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.

Microgrids Big and Small

Last summer, we used the call “Every end node is a microgrid” to focus smart energy standards activities. Like the regional grids, a microgrid is responsible for running its own operations, and for supporting its own needs. Like the regional grids, a microgrid uses market operations to acquire what it cannot make itself, and what it can buy more economically than it can make itself. Like the regional grids, a microgrid can contain microgrids that are responsible for their own operations.

Last week, a board member of NAESB asked me to define microgrids. I was invited to speak to NAESB to explain what interest natural gas suppliers might have in smart grid standards. I was surprised that an idea so central to national smart grid efforts needed to be described to one of the most significant energy market and business practices groups. There is so much going on so fast right now, and the pressures to accelerate are so strong, that some of us get used to ideas before we ever have to explain them.

The list of end nodes that might be microgrids starts with homes, commercial buildings, and industrial sites. Within an end node, different subsystems can interact much as they do within the larger grid. Building systems could bid for access to site-based power. Microgrid events can trigger demand response (DR) behaviors from the building systems or building zones. Microgrids can contain and be contained by other microgrids.

Buildings and sites can be participants in local area microgrids. Campuses, and military bases present existing business models for microgrids. Rather than as integrated control systems, these contained building microgrids grids can participate collection of autonomous entities. Each building / microgrid could then bid for and obtain energy supply and reliability from larger microgrid.

The models propagated by the District Energy Association can inform microgrid thinking. The defining characteristic of District Energy is cogeneration, in which a single plant may make electricity, steam, and hot water. Because steam can be used to power cooling, cogeneration systems often produce chilled water was well. Each of these products can find a market within the microgrid. The district energy plant then becomes the market maker, shifting modes of energy delivery to match the bids from the autonomous buildings it contains.

Microgrids can opt to be more intimate, and to communicate more frequently than does the larger grid today. Buildings may choose to negotiate available load shapes, sharing planned energy use and backing-off of planned energy-using processes to maintain overall market conditions within the local microgrid. Microgrids can maintain their own cybersecurity regimes, tighter or looser than those in the wider grid as befits their needs.

These local area microgrids will require regulatory reform to flourish. Industrial parks must avoid these business models today lest they become regulated as a public utility. Commodity home builders are exploring providing turnkey district energy and management, turned over to the turnkey homeowner’s association (HOA) they provide today. When combined with the new package solar thermal systems, shipped in a single container, and installed on-site, neighborhood microgrids may be the future of distributed energy.

Today, in many states, an energy supplier becomes a regulated utility when the energy delivery crosses a public road. In new neighborhoods, the homebuilder finishes a neighborhood and turns the rods over to the city. Green builders are already considering turning title for the roads over to the HOA instead, to avoid such regulation. Future regulatory changes could open up existing neighborhoods to this kind of energy management.

Microgrids can extend down as well. Each tenant in a commercial building could operate its own microgrid, existing within the environment of the buildings microgrid. One could argue that green leases are beginning to move in this direction. I find it fascinating to think of intra-building market opportunities. Can we use intra-building markets to re-use what is today waste energy? Does the data center in the basement defray costs by selling its waste heat to the other tenants? Would some tenants pay a premium for site-generated energy? By hiding the complexity of interoperation behind an economic veneer, can we improve performance and reduce integration costs?

Microgrids, whether virtual or real, are an important organizing concept of smart energy.

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…”

The Fourth Amendment and Smart Grids

If we are not careful, smart grids are in direct collision with the bill of rights. Some smart grid activities define or enable business practices for balancing energy supply and demand. There is a direct link between commonly accepted business practices and some definitions of our constitutional rights. With the best of intentions, we may be casually removing significant barriers to some of our most cherished freedoms.

The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures. During the American Revolution, British forces made extensive use of writs of assistance, a sort of general search warrant that could be extended and used without ongoing review. In response, the Fourth Amendment created a standard whereby government searches must be issues only on a discovery of probable cause, and specifically limited in location and as to the matters being searched for, based on specific information supplied to a court.

The Fourth Amendment is the most explicit source of any support for privacy that I can find in the Constitution.

Dr Orin Kerr is one of the most respected legal voices on Fourth Amendment issues. Dr Kerr blogged this week on the relationship between technology, common practices, and developing standards for reasonable search (see reference below). Specifically, Dr Kerr was exploring the ten year old Supreme Court ruling in Kyllo vs. United States that defines the limits of police use of high technology in warrantless searches.

In cartoon form (IANAL), police scanned houses with some sort of IR scanning system and noted a hot spot in the attic. From the hot spot, they deduced that the defendant was growing marijuana under grow lights in his attic. Kyllo asserted that this was a prohibited search under the 4^th amendment. The question was, in effect, is a non-intrusive search using high tech an unreasonable search. Clearly, if Kyllo had been growing the marijuana in his front yard, there would have been no dispute when police noticed this when on routine patrol. Previous rulings had stated that police fly-overs are legal searches because non-police could fly over the property and spot the plants; the property owner has no reasonable expectation of privacy applied to aerial views of his property.

In this case, the search was ruled unconstitutional; Kyllo won. The Supreme Court adopted a test designed to let the result change with social practice: “when . . . the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a “search” and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant.” Because infrared temperature sensing was not in “general public use,” the thermal imaging was a “search” that required a warrant.

Dr. Kerr was blogging on whether under this standard, the search in Kyllo was still prohibited. Remote infrared temperature-sensing has become quite common in a wide range of applications. I heard an ad on the radio yesterday for a remote home thermometer enabling mom to take a sleeping child’s temperature from the door without waking the child. Thermal images of houses to reveal gaps in insulation have become common; many utilities will pay for them as part of energy efficiency efforts. The question was, then, is this high tech device now considered to be in in “general public use,” and if so, can the police use it without a warrant without violating the Fourth amendment.

And so, at last, I loop back to smart grids.

Some business practices we are defining, particularly in what we are calling Managed Energy, can routinely monitor the activity of every device in a home. If we establish these practices as general practice, have we eliminated any Fourth Amendment shield against the use of the same techniques by police?

Analysis of electrical power consumption reveals more than you might guess. Research a decade ago explored what engineers could learn from these signals. One anomaly occurred almost every day in a home somewhere between a half hour and two hours after the owners left each day. Further research determined that the family dog waited each day until it was sure that its owners were really gone for the day—and then climbed onto the warm waterbed. They were detecting the change in the pattern of water heater use. Further research demonstrated an ability to distinguish how much activity was on that waterbed…

When we define business practices for the smart grid, we are doing more than solving a a difficult engineering problem. We may be creating practices that re-define our precious constitutional rights. Privacy is more than a best business practice for smart grids.