Privacy, Self Defense, and Smart Energy

I spent some time last week down a country road, watching the local power. I watched three phases that were greatly out of balance. I observed trapezoidal wave forms. We could see the home appliances of everyone else on the road, as they each turned on and off.

Together, we watched the power coming into his lab. They were his neighbors, and he knew them from observation. He could relate when they changed their appliances, and how they lived their lives. He could tell from the patterns how they affected the shared local electric distribution circuit. There were some especially odd patterns, second level harmonics that caused some unusual recurring spikes. It wouldn’t be hard, simple machine learning, really, to learn these special patterns for some types of equipment, and then to search for them.

This is all so much easier than it was even a couple years ago. Affordable gigahertz sampling is no longer cost prohibitive. Industrial espionage can be done from across the street. Soon private detectives will be able to read the activities in houses from down the street, using only a power connection, pattern matching against an on-line database, and a little creativity. Your house and business is now an open book, with or without the participation of utilities.

This technology was not built to look out, however. Monitoring and analyzing the distribution feed is a mere side effect of the system I was checking out. The purpose of these systems is not to spy on the distribution system, but to defend against the distribution system. What we could see on the samples is also felt by the building.

The purpose of this monitoring is to fix the power inside. Each phase of power is simultaneous corrected to near ideal wave forms. The effects inside the building are extraordinary. When supplied with an ideal power wave, electric motors become audibly quieter. While that alone makes an industrial space pleasanter, it reflects an underlying reduction in vibration and in generated heat. At the same time, the motor begins to operate at its faceplate output.

This is what I mean by defense against the distribution system. Excess vibration, and the associated noise and heat, are caused by the noise on the electrical supply, by wave forms that are less than the ideal. Traditional power conditioning systems often create trapezoidal or triangular wave forms—they may protect from spikes and sags, while they increase wear and tear. It’s too early to predict how much ideal power forms will extend the life of equipment, but reduced noise and reduced heat are strong benefits on their own.

While one can hear the change in motor operation, florescent lights and digital equipment benefit as well. Long time readers of this blog know that my house is beset by something that causes even my incandescent lights to fail in clusters. Having watched the power on this nearby local distribution loop, it seems likely that I have seen the answer, even while all parameters are “within spec for home distribution.”

The plan of course, is for the local distribution to get worse. While we watched, we saw changes to power on the entire loop when the charging of a single neighbor’s electric vehicle began. Even the best solar panel installations affect these wave forms, and most installations are far from the best. The effects not only damage neighbor’s equipment, but they may increase metered power use for those neighbors as well.

Defense from the grid, especially from the smart grid is an important new market. Distributed energy resources are in all our future, and they make such defense more important.

An allied outcome of this defense is that the view from the outside is obscured. The systems behind the power controller cannot be inspected as we inspected the neighbors. Unbalanced power use, that is, power unevenly spread across the three power phases is balanced on the outside of the controller. Power factor is optimized. This ideal power load reduces metered power, often substantially. The operation of individual motors and digital systems looks from the supply-side as a single ideal consumer. Energy-use privacy is protected and restored.

As consumers, we don’t yet know how to think about and use this kind of product. As smart energy, distributed energy resources, and electric vehicles become more widely deployed, we will want to learn.

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.

Building Codes for the Smart Grid Ready Home

Companies were looking to put standards into production at the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) Face to Face meeting in St Louis this week. The most interesting new question I heard was “Where are the model home building codes to support smart energy?” I don’t think there are any.

Smart grid-ready homes must go beyond smart thermostats. LEED and other models design for energy efficiency but do not manage actual use. Smart energy demands that homes respond to changing energy prices and changing requirements of their occupants. No existing code plans for new patterns of electrical use, ones that may change the wiring requirements of the home. Today’s codes do not plan for rapid changes of technology in the future.

Energy efficient design means little without monitoring. Tomorrow’s smart homes must monitor their actual energy use; they must know if they are delivering the performance promised. They should measure live or plug energy load just as they measure energy for the installed systems and sections of the house. Without the means to measure and verify energy use, efficient designs are not ready for smart energy.

In the home, the highest energy efficiency may actually hinder some interactions with smart grids. Smart energy supplies will be intermittent, in price if not in availability. Smart grid-ready homes must be able to store energy during abundance for use during scarcity. Storage will never be as efficient as instant use, so smart energy homes will be less than perfectly efficient.

Some energy based services achieve their effect right away; lights come on almost instantly. Some services require time; air conditioning and humidity control may require hours to show their effects. The most efficient systems have run constantly with just enough capacity; they do not have the excess capacity to respond on demand.

Smart grid-ready homes must anticipate their occupants’ needs, even as the price of energy changes over time. Smart energy homes must learn the schedules of their inhabitants and make plans to provide services at the right times while buying energy in response to markets.

Smart energy must support distributed energy generation and storage, both today and tomorrow. Smart grid-ready home designs will have places to site energy generation and storage systems. Home circuit panels must accept multiple energy inputs. These systems must be able to connect and disconnect, enabling the home owner to upgrade as new technologies come on the market. The smart grid ready home must be able to disconnect automatically from the grid, both for safety and to avoid power quality problems to and from the neighborhood distribution.

Distributed energy changes the wiring requirements for the home. Today’s wiring is undersized for its load, designed provide rated power for only a few minutes at a time. Energy storage and electric cars will require full power for hours at a time, causing cables to fail early. Internal wires to support, say, a 50 amp services for such uses must be larger than those for a 50 amp service today. Even the cable supplying the house must be larger to support the stresses of continuous outside, lest it to fail early.

Most energy use in our homes is, or could be, supported by Direct Current (DC). Traditional power coming from the grid is Alternating Current (AC). Batteries and many forms of distributed generation produce DC. Energy is lost when power is converted DC to AC for local distribution just as it is when converting AC to DC for point use. (This is what your wall-warts do.) Internal DC distribution and DC plug standards may be part of building codes for smart-grid ready homes.

Building a new smart grid ready neighborhood of smart grid ready homes requires care, attention, creativity, new technology, and planning for a steady stream of technology changes in the future. It probably starts with BIM-based construction to establish a known baseline building performance and capabilities. It will require standards for energy information exchange that are only now nearing completion. Each home will be filled with sensors to inform the systems of today, openly accessible to share with tomorrow’s systems that today we do not know. Each home must interact with the computers, PDAs, and smart phones that run the lives of its inhabitants. Above all, each home must be designed to allow for constant and regular upgrades.

We don’t have those building codes yet.

Collaborative Energy: Smart Grids and Intelligent Buildings together

Intelligent energy use acquires energy at the right time at the right price for the right reason. Intelligent buildings provide customer amenities and customer services at the right time. Collaborative energy works with the smart grid to minimize the incompatibilities of these two problem sets. Systems on the grid and in the building need to do a better job of sharing information to improve the performance of these functions.

Smart operations in transmission and distribution will provide only minimal help in adapting to new energy sources or in coordinating supply and demand. The improved situation awareness they provide can, however, deliver better market information to help smart buildings acquire energy at the right time.

Intelligent buildings need to know what services their occupants expect them to provide, and at what quality of service. Today’s intelligent thermostat makes the occupant think about the building. The occupant should tell the building what his activities are, and what quality of service he expects. The thermostat, then, should optimize service [comfort] delivery as well as economic performance on its own.

To optimize economic performance, buildings need four types of information from a smart grid. (1) A smart grid should provide the building with the price of energy now, and anticipated price in the future. (2) A smart grid should provide risk and reliability information, both now and for the future. (3) A smart grid should provide information on other aspects of electricity that the building occupant may be interested in, such as available carbon credits or green generation source. (4) A smart grid must provide the building with information on current energy usage, information that should be as frequent and as close to real time as practicable. With these information streams, the intelligent building can begin to use energy intelligently.

The plug in electric vehicle is just one more smart component of the intelligent building. The owner should provide a schedule of the services that will be required. This may include distance to work. It may include after-school sports and it may include evening choir practice or even community organizing. Energy use decisions by the car, including rapid charging or overnight waits, becomes merely another aspect of the functions of an intelligent building.

These capabilities are pre-adaptations for distributed energy. In biology, preadaptation refers to features evolved for one purpose that are ready to serve another purpose later. Distributed energy will be more intermittent than current electrical sources, and may be subject to more regulation as the when it may or may not be used. The intelligent building is what enables smart grids to accept distributed energy.

Collaborative energy is how the smart grid will deliver the most benefits to society. Those benefits will be social and environmental as well as economic. The purpose of the smart grid is to better coordinate energy supply and demand, even as the sources of that supply become more distributed and less reliable. But collaboration requires able partners; smart grids require smart buildings able to make intelligent decisions about energy use.