The Path to Smart Energy

For the last two years I have been so immersed in smart energy that I sometimes lose track of the big picture myself. This post goes back to basics.

The power industry of North America has provided its customers with the greatest life style that any civilization has ever had. The old service model assumes an ever-present supply of power that is predictable, abundant, and inexpensive. World-wide, our plans are to reduce the power supplied by predictable an inexpensive power sources, to replace them with power sources that are intermittent and less predictable, and that are widely distributed across the grid, including within homes, businesses, and neighborhoods. The old service model will not survive.

None of us wants to face deteriorating life-styles or reduced ability to provide quality services and products as energy supplies become less dependable. Smart Energy is the means we will use to expand both amenities and service quality.

Smart energy looks to each home, business, and industrial site to take responsibility for the management of its own energy in the face of an ever-changing supply. While efficiency is important, it is a small part of the story. Early efforts react to infrequent temporary and perhaps unanticipated shortages by degrading services, i.e., by turning things off. The proactive approach is to pre-consume energy, to take advantage of the more frequent periods of energy surplus in ways that there will be no degradation of service during shortages. As this shifts energy purchase to times of inexpensive supply, smart energy will provide better service for less.

Energy use is more than power use; smart energy is about more than power markets. Smart energy systems use thermal, pressure, chemical, and potential energy to support their purpose. Through balancing a changing portfolio of energy resources to meet the demands placed on them, smart buildings, homes, and facilities will use changing processes to provide consistent and high quality results.

Every node on the power grid, i.e., commercial buildings, homes, and industry, will act as a microgrid. Smart microgrids manage their energy use, generation, storage, recycling, conversion, and rely on market operations (buying and selling) only to make up the difference. Off-grid facilities already act as microgrids; they will become more prevalent as smart energy improves the quality of this choice. Microgrids can be combined into larger microgrids to enhance resilience, to encompass the neighborhood, the office park, the military base, and the campus.

Smart energy is information based. Systems and devices will provide information on their present and anticipated future energy requirements. They will consume information from energy markets and from the predictions of their peers. They will gain situation awareness from weather services and other external sources. They will exchange schedules and requirements with the personal and enterprise systems they support. New energy moves beyond performance to doing the right thing at the right time. Smart energy systems will be autonomous, self-monitoring, and self-managing.

Our homes, commercial buildings, and industry, will share the burden of energy quality, reliability and production with their suppliers. With the new standards ready to use, we have the opportunity for market-driven innovation incented by grid-based economic signals. Today we have the public interest and attention to bring products rapidly to market. The innovators and ventures able to take advantage of the opportunities in these new market realities will reap large rewards.

The end nodes of the grid are consumer-driven, and so are able to support more vibrant technology markets than can any central service. The promise of new energy is to achieve societal benefits by aligning energy supply and use while offering better amenities to buildings, homes, and their occupants while costing less. The challenge of new energy is to bring the digital systems in every system and appliance in our lives into the internet of things, and to have them respond to our needs and wants.

Forget Efficiency and Demand Response, Load Bank for the Grid

All the Smart Grid attention is on Demand Response, that is, on the half dozen times a year when the grid runs out of energy or has to turn to expensive energy sources. All the building attention is on efficiency, using the least energy inside the building possible. Neither approach supports renewables, or distributed energy resources. Efficiency may reduce the ability to respond to Demand Response signals. Buildings should turn to productive load banking instead.

When I am at home, my smart thermostat turns my home temperature up and down. In the winter, the temperature setting goes way down at night. The house becomes parsimonious just as the local wholesale power market goes negative. The price goes negative because it is expensive to turn up and down the power generation. I don’t see wholesale prices, so efficiency is what I do for now. In a better market, I would increase my use at night, and turn the temperature down when I get up. Instead, I efficiently use more energy by using it at the wrong time.

Load banks are familiar to those who test and install generators. Generators can burn out the circuits they are on, or the equipment on those circuits, if there is not adequate load to consume the power generated. Load banks are paired with generation to use any excess energy. Most load banks do little more than heat the air to burn off excess energy. If we can make our building systems create value while load banking, we will turn grid economics upside down.

Renewable energy, or rather intermittent generation, often generates energy when there is no market for that energy. Wind farms often produce far more energy than they can sell at that time. Just google “wind farm Texas toaster” for description of the problem. The problem is not, as many decry, subsidies. The problem is lack of markets. With no place to sell enough power when the wind is blowing, the great Texas toaster load banks wind power into heat.

Building systems should look at what they can do to use more energy, but at the right time. Ice Energy, which chills water at night to avoid air conditioning during the day, is better thought of as a daily load bank. The real impulse behind utility support of electric cars is that if charged only at night, they provide load banking while expanding their market.

I always laugh when I go to a conference “powered by wind”. I know that they are paying un-economic fees to a power source that is not the wind, which promises to buy wind at some later time. If you want to encourage renewable energy, you need to buy it when it’s available and cheap, not on some pretend market which sells you conventional power, and promises to buy wind later when it is not needed. If we instead bought energy when the wind is blowing, we would increase the value of wind energy. I the great wind farms could sell more than 40% of what they generate, they would be instantly more economic, without waiting for new technologies. Think of it as canning fresh tomatoes in summer. You don’t can tomatoes in summer to heat the house; that would suggest canning in winter. You can tomatoes in summer because that is when they are fresh and cheap.

The most efficient place to store energy is in the middle of a process you were going to do anyway. Ice Energy is effective because it stores cold in the middle of the air cooling process. My home well would be a great load bank if I had a means to store several days of water pressure. A maker of home water heaters marshals thousands of home units to provide fast 4-second load banking to meet the needs of the gird—and radically changes the net cost of water heating. Load banking that performs a useful service creates value you can see every day.

Look at your buildings, and ponder, what you can do in advance, and do it when there is a load banking opportunity. Look for ways to productively load bank your distributed energy resources rather than sell excess to the grid. Look for ways to use more energy, right now.

Demand response happens now and then. For the last couple years, with a down economy and lower industrial demand, it might not happen at all. Load surplus opportunities happen every day. If your building systems can take advantage of this surplus, consume energy when it is cheap and plentiful, to provide service when it is expensive and scarce, you can find new value streams from energy engineering, renewable energy, and building systems.

Ready for the BSI

I want to get back to buildings soon. Smart grids are engaging, but I think our goals for the future will be met by buildings.

For months, all my writing has been about smart grids. More particularly, for November, it has all been about smart grid standards.

As I write this, the essential market interfaces of the grid are in review. A common communication of schedule and interval, suitable for sharing schedules between grid and enterprise and building and finance finished public review last Tuesday. We have nearly 80 comments to settle, but soon we will be ready to discuss using ws-calendar not only in smart grids, but in buildings.

Energy Market Information (EMIX), the critical description of energy product and price has two more weeks for public review. Energy prices always have a schedule, and EMIX uses WS-Calendar. EMIX supports demand response, but more importantly, full participation of buildings in all energy markets. EMIX is in review until the 17^th.

Energy Interop was released for public review last Saturday. EI (as we call it) defines the essential e-commerce framework for interactions between grids and aggregators and utilities and, yes, buildings. EI is locked for review until December 27.

Now, I am reeling from a week at Grid-Interop, at which I have spoken 5 times, sat In two meetings of the Smart Grid Architectural Committee, and practiced politics (difficult for me) in numerous other meetings. In October and November I put three of the four market interfaces of the smart grid out for public review. Light, loose, market oriented, interfaces that transfer incentives for participation to the buildings. Now I am longing to talk of buildings again.

Today, at Grid-Interop, the focus shifted to buildings as microgrids, each responsible for managing energy use, generation conversion, storage, and, only as a last resort, market operations to make up the difference. This is what I wanted to accomplish when I got started on Smart Energy. No grid control, which would strangle in-building innovation. Maximum grid incentives, all delivered to a single energy services interface (ESI), the locus of market bidding for the building.

Now I turn back to the building, Now I want to think of the Building Systems Interface (BSI), the abstract interface to building systems. Some of it is building services as in BAS, abstracted with system metadata, and associated with the space it supports, the space that the tenants recognize. Some of it is simple appliances, and the way the communicate in homes. Some of it is the live or plug load, perhaps discover able, perhaps mappable to space using PLie.

So what are the essential building services? There is energy management, accessible for low integration re-hosting in the clouds, There is performance contracting, also in the clouds. There is energy auditing, which must be based upon the zero integration costs (because the metadata is already in the BSI). Energy auditing? Well what if we call it a live LEED rating, or perhaps 3^rd party verification of the performance of the performance contractors… BIFER (BI for emergency responders) may even come from that mix.

There is an enterprise service, that links between the occupants and their activities and the BAS and its performance. It communicates to support business activities while using the common schedule communications developed for smart grids. It is aware of the market conditions and deals made with the grid though the ESI. It knows whether the volatile energy of the renewables-based grid is scarce or abundant. It can report back to the enterprise how and where energy is being used right now.

This needs some standards to fly, to be cheap enough to let these cloud-based services flourish. PLie needs to be advanced to a standard. oBIX trends for energy management must be accessible form self-metering systems and from switch panels, and be able to support the NAESB Energy Usage Information standards. There must be a light-weight BIM, my vote is for GBXML, able to act as the spatial lens through which to view energy use.

I want to define the BSI…

But now, rest, and sleep.

Smart Buildings & Smart Energy: the Integration Challenge

Last week, twenty of us gathered in DC for a two-day charrette on the standards needed to apply BIM to the problems of dynamic energy management. The work-shop, entitled “Smart Buildings, Smart Energy”, was put on by the Corps of Engineers Research Lab (CERL) at the National Institute for Building Science (NIBS). The meeting was a fascinating, and occasionally heated conversation that brought together academic and government researchers, building system practitioners from industry leading companies, and participants in standards committees from ASHRAE to OASIS. It was a fascinating meeting, filled with bright, deeply focused individuals who as a group had not yet recognized the profound changes in their goals required by smart energy.

The challenge of smart energy to buildings is dynamic change. The goal of smart buildings has always been superior performance—usually defined as energy efficiency. Energy from external sources will all become dynamic and intermittent. Some will be available under rapidly changing prices. The most efficient system may not be the one that is most able to respond to these changing conditions. Perhaps the goal of smart buildings is to defend its occupants from the degraded conditions of the smart grid. The game is changing.

The use of Building Information Models (BIM) is only now becoming common enough to change business processes. BIM lets us design buildings the way we design cars and planes, with full simulation and testing before the contractor turns over the first shovel full of dirt. BIM furthermore provides the contractor with accurate materials requirements and each trade with accurate measurements. With better knowledge and a dramatic reduction in re-work, the cost of construction can come way down while the quality goes up.

Most of the cost of a building is incurred in operations, during the long period between construction and demolition. For the last five years, led by NASA and CERL, there has been a project to define how to hand over information from design and construction for use in operations. The Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBIE) defines how to hand over information from the BIM to maintenance and operations.

The information in COBIE seems almost trivial—unless you don’t have it. COBIE defines a standard exchange for equipment information including spare parts lists and preventive maintenance schedules. COBIE exchanges are defined as a series of simple spreadsheets, which can be generated from BIM or filled in by hand. A growing number of maintenance management systems are now able to import COBIE directly into their databases. Whether or not a building was built using BIM, whether a building is old or new, the owner can request COBIE formatted information for handover from the builder, commissioning agent, or seller.

Francois Grobler gathered us together to discuss how to extend COBIE to reduce the cost of building system integration. Building systems are classically islands of automation, communicating only with a single proprietary console. The cost and time required for integration is a barrier both to better integration, and to system upgrades. Occult system tags and poor documentation prevent the timely value-based upgrades that drive innovation in the IT world.

This last point is critical of we are ever to get to a highly innovative green-tech. Cost-based upgrades look to historical cost and to growing maintenance problems to decide when to upgrade. Systems are not replaced until they fail or have been completely depreciated. As IT merged with telecommunications, we moved to value-based upgrades. Lap-tops and PDAs are upgraded when they give the sales force a competitive edge. Work-stations are upgraded to increase engineering productivity. This dynamic has driven these worlds to innovate to drive shorter sales and replacement cycles. The difference is the one between the old black hand-set we used to lease from the phone company, often for decades, and the new market of cell-phones and the latest functions.

A key component of this new COBIE will be control system tags and metadata. Today, a retro-commissioning agent spends the first days or even on site in low-value discovery of this information from blue prints and the current control system. Only after this work is complete, can the more high-value and useful work begin. When a project such as completed, those working notes are thrown away, or stored where they see no further use. A standard for the exchange of this information would reduce the costs of each commissioning and perhaps stimulate a market for third party discovery tools.

Space is the most important class of metadata. People in buildings inhabit and interact with spaces. Building systems affect those spaces, and secure those spaces, but the relation between systems and space is often occult. BIM can provide the mapping, but we don’t need all the BIM for that. We need something small and lightweight, describes the three dimensional space, but leaves out the details that add complexity.

The most significant use of BIM will be in buildings that built without using BIM. Most buildings next year are not new; most new buildings next year will be built without using BIM. Even if we were to imagine that in five years, all buildings will be built using BIM, most buildings still would not have a full BIM, with an intelligent structure, for a very long time. Fortunately, we do not need a full BIM to describe the space in buildings, and to provide a light framework integrating system information with that space.

Retro-BIM is the work for taking one of today’s buildings and creating a BIM for a portion, usually during a renovation. These BIMs tend to be descriptive, and lack the full engineering detail that would come with design through BIM. There is a growing set of tools and practices to cost effectively create a three-dimensional BIM during a renovation. Retro-BIM can provide as good a foundation for a light integration framework as can a full design BIM.

Green Building XML (GBXML) was designed to provide a “good enough” description of building space and building systems to support energy models that are “good enough”. GBXML is based on the IFC data models that underlie design BIM. Because GBXML already includes information on space and systems in a light-weight model, GBXML would need only a little extension to map system tags and related system metadata to space. Retro-BIM datasets, design to map to the IFCs, should be able to expose information as GBXML with little trouble.

The new challenge of smart energy is dynamic decision-making. Volatile energy availability and energy prices will make the grid  an unpredictable supplier. The availability of on-site energy sources, both generation and storage, enable self-reliance. Smart energy will require energy use decisions on a minute by minute basis. Buildings must be able to accept the complexity of new systems and new technologies without bearing the additional cost of complex integrations. GBXML might be the shim between systems, space, and the people that occupy that space that lets us put it all together.