Idle Thoughts on Smart Grids

Musings from the GridWise Architectural Council, Orlando, 2010

After a week at the AHR show, and meeting with ASHRAE, and sitting in on B2G (Building to Grid) summit, I was back in the building zone as I sat in on day one of the GWAC meeting. The GridWise Architectural Council (GWAC) is a voluntary organization of people concerned with the future of energy. The Department of Energy sponsors meetings of the GWAC, a commitment that keeps the group in meeting rooms, coffee, and pastry. The DOE also provides administrative support through Pacific Northwest National Labs (PNL).

The GWAC is immensely influential in the development of the North American approach to smart grids. It draws members from many industries and not just the best thinkers of the utility industry (although its members include those, too). The GWAC often meets at the end of conference or show tied to a different field of energy, to cross-pollinate their approaches. This week, they met after the AHR show. I have never had the time and resources to commit to a GWAC membership; the members make a serious commitment of time. When one of their open meetings is in the same town as me, I always attend if I can.

What follows are mental doodles from my meeting notes, none long enough to warrant their own post.

Is Demand Response the worst marketing phrase ever?

Demand Response is the girlfriend (or boyfriend) who you dated for a while, but dumped because she only talked about her problems. If utilities want to people to care about DR, they have to come up with some better way to talk about it. Until they do, energy suppliers are going to continue to have a hard time engaging their customers.

Is Customer engagement “the disruptive technology”?

The system designs of electrical grids have been defined by deep integration and process interactions. Service integration and service orientation were unknown. The services, both between supplier and consumer, were undefined. Even within the consumer realm, the services were not defined. Rarely does a commercial owner hope to buy electricity on any given day—electricity is not a service. . . Lights, warmth, computing, music, even flushing toilets, now, those are services.

What will it take commercial building owners to embrace energy response

A building owners business is to operate a building efficiently without, at a minimum, annoying his tenants. If he knew a way to use a third less energy without annoying them, he would be doing it already. Annoyed tenants may not renew their leases. It is safer to avoid this risk.

If a building owner could see how each part of his building would respond to DR, and knew which tenants would be annoyed, this risk is removed. I think the killer app of demand response can apply all service degradation only to those tenants who are habitually late on their rent.

Why does the smart grid have no formal architecture?

This was a real challenge when developing the national roadmap. We did not want an architecture, for a good architecture is ultimately an expression of a particular business model. When we developed the national roadmap, we wanted to support any number of business models, both those known today, and those we might find in the future. How would a traditional “architecture”, or perhaps even a TOGAF-style instantiation of Intelligrid, handle, say Google becoming its own virtual utility buying directly in multiple ISOs? We deliberately left architectures undefined.

We had to socialize the services as “reducing the size of interoperation domains” to enable innovation by reducing the requirements to form cross-domain interactions

Why does it seem that there is a fundamental contradiction between the smart grid and new technology?

When integration and interoperation are the biggest challenge, then diversity is the biggest controllable expense, and technical innovation is the biggest controllable risk; it is most easily controlled by preventing the introduction of either. The smart grid must introduce both.

The real question, if properly constructed, is not how we create The Smart Grid™, but how do we define Service Oriented Energy (SOE), of which the Service Oriented Grid is just one arranged subset. The SOG interacts with another entity, with quite different purposes, the Service Oriented Building, The SOB exposes some of its attributes and behaviors through SOE interfaces.

From this, we derived the existence of an Energy Services Interface (ESI). The ESI is the external face of any building or microgrid. What happens behind the ESI is of no concern to the grid other than how it effects how the node behind the ESI comes to market.

Can you really keep your mind on smart grid all the time?

No. During most of an excellent talk on new energy generation from FPL, I was thinking, “It won’t be carbon that destroys the biosphere, but alternative energy, specifically, through the slowing of the Gulf Stream by ocean current generation and slowing of the trade-winds by wind turbines…”

Plumbing and the Man about the Net Zero House

Maybe the ongoing attempt to over-domesticate males is a barrier to sustainable energy. Maybe Swedish feminists are simply insensitive to carbon issues. Maybe Gaia just needs a man about the house. Maybe the essential appliance needed for the net zero energy (NZE) house is a urinal.

A report last week from Ohio University describes a catalyst capable of extracting hydrogen from urine. More efficient generation of hydrogen would be a great step to more effective energy storage, one without the major shortcomings of today’s batteries. Hydrogen storage would not wear out through regular re-charging the way today’s chemical batteries do. Hydrogen storage combined with transfer technologies such as micro-beads might solve the fast re-charge problem for vehicles that do not use carbon-based fuels.

More efficient multi-purpose energy storage is the most important single issue for the smart grid. Want to shift load to reduce the requirement for new generation? Want to manage peak transmission? Storage is essential. Current social and political decisions mandate the use of more unreliable power sources in the grid. Providing instant remediation of gaps in power generation at the grid-level is difficult and expensive; there are reports that efforts to use fast starting gas generation to backstop wind have used more natural gas than if the wind had never been hooked up. Efficient storage, especially distributed storage in homes and buildings, would be offer a profound benefit to grid operation.

Efficient local storage would also make site-based generation more sensible. Selling electricity back to the grid rarely makes economic sense. Expensive grid upgrades can be needed to improve monitoring and guarantee power quality; these costs are usually foisted onto other rate payers. Because the grid cannot rely on the local storage when it needs it, utilities may still need to build the generation to support peak capacity.

With efficient local storage, site based generation would be placed in storage rather than sold back to the grid. Solar generation would go into storage all afternoon. Wind generated electricity, no matter what speed the wind is blowing would simply go into storage. Expensive-to-fix issues in power quality and availability could be simply eliminated.

So what if urine is part of the answer? The problem, of course, is that we typically dilute urine into a lot of water before flushing it away. If the approach in the report pans out, perhaps each home should have urinals to enable the storage system.

Our society’s on-going war against nature has been trying to re-write the old riddle "What does a man do on two legs, a woman do sitting down, and a dog do on three legs?" Man’s ability to stand while micturating has been declared aggressive, oppressive, and unsanitary. Sitting and standing, and whether a teenager preferred the former was recently a critical issue in a custody battle. Legal discussions of this case have been surprisingly impassioned. Maybe they have not been impassioned enough.

Maybe we should be planning for urinals in homes. Water-free urinals are an effective if controversial means to reduce water consumption. Up to 40,000 gallons per year in water savings are claimed for each public urinal that goes waterless. Home urinals could be the foundation for home-based hydrogen generation and storage.

You should install a home urinal. It’s for the planet, after all.

Heading to New York

It's been a sparse week, but I am working on some talks, and doing a lot of work at my day job on BIM as a service model. There is something quite powerfull in this realm that I have not been able to define yet - not even enough to write about.

BIM as a service framework. BIM in the clouds. Transactional BIM running through service markets. Open Geospatial COnsortium (OGC) tagged Demand/Response in localize energy day trading.

It is snowing here in Carolina, but I will be up early to put my daughter on a plane to NYC. North Carolina does not handle ice well. I am expecting a complete mess on the way to the airport tomorrow morning.

A few hours later, I get on the plane to the city myself, to speak at AHR in the Javits center. As the biggest trde show for AirConditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration, there is alwauys a cluster of meetings and events nearby.

January 21, 2008 B2G (Building two Grid) summit - "New Business Models in Service Oriented Energy Management"

January 22, 2008 Global Warming and GridWise 10:30 at the Javits Convention Center

January 23, 2008 Preparing Buildings for a Sustainable World 1:30 PM Javits Convention Center

In between, I will try to squeeze in some time at the Commercial Building Initiative (CBI) to see the latest efforts to meet the 2030 challenge of zero net energy buildings. 

Come by and see me if you're in town.

Pumpkins on the Bridge

I live in an shuttered mill town; the mill closed nearly 40 years ago. Many of the places my children explored while growing up were forbidden relics. They would creep up the rotting stairs of the county’s first cinema, no bigger than many home theatres, to view the still-open projectionist’s log. They would hunt snakes and crawfish under the old general store. They even made excursions into the old mill itself, until it burned sown in a succession of surprisingly large fires. Those fires were probably the dire consequence f misguided environmental policy—of which I may write on another day.

There is another old relic at the heart of town, one that the state and its rational engineers tried to destroy: the old bridge. The old bridge was built in the 20’s, when Bynum was the end of the paved road. A cement roadbed still extrudes from the north end of the bridge up to the second general store where it ends in blacktop.

When 15-501 was paved, it swerved to miss the town, crossing the Haw River just upstream. Some old timers claim they avoided the town so folks could drive from Chapel Hill to Pittsboro without being shot at. That was a lucky break, because it preserved a quiet community and the one lane bridge crossing the river by the old mill.

When the State was planning to make 15-501 a divided highway, they first scheduled the old bridge for destruction. Tear it down, make it bigger, and folks can drive through the town during the highway construction. This, of course, would years later still encourage impatient folk to speed through town to get past a slow school bus on the highway. The free-ranging flash crowds of dogs that characterize Bynum would have been quickly culled. So the unincorporated town protested, eventually successfully

In a fit of petulance, the State next announced that they would tear the old bridge town, cutting the town in two. Not up to standards. One lane bridges are outmoded—you might have to wait on one end for the other driver to cross. Finally, after more protest, the State relented, but still insisted on blocking each end to prevent traffic crossing.

In central Carolina, there is a tradition of placing jack-o-lanterns on country bridges at Halloween. Higher speeds on newer roads have made that dangerous. New designs offer no ledge to place the pumpkins on. But the old Bynum Bridge, with its squared off concrete sides, can still hold and display the giant squash. Now blocked off, a virtual 1/8^th of a mile walking plaza, the old bridge has become Pumpkin Display Gallery for the whole county.

Last night there must have been 80 or so carved vegetables. A few were traditional, albeit better than I ever manage. Others offered radical designs, or were carved with linoleum cutters, and awls, and who knows what to produce translucent cave drawings, and demonologies, and even nature scenes. Some were influenced by Bosch, or Durer, or the rock painting of the Anastasi, or the folk art of the Mexican Day of the Dead. There was even a small can of pumpkin pie filling with a votive candle in front.

Later in the evening, two nameless individuals began drumming at the end of the bridge. There were wearing costumes with a line of glow-sticks sewn down each limb, making a read stick figure, and a blue stick figure that danced, and drummed, in the dark. When their performance was over, they vanished into the dark. Their performance made a fine end to the evening.

It was a triumph of local good will and creativity over the single purpose engineering of the Department of Transportation. Halloween evening was just one other experience of what makes Bynum a special place to live and raise a family.