Lessening the Integration Barrier to Smart Energy

We do not have a problem of knowing what to do to make buildings participants in smart energy. We do not have a problem that the technology is too expensive. We do have a problem that it takes too long to integrate systems. High integration costs lead to vendor lock-in. High integration costs lead to long sales cycles for replacements and upgrades. High integration costs will continue to slow the adoption of distributed energy resources. High integration costs lead to islands of automation, unable to participate in smart energy and demand response.

In design and in construction, today’s best practice is to use a BIM (Building Information Model) to deliver better buildings on-time and under budget. BIM trades higher design costs for much lower construction costs and reduced risk. We use BIM to generate energy models, essential to green certifications for buildings. Until recently, BIM hasn’t had much to do with the operations of a building, or with systems inside a building. This month, I am writing about how this is starting to change.

In traditional CAD, we have used libraries of templates supplied by product vendors for years. Suppliers of plumbing and lighting equipment have wanted it to be easy to design with their products, and they have wanted their products to look good in design renderings. Specifiers Property information exchange (SPie) is a project that encourages this approach applied to the more detailed requirements of BIM. SPie objects are cross-referenced with Omniclass and can include hookup and connection information. The National Electrical Manufacturing Association (NEMA) and is one of the associations participating. SPie brings the things we install in buildings into BIM.

Two technologies dominate the generation of building energy models. GBXML has wide support not only in energy modeling, but also in the design of HVAC and control systems. Information built on GBXML has had no path pack into BIM. EnergyPlus is purported to generate more accurate energy models, and has a well-defined model view for re-entry into BIM. ENERGie, (the ie is again for information exchange) is an effort to merge the two to provide a single model coordinating system design with building design and supporting full system detail. It is likely that ENERGie will soon be required for General Service Administration (GSA) and Department of Defense (DOD ) work. GSA and DOD are the two biggest landlords in North America, so their wants can drive the industry.

In information technology, we again and again see the technology we develop for the most advanced systems flowing down through normal business and all the way to the consumer. ISO 15926 is an information framework developed to express the relations between systems and components in the largest chemical processing plants. Today, ISO 15926 being adapted for a variety of tasks, from the esoteric mapping between ontologies to the automated mapping between form and function to operate smaller systems. ELie is a project to hand over the Equipment Layout in buildings to the owner by mapping from BIM to ISO 15926. ELie connects a static design to a runnable model.

Management of live electrical load in buildings is the largest challenge in smart energy. Plug load is almost unknowable in any automatic way. It will be some time before smart energy-communicating systems will outnumber legacy dumb-load equipment. Smart electrical panels that expose energy use per circuit have not found wide use; they follow no standards, and it is unclear what space they support. PLie standardizes the description of Panel Layout and brings it into the BIM of electrical wiring. PLie can provide automate the mapping of building wiring into the spaces and equipment it supports.

The EIS Alliance is developing models to support autonomous load management and shaping in buildings. One of their concepts is that the buildings electrical meter should be an information appliance for the building EMS. New building equipment and appliances could support the same interface to report their own energy use. Web services (WS) aware electrical panels could use the same interface to standardize their load reporting. Combining this interface and PLie brings the buildings dumb load under management with minimal integration.

Everything above is talking about plans and designs. New systems present ongoing integration costs. WS-DD and WS-DP are new standards to enable the automatic discovery of systems. These standards enhance the value of the energy information appliances by describing what each meter is tracking.

This laundry list of energy-related specifications are the answer to high integration costs and provide a path to sustained re-integration of systems. The flow of information through Model Views into smart energy is the key to continued understanding of building performance. These specifications will move the markets in energy management systems into improved interfaces, for users, for enterprises, and for energy marketeers.

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.

We need a BIM Lite

Every week I encounter another project which would be simpler if we had a light-weight three dimensional BIM standard. BIM (Building Information Model) is a family of data standard models that fit together to describe every aspect of the design and construction of buildings. The sexiest member of this family is the Building Model, the 3D representation of the space itself. Today, BIM does little for the operation of a building or for providing tenant services. For this we are going to need a BIM Light.

Today the internet of things is becoming salient; the intelligent objects and intelligent systems that run so much of our world are getting interfaces. The agents that run them our learning to respond to our financial systems and with our lives. In return, these systems are starting to share information with us. This interaction is at the heart of new energy, of e-tech. This information is central to new models for emergency response. These changes will be critical to offering each of us improved amenities even as the agents work aggressively and autonomously to reduce our energy footprints.

Direct control of these systems means we will limit their responsiveness to the minimum. Direct access to these systems will ensure that we share as little information as we can get away with. We will not allow these systems to do much unless we, as the owners and occupants of the buildings can understand what we are allowing them to do, and how their responses will affect us. As we have protean businesses and dynamic lives, these interactions and their effects on us our ever changing.

In the IT world, we coordinate loose collections of services by policy-based assertions. Policy frameworks are used to coordinate services that may be similar, but not necessarily known, or operated by the same people. We know what policies refer to if we are describing financial services, or contractor interactions, or customer relations. It is not clear how to apply policy to things, especially things that are run by agents that have their own internal logic and business rules.

We do know one thing about these objects and systems; each is grounded in space. If one of these systems is supporting a customer service, that customer is grounded in space, and the business relationship with that customer, perhaps a lease, is grounded in space. In an industrial building, each division or work unit is assigned space. The natural basis for asserting policy on these services is to tie them to the space that they support. The natural framework to understand the information these services report is through the lens of space, and through mapping that space to the customers and business services supported by that space.

Today’s BIM is too large to use as a vehicle to transfer information. It is filled with detailed structural and performance information that makes it too unwieldy to use as the basis for a service framework. Even retro-BIM, the information collected long after construction, often to support renovation, is too detailed. We need something small and light, the size of a Google Sketch-Up drawing, and expressed in XML, that we can use to visualize and understand services.  Perhaps it can be based on GBXML (Green Building XML), already based on BIM and used for exchanging information used for energy modeling.

Ideally, the new dimensional BIM-light would support easy perspective-based translation to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). SVG is an internet standard based on XML for defining graphics. SVG graphics are already supported by many cell phones, and by all browsers except Microsoft’s (and Google is working on a solution for that). Because it is vector based, zooming in or zooming out is based on simple math operations  and produces clean sharp lines at any scale. SVG supports the full Document Object Model (DOM). DOM is the basis for interactive web pages, so scripting languages such as JAVA and interactive approaches such as AJAX are fully supported.

A simple light way to exchange three dimensional building models would improve owner and occupant understanding of building performance. A better understanding would reduce the perceived risk of fully participating in collaborative energy activities, including demand response. A shareable framework for visualizing information from building services would improve both the safety any occupants inside a building during an emergency and that of emergency responders.