Enterprise to Grid in Atlanta

I have been working toward the Grid Interop event in Atlanta this week and have had little time to post. This is the second Grid Interop event,sponsored by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the US Department of Energy (DOE) and organized by the GridWise Architectural Council. Aside from my own presentation there, there are numerous events and reports that I am as associated with that also have their end point there.

One of these is an open work shop on standards for e-Commerce, the Enterprise, and the Grid being hosted by OASIS and NIST in the evening. We hope to come out of it with a common road map for the key standards ahead. All are welcome, not just conference attendees. I thank Clasma for their assistance and the venue.

Tuesday, 11 November, 7:00pm-8:30pm
Hyatt Regency, Peachtree Center, Atlanta

Facilitated by William Cox, Cox Software Architects LLC and OASIS Technical Advisory Board

Other planned attendees (confirmations pending):

Toby Considine, University of North Carolina and OASIS Technical Advisory Board
Carol Geyer, OASIS
Joe Hughes, EPRI

Theme

For Smart Grids and Smart Buildings don’t reinvent—for timely and efficient technology we must select existing work and....

• Repurpose
• Reuse
• Realign

Goals for this Round Table discussion:

• Share context
• Discuss Motives and direction
• Examine eCommerce and Security standards and appropriate domains for use
• Establish action plan for standardization and implementation

Talk about OASIS and other Standards and Specifications such as

• Web services
• XML Vocabularies
• Security
• Messaging
• Transaction management
• oBIX for smart buildings
• WS-Device Discovery
• Distributed Management

Come away with a deeper understanding of how and when we can move Smart Grids and Smart Buildings standards forward to rapidly benefit from broadly deployed practices and standards.

AGENDA

First items total 15 minutes. Brief overview and introduction

• Standards and specs
• IRP issues
• Standards ROI
• SOA and Semantics
• Buildings & evolution
• OASIS Blue Initiative
• Markets

• Facilitated discussion

Free markets are Live Markets

The Wall Street Journal looked at Texas Energy price increases this year and got nearly everything wrong.

The big changes in electrical prices in Texas this year mirror the price changes in all energy markets. It is unclear to me how people think that *any* industry, no matter how regulated, can repeal supply and demand for its primary supplies. Some are arguing that these price changes argue for extended market regulation. The regulated energy market is not the natural order; we have a regulated market structure only because nothing else made sense in 1908 when the current model was created in Chicago..

Renewable energy will not work until we break the dependency on the perfect grid. The current grid requires spun up power plants, always ready, to achieve reliability. This spin reserve is an effective tax on every renewable energy source because unfortunately renewable ==> unreliable

You can gain reliability by combining a number of unreliable sources, as long as the reliability profiles for the different sources are different. This requires scheduling and wide area service choreography, and perhaps even architectures with full ontologies, as some laughed about yesterday on another thread. Those interested should just google Kombikraftwerk.

There is an interesting combined power generation scheme currently underway in the inland empire area of California, that combines remote web control of household systems, including homeowner intervention (Don’t regulate anything today – my wife’s parents are in town and I do not want to listen to my mother in law complain!). What is unique about the system is that it is only installed in house that also have solar panels, and the excess output is sold back to the grid at prices as if it was one large distributed solar PV generator, a virtual power plant. This business model, and many others, only works with the extra incentives of live time-of-day pricing.

Many observe that live pricing does not work very well with the home and office infrastructure we have. Well, the internet did not work very well with the phone infrastructure we had 20 years ago. Live prices will be what creates the infrastructure of tomorrow that will work differently.

One difference will be home storage of energy. Energy storage need not be limited to batteries or lakes in the mountains. A tank of icy slush in the basement is a fine energy store if your major energy use is daytime cooling; cool it at night and use it for Air Conditioning during the day. Your heat pump to make the slush is also working more efficiently when it is cooler outside. At a 20% price difference between 2AM and 2PM, that slush might start looking pretty good. At a 50% difference, everyone might have one. We do not know what folks will come up with, and without market information on value and scarcity, we won’t.

It is these new markets that make live pricing important. New business models will change technology decisions.

Local storage becomes an additional use for any locally generated power. This increases the benefits for both generation and storage. This continues to make folks less sensitive to grid fluctuations. This ecology of local energy requires live pricing to thrive.

The New Privacy Advocates

Last week, I wrote of a new concern with privacy arising and data archiving that young adults now have in “she never wants an electric car”. Regular commenter Michaela notes

My sample of two (my daughters 13 and nearly 16) have a very different point of view. . . . They are big Facebook and MySpace fans. They say It’s a trade off worth the giving up privacy to keep up with their friends. . . .they are much more aware of it than most kids (or adults for that matter). They don't care. Their only concern is really keeping info from Mom and Dad :).

Michaela is certainly aware of the issues, and has explained things to her daughters. This also described my daughters at that age—but things change a lot. Soon they will get burned by more than Mom, and they will have a keen understanding and awareness of privacy.

Living in a college town, one can see this new progression. The freshman come in as digital libertines, sharing their information with everyone. In the next few years, they will hear through the grapevine of friends who missed out on an internship because of Facebook. Scholarship athletes have been tossed off the team because the coach saw the tagged pictures from the big party. Even getting up early to de-tag pictures may not be enough – coach may have reviewed his team even earlier. Some of the best parties are no declared “cell-free zones”, but to little avail.

Last weekend, I read of someone, now nearly 30, whose high school buddies emptied their photo collections onto Facebook. These pictures of long ago parties now show up first for when potential employers search for her. She now begins each week search and de-tagging pictures of her long ago self from the net.

Like the former libertine who turns socially conservative, these formerly promiscuous with personal information become some of the most protective as they gain experience. Unlike the privacy advocates of old, they really understand how long a digital shadow they cast, and become fanatical about protecting their digital image and owning their own digital footprint.

They will not tolerate the so-called privacy of, for example, today’s Automated Metering. In many areas, the utility shares usage data with no one, including with the tenant except in ways that the utility controls. This is claimed to be in support of privacy. The new data-mining savvy consumer will demand direct control of this data themselves, and want to decide how and when it is data mined. They will trust neither the utility or the government to make these decisions for them.

Secondary school is a time of pushing many limits. It is at an age where Mom and Dad know little, about privacy or about dress. At as Mark Twain is said to have observed: “When I was fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have him around. When I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”

Some of this generation will be remain digital libertines—but not many. Most will want their own data, will expect to control their own data, and their metadata as well. When in control, they will share it as they please.

Note: It was very tempting to use an extended analogy about tight clothes in middle school and knowledge about exactly where and when to flash a little lace at 30, but I controlled the impulse…

It’s not Use Cases, it’s Interaction Patterns

The NIST B2G efforts so far have annoyed me like an itch I cannot quite scratch. The B2G (Building to Grid) group is trying to collect applications and use cases, to create the desiderata for the new interface standards. These are the traditional ways to characterize known systems. Certainly even distinguishing the two can be a strain, although practitioners may prefer one over the other. And yet there is that annoying itch…

This morning over coffee I realized that it is because we should be talking service instead of procedure.

One of the truisms of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), is that it is nearly impossible to implement a SOA in a Procedure Oriented Enterprise (POE). (POA is the "antonym" of SOA, only discovered after SOA existed, in a manner similar to the term Analog Watch only being discovered once we had digital watches). It is easy, relatively, to implement SOA in an organization in which each department and each departmental system knows what its purpose is, and what its effective business metrics are. Such a well understood business can be referred to as the SOE.

A standard SOA talking point is the virtual company assembled entirely from the Services provided by others. Virtual companies are almost inherently SOEs. Many of the new markets I can imagine seem more like virtual companies than they do like the process-oriented companies that make up today’s energy markets. We should be thinking service.

We need to focus on interaction patterns, the approach at the heart of service integration in the e-commerce side of web 2.0. To enable the new markets that most of us hope can arise from these efforts, we need to shift from thinking in terms of request-response and buyer-seller-shipper interaction scenarios. The patterns we must document here go beyond simple bilateral interactions, to include multilateral, competing, atomic, causally related, and routed interactions, and should allow for any number of long-running business processes.

The new smart grid, and the new economies of Zero Net Energy Buildings (ZNE) will involve the discovery of and interaction with services. These service will be involved in energy generation, storage, and conversion. These services will be diverse and multi-party. These interactions will not be procedural.

Now that I have my head on straight, I hope to submit interaction patterns required for new energy markets soon. But I thought I would give everyone a heads up on what I think is the real task.