NERC and Utilities Commissions are unintentionally hindering Distributed Energy Adoption

For significant use of distributed energy to arrive, it must be managed and used locally first, the variability and storage managed locally, and only then traded with others. This mode of operations is termed a microgrid. Legacy business models that assume irresponsible end nodes require direct control of energy distributed in residences. Commercial sites are treated as bulk generators subject to NERC regulations that require months of filings for each configuration change. It is time for a new regulatory and operational model.

The microgrid model lends itself recursion. Twenty home microgrids on a neighborhood street can federate themselves as a microgrid. Such microgrids should manage variability internally first, trade power first amongst themselves, perhaps incorporate additional storage as a group, and then trade with the larger distribution network. A similar logic flows up through the larger neighborhood, the district, and potentially the town.

In a similar manner, a commercial site could produce and store energy locally, manage variability locally, and trade with the larger grid only to rectify systemic shortage or surplus. Perhaps the initial microgrid is the office park. Sites and facilities with the office park then evolve themselves into microgrids, to gain additional energy surety and local control.

At some point, these microgrids that are aggregations of microgrids reach a scale comparable to the bulk generation that current NERC requirements (I’m thinking CIP 5) were written for. These include cyber-security, and configuration management and filing configuration changes way in advance. These standards are important to manage stability of the overall transmission grid. These regulations do not recognize that failure modes for these composite microgrids are quite different than for bulk generation.
Managing these composite microgrids will require changes in thinking, similar to those seen in IT for storage and for cloud computing.

A composite microgrid shares failure characteristics with a RAID array. 30 years ago, one paid a premium for disks above a certain size and above a certain data throughput. Today one pays a discount. The reason is Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID), although that acronym has morphed into independent disks over the years. RAID technology multiple disk drive components into a logical unit for the purposes of data redundancy or performance improvement. By the late 1980s, it was recognized that the top performing mainframe disk drives of the time could be beaten on performance by an array of the inexpensive drives developed for personal computers.

Although RAID technology was developed for price and performance, it was soon recognized that it offered superior failure characteristics. A drive could fail without any externally-visible loss of data. A replacement drive could be added to an array with only a temporary reduction of throughput. RAID arrays properly managed nearly eliminated catastrophic loss of data.

It is an interesting side note that the first control of electricity took the insignificant charge generate by two pieces of metal separated by salt water (an electrolyte) and made it useful and predictable by stacking many such pieces of metal and paper soaked in electrolyte. This type of technology was initially called simply a pile (or voltaic pile), but was later renamed a battery by Ben Franklin, invoking an artillery battery. So it would be appropriate, albeit confusing, to say that a microgrid can consist of a battery of microgrids.

While batteries and RAID arrays offered more capacity and greater predictability, it is the reliability and failure modes I want to concentrate on here. Just as a RAID array does no fail when a single, perhaps inexpensive component fails, so a microgrid does not fail when one of its components fails, or changes in capacity. Cloud data often uses hybrid RAID, in which RAID arrays are themselves components of or RAID systems. In these, entire RAID arrays can fail without reducing throughput or availability.

An analogous increase in redundancy, availability, and resilience is the expected outcome of the aggregate recursion architecture for microgrids, or what some are calling more elegantly, fractal microgrids. Just as RAID architecture enabled data centers to incorporate inexpensive “unreliable” disk drives into mission critical systems, so reliable aggregated microgrids can be built upon small, inexpensive microgrids that are currently prices out of the heavyweight NERC-required processes.

A similar logic encompasses residential control standards. To prot the distribution grid, utilities are granted direct control of low-level devices inside homes. This results in two systems that never meet, the home-based distributed energy system and the home based energy use.  Homeowners realize this out to their dismay when they have no access to their distributed generation when the grid is down.

The model of the home microgrid instead rewards the customer to install local storage. Solar installers could develop businesses around optimizing cooling when the sun is shining brightly. Such development will never happen so long as utilities commissions mandate direct control, or require a heavy process for connecting microgrids.

We need new lightweight regulatory models that embrace the coming microgrids.

Odds and Ends: Looking to 2015

I have been quiet here for too long, and have made a New Year’s resolution to get back to writing. Many of my recent projects I cannot write about, for competitive or contractual reasons. Still, there are some big themes coming to light, ones that I have been writing about for years, and that are now hitting the market.

Microgrids, broadly defined, have been a place with a lot of demonstrated movement in this last year. The most expensive thing about the obsolete grid is the assumption that everything happens centrally, and that the local node does not have any responsibility. This might be true if our world was run on incandescent light bulbs and ceramic space heaters. In a digital world, aggregate load and rhomboidal curves are growing problems, ones that cost a lot of power and shorten the lives of a lot of equipment.

Storage remains the most important enabling technology for alternate and distributed energy. The storage symposium at the California Energy Commission on December 1 brought some powerful choices into the open. Grid-scale storage is important, and will grow more important. I think that neighborhood scale, and even commercial building scale storage will have more effect in the long term. Look to announcements in the mid-year.

Smart water and smart energy continue to entangle themselves. Pumped water is pre-consumed energy, stored for future use. Reliable distributed energy fits naturally with reliable distributed water pumping, which is the key to avoiding sewage spills. This challenge has been met with portable generators and other technologies that require nimble deployments of work forces. Batteries with up-front capital costs and life spans of only four or five years, don’t make sense here. I look to experiments with 25 and even 45 year storage systems in 2015.

Golf courses have a reputation as despoilers of the environment, with over fertilization and chemical pest control leading to run-off and despoliation of habitat. For years the best practices in turf management have made that reputation un-true for the best run golf courses. Look to a combination of distributed energy, energy storage, water pumping, and the DC club house to appear at selected locations this year. Golf courses may be just the right size to lead the way in new microgrid approaches.

New players keep cropping up applying digital signal processing to power distribution. Early players, some of which I have written about before, have struggled to connect work in their labs to customer service oriented organizations. Early adopters are scared off by costs that have not dropped yet, and not quite understanding the offerings. New players like 3DFS are preparing production offerings. One of these guys is going to make it big, particularly in light industrial or commercial settings which rely on motors.

The high cost of per-site integration remains a brake on microgrid deployment. Semantic integration is going to be critical to reducing this integration cost. Maybe this is the year…

I hope to be more diligent in writing this year. Keep those notes coming.

tc

Making New Homes ready for Smart Energy

Smart energy names the techniques and technologies needed to manage energy flows and energy supply and demand when energy generation and energy storage are as distributed as energy consumption is today. Grid assets are managed by central control. This only works so long as the assets are central and the assets are centrally owned. Distributed assets should have distributed ownership. We must turn the centralized model on its head. Smart energy manages from the edges, not from the center. Smart energy treats homes and commercial buildings as microgrids responsible for their own power.

The concern of smart energy policy is to remove barriers to enable rapid entry and virtuous markets for new technologies. Policy is implemented by regulations and codes. Today’s post arises because I am wondering when we will have a model building code for the smart energy-ready residence. What should a commodity builder do if he wishes to claim that each home in a neighborhood is “smart energy ready?”

Let’s start with the interconnect. Today’s rules for distributed energy focus, as they should, on safety first. To this end, they mandate anti-islanding, i.e., if the grid goes away, power systems shut off. This prevents a linesman from being electrocuted when the downstream side of a downed line is “hot.” The model smart energy ready building should instead choose safe islanding. Local power systems, generation, batteries, even electric vehicles, should work safely within the home no matter what the local conditions. Software and hardware at the building entrance should support this safe islanding.

Within the home, there should be an emphasis on safety and extensibility. The Electrician working in a house needs to be just as concerned with unexpected power sources as does the linesman outside the house. If there are distributed energy resources, then there will be unexpected power sources in the home. The interconnect in the house is as important as that between the house and grid.

So we need two interconnects.

Rooftop solar requires paths and connections. If added during construction, conduit to the roof to support the eventual installation of PV costs almost nothing. This conduit can be put in while the walls are open and before siding is installed. Designed-in conduit is less likely to leak then after-thought retrofits. Preparing for roof-top PV likely means planning for an inverter closer to the home’s power distribution panels. 

A similar logic suggests that garages should plan for plug-in electric vehicles, even as the standards for them have not gelled. My guess is that this area will come to be dominated by smart charging stations coupled with storage. Whatever the technology, there will need to be wiring able to safely support high power flows over long periods of time. In the smart energy ready home, empty conduit may be enough for now.

The smart energy ready home should plan for power storage. Chemical based storage systems may lose much of their capabilities at extreme temperatures. There should be some space for storage installation that has an adequate and safe path to and from central power distribution. Again, empty conduit may be adequate for now.

To achieve reliability goals, some homeowners will opt for site-based generation. At its simplest, this requires a pad and conduit back to the central power distribution for the house. At its most complex, it requires very complex configuration. Because utilities today must pay above market rates for solar generated home power, they must watch carefully to make sure that the homeowner is not selling them “solar power” sourced from a backyard gasoline generator.

The answer is to get rid of the above market rates, and let the homeowner operate in the market. Distributed energy resources are first and foremost to serve the needs of the distributed site.

When I consider smart, distributed energy, I always call to mind the words of Doug Gwyn, when asked of a feature in UNIX: “UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.” We must be careful that we apply the same thinking to distributed energy.

To get more participants in smart energy, we must make it easier. A good start would to be to define the requirements for a smart energy-ready home. We can then see if builders would be willing to build them, and whether the market will bear the trivial costs, or at least trivial if designed in.