Smart Cars At Loose on the Smart Grid

I have written before of the challenges of software for electric cars at home (Smart Cars at Home on the Grid). Today I want to expand the domain of those cars into the wider world. The minimal car software will have some way to make electronic purchases as it drives across the town and the country. The better car software will do much more.

The electric car may recharge while on the road. It can also re-sell power when on the road. How it decides to do this must first be based upon what the car is doing. If I am driving to the beach, a drive of several hours me, then I am not interested in accepting any offers to buy my stored power when I stop for a Bo’s biscuit en route. My car needs to know and understand my travel plans.

Cars will certainly have fast charge as well as slow charge options. Unless in the dead of night, fast charge is likely to be considerably more expensive than a slow charge. Not all locations will offer fast charges. Not all locations will be connected to the grid. Not all locations will offer the same kinds of power. As a car drives from home to work to the public parking lot to the mall, as its driver visits friends and family, then the power market rules, billing, and security change.

The car’s energy management system (EMS) may well integrate with the car’s geographic positioning system (GPS). Today’s GPS can already tell you where the nearest gas station is, and the prices at many of them. Tomorrow’s car-based GPS should find stations for re-charging, including the location of the green re-charge, the fast re-charge, all factored by the remaining charge in the vehicle battery.

Too much time, and too much energy is spent on standards for portability of car identity. Current market rules prohibit resale of electricity by non-utilities. This market rule creates all sorts of complexity and rooms full of technologists and executives discuss how to make the charges from plugging in your car away from home go back to your home energy bill. This causes too much complexity. It breaks one of the oldest household transportation rules, that the teen pays for her own gas. It adds complexity on top of the more important life-style and service issues discussed above.

Even at home, the smart electric car will need a wider intelligence. The car may benefit from accessing weather predictions. Weather is the best predictor for predictor for tomorrow’s energy prices. Weather information is the best way to predict whether solar or wind power will be available tomorrow. Weather may be the best way to predict, in this household, a spontaneous desire to drive to the beach.

Wherever it goes, wherever it plugs in, the smart electrical car will be exposing itself to strange networks, with uncertain security. If the car manages its own charging identity, then it will need to protect its identity, shielding it except from the charge processing entity. The car will need to defend itself from strangers, while allowing extended family to re-program. The car must be able to request and accept software updates while defending itself, and its own system integrity.

Within the car, the car’s user management and credential management systems must be unable to take over the cars control system. The best cars designers are already moving to service oriented architectures within the car. This will make the move to defense in depth within the car simpler.

Dumb electric cars will be just tolerable. Good electric cars will engage the wider world as well as the home of the car owner. Software and information will be at the core.

Smart Cars at Home on the Smart Grid

Too many of the scenarios for electric cars on the smart grid talk only about the relationship between the single car in the home and the grid. These relationships are not the most important ones, and will not determine the successful integration of millions of electric vehicles into the grid. The relationships that matter are those between the cars and their drivers, their family plans, and the other cars in the household. Car software will be even more important than car performance.

The successful car software will begin learning about its owner from day one. It will learn the schedule of its driver, and how far he drives each day, and when. I say learn, because the successful car will pick up this information without requiring programming. This will mean that programming will normally be by exception.

Over time, the car will learn how often these standards are broken. If periodically during the week, the family drives over to Grandma’s house, four miles away, then the car must have reserves for an nine mile drive. If that drive is the only trip during the week that piles the entire family into the car, then those nine miles must be for a more heavily loaded car. Each bit of this learning can affect how and when the car buys electricity.

A challenge in any household is managing the family schedule. Soccer games and little league responsibilities may be spread over the house. A car may leave home to park at the airport for a week. The whole family and all its cars may plan to drive across town to grandmother’s house on Thanksgiving. Just as the family must coordinate their schedules so no one is left behind, so the cars must coordinate their charging schedules, so each car is charged up when needed, and the electricity was purchased at the lowest cost to the consumer.

There are different ways to coordinate the cars. The family may manage a common calendar, perhaps on a flat screen mounted on the refrigerator door. The common family calendar may interact with family PDAs and cell phones. The family cars may get their target schedules from this common calendar. Alternately, the cars may be able to “see” each other, perhaps using Blue Tooth. Somehow the cars must negotiate priorities. Does Mom or Dad get top priority for charging? Does the college kid who works at night get top priority in the late afternoon? If grid power is expensive, can that college kid buy power from another car? Will the relative efficiency of each car’s battery be factored into those decisions?

So far, we have not moved beyond the garage—except to the refrigerator schedule.

In the well functioning household, all the parts need to work together. Thanksgiving day laundry with an electric dryer may anticipate that Thanksgiving day trip. Hair dryers can be anticipated in the hour before departure. In-house generated power may be part of the decision process. Weather reports may help predict the amount of in-house power that will be generated as well as what the external power prices may be.

The interfaces that make this work are not engineering interfaces. They are human interfaces. The interfaces that make this work are cross-cutting interfaces. They will not be managed by end to end controls.

The team that does this well will have the killer app for cars...

She never wants an Electric Car

My daughter explained to me yesterday why she never wants an electric car. She has been reading about Shai Agassi’s and Idan Ofer’s efforts to build an electric car while building up an electric car infrastructure. She resents the “Gillette” (or Polaroid) model: sell them the handle cheap and sell them blades forever. She does not want to be even more dependent upon the power grid. She also mistrusts giving a single player access to her driving information.

Many of today’s twenty-somethings have deep doubts about our information society and its long-term stability. Cultural messengers from Al Gore to Rap to Ron Paul communicate a society whose wheels are ready to fly off. The local food movement is at least as concerned with relying on fragile connections to far away locations as it is with transport costs and produce freshness.

My daughter likes the idea of being able to pay cash for fuel and leave no records. Her generation has few illusions about privacy and a reflexive understanding of her exposure to data mining. She is refusing to use Chrome because of the ever intensifying record keeping it manifests.

Her generation sees the amorality of large institutions in part through the lens of the collapse of the intellectual property deal. The deal has been that by revealing secrets and participating in trade, individuals would get short term government enforced exclusivity. The deal was that to encourage creative works, the author would get a brief exclusive use of the work. That deal has been broken by patent trolls who never develop products, but merely wait to hold for ransom those who do. That deal was broken when Congress, corrupted by liberal application of corporate money, retroactively extended copyright on old works.

Once the deal was broken, the new one-sided deal has been enforced by data mining for IP addresses and enforced by technically illiterate courts. Even when the data mining is done incorrectly, the courts have allowed the RIAA to assert points of law and points of fact by raw assertion, turning personally identifiable information into vulnerability to a shake-down. And so this generation mistrusts data-miners even when their motto is “Do No Evil”.

Power companies are proposing models of central control and data tracking to manage the smart grid. Smart car models are developed around automatic tracking, for billing purposes. Regulations stipulate that privacy concerns are paramount; those privacy rules are used to prohibit homes and businesses from seeing their own data, their own energy use.

Current practice has taught the college age generation about privacy as well. Privacy is an inviolable contract, one that prevents parents paying the bill from even finding out what classes are being taken, yet privacy concerns are tossed out when corporate interests are involved. This year’s Congress proposes that unless campuses track data to support the RIAA, that all federal funding be denied. No student today believes in the enforcement of privacy laws.

She does likes the idea of fuel stills, so she can be self reliant. She would welcome the self charging electric car, on that would let her go off grid and off the records. She mistrusts a rigid reliance on our infrastructure; while happy to use it, she does not want to have to rely on it.

This is the citizen of the future. This is the middle aged consumer of the 2030 challenge. If we want to define successful new energy markets, we had better keep her in mind.

Ontological requirements of the service oriented grid

We will be unable to scale out the integration of the power grid on a continental scale, to support the diversity of systems currently installed using process oriented integration. We must support even more diversity, from technological innovation as well as from business innovation to achieve the new markets in energy today’s challenges require.

While simple demand-response capable systems provide great aggregate value to the grid, the small-scale benefits they offer seldom make a compelling interest to the home or commercial building occupant. This limits new energy scenarios to small advantages that can be achieved by static regulation. If we enforce participation through regulation, we will only harvest the lowest of hanging fruit and encourage cheating and “malicious compliance.” To do more, we must increase the value proposition for building and home owners. This means either decreasing the costs of integration, offering more value for integration-capable systems, or both.

Service oriented coordination is opens up new avenues for energy re-allocation and conservation in the home and business. Service orientation solves the diversity of systems challenges while providing the building owner/operator with new means of controlling power use. A key challenge to establishing such services is common semantics to enable conversations about energy use and system performance. If properly defined, these semantics enable the owner to recapture investments in performance and interactivity through non-operations business processes, reducing the barriers to adoption.

The energy grid itself must acknowledge its roles as a service provider in the systems architecture of each building owner and operator. To be a full participant, business negotiations between building and grid must beyond availability and burn rate to a fuller model of cost, and scarcity, and projected reliability. To create discoverable markets in power, power source semantics must be mappable to ontologies of value that are relevant to the energy purchaser. In other words, we must move beyond mere price signals of demand-response. The integration client must be able to decide whether to make or buy based upon projected quality and reliability. Markets that allow the building to discover and negotiate with power sources must also enable the building to negotiate for which kind of energy sources.

 Electric cars and their batteries are popularly cited as a solution to problems of peak shaving and energy demand smoothing. Wholesale adoption of electric cars would instead increase peak demand volatility in many scenarios. To achieve the hoped-for benefits of electric cars, drivers, automobile producers, and the power grid must develop a common vocabulary for use in the acquisition, storage and use of power. This semantics will be critical to the e-commerce underpinnings of electric car adoption.

 To achieve full realization of the potential benefits from the new energy technologies, we must move beyond process oriented interactions to service orientations that accept diversity and enable technical as well as business innovation. These approaches will require the development of ontologies around building-based and grid-based services so that each can be full participants in enterprise and consumer interactions.