control systems that manage and monitor energy using systems in the building. I think BIM-based designers should specify performance goals, Healthfulness, comfort, and performance should be specified. Subcontractor bids should warrant results not methods; this maximizes the incentive for innovation. These performance goals, along with the intrinsic energy model described above, become the platform for commissioning.

Too often, commissioning falls back to the old standard—no sparks. BuildingSmart, the consortia that promotes best practices in BIM, has defined the Common Operations Building Information Exchange (COBIE). COBIE defines the handover of information from the BIM to operations at the end of construction. COBIE catalogues building systems and formalizes commissioning records. When combined with the performance specification for each system as described above, COBIE will raise commissioning to a higher level.

Building owners and operates must understand how their buildings actually operate before they can understand how to collaborate with the smart grid. Such knowledge increases the value received from site-based generation and storage even before smart grid interactions are considered. A tenant who can see the services provided by his building, and understands how changes affect quality of service changes, rather than how systems operation changes, knows enough to negotiate with the grid.

It starts with knowing what is in the building, what services are provided by the building, and how changes affect quality of service. In new construction, that should begin with BIM.

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.

EnergyStar Systems and Data Centers

Data centers consume huge amounts of electricity, much of it wasted. Data centers convert electricity to heat, so all energy used for computing is paired with a similar load for heat removal. Rethinking data centers is a good way to make a strong impact on energy usage in a hurry.

All computers use direct current (DC) to actually run. So does most consumer electronics. That little brick, or wall wart on the power cord transforms power from the alternating current (AC) of the power grid to DC to be used by the computer. In most desktop computers and servers, that “brick” is internal to the computer. Improving this process is straight-forward, and does not require any fundamental re-engineering of the computers.

Recently I was reading that the EPA is proposing higher efficiency standards for power conversion efficiency in computer systems. Most systems today still have not met the current version of these standards, called EnergyStar. What caught my eye was how much power is wasted even in today’s EnergyStar compliant systems. The numbers are so large that they make the case for re-thinking power systems for data centers far stronger than I had thought.

EnergyStar standards require power supplies are that no more than 80% efficient or better. This means that to be compliant, no more than 20% of the A/C power coming to your data center computer be converted to heat and lost before it even gets to the computing circuitry. This lost power is converted to heat before it ever gets to support actual computing.

This increases the arguments for Direct Current (DC) data centers. DC Data Centers convert Alternating Current (AC) power to DC before it is distributed to the servers. Telecommunications has longed used DC distribution for its big racks. There are several processes that can be improved by re-thinking power distribution in data centers around the principle of DC distribution.

All of that power lost by conversion is today heat lost in the data center. That heat must then be removed to keep the computing equipment sufficiently cool. Air conditioning is one of the most significant costs of a operating a data center. Many estimate that it takes up to 1.7 times as much energy to remove heat from conditioned space as the initial energy that generated the heat.

By simple moving the AC/DC conversion outside of the conditioned space of the data center, 20%-40% of the heat is moved out of the data center where it will not need to be air conditioned away.

Many reputable companies sell data center batteries to support uninterrupted power. These usually have AC converted to DC to charge batteries, with the same losses as above. The servers run off batteries. The batteries supply DC, which is converted to AC (5-15% loss of power as heat) to support the AC servers. The power supplies in the servers then convert the AC to DC (as above, with loss of power and generation of heat).

When people discuss the efficiency of this process, they usually describe the efficiency of the battery storage as the limiting factor. What the process above shows, however, that as much as half of the power stored may be lost as heat though the double conversion before it ever gets used for computing.

In a DC data center, the batteries still supply DC power, but all of it goes directly to the servers. Not only does this generate less heat, but it can as much as double the effective efficiency and life of the batteries by removing the double conversion for the last yard of distribution.

This increase of efficiency comes with today’s technologies, without waiting on the perfection of any novel or exotic battery technology.

It is hard to use the waste heat from Air Conditioning. A large AC/DC transformer, however, concentrates the energy lost as heat into one place. It is easy to harvest heat from a single very hot location. I have even seen proposals for fueling a steam distillation chiller off waste heat from a transformer to provide supplemental air conditioning for a data center. You could run domestic hot water heating off the external transformer. I suppose you could even hook a Stirling engine to the transformer and light the building using the waste heat.

We do not have to wait for exotic technologies, although they will come. We need to re-think processes with an awareness of power at each step. Transactive pricing for energy will encourage us to do just that.