Smart Grid Blood on the Floor in DC (1 of 3)

This is the first of three planned posts on the outcome of the conference last week in Virginia. This one deals with semantic issues. The next one deals with business model issues. The third will be my perspective on critical standards, updating my earlier musing on SGIX.

Thirty ornery smart grid partisans gathered outside DC last week for a hastily convened review of the customer oriented standards development plans. To one side, the plans developed at the August Standards Development Organization (SDO) was putting critical ongoing deployments of billions of dollars infrastructure upgrades at risk, and throwing long term plans into disarray (Team A). The other side saw keeping the August plans intact necessary to enable new investment and new participation in distributed energy, and to break the iron grip of dinosaur twentieth century processes and organizations that impede new energy (Team B). There was little common ground.

The NIST smart grid process identified a number of Priority Action Plans (PAPs). Four of these defined the border between energy supplier and buyer in the smart grid. These communications occur between utility and end node, whether that node is house, or commercial building or industry. These standards are for Price and Product communication (PAP03), Calendar and Schedule communication (PAP04), Energy Usage information (PAP10), and communications for Demand Response and Distributed Energy Resources (PAP09).

The first morning passed with quiet platitudes, until Dr. David Wolman, technical lead for NIST on its smart grid project, called for "blood on the floor" during the afternoon session. The participants complied with enthusiasm, and the conversations became more interesting and more revealing.

Power system engineering standards are developed in the IEC TC 57, the overarching technical committee (TC) defining standards for power management. TC 57 has defined a common information model (CIM); and utilities are striving to rationalize their world by using only elements defined in “The CIM.” Some of the suspicion with which building systems technologists regard the CIM is due to a historic tendency to fit all building operations into the TC 57 CIM

Representatives from the end nodes, particularly commercial buildings and the business enterprise, do not see their world as an extension of the power grid. These areas have their own information models and find the phrase “The CIM” mysterious and unhelpful. Financial services use a CIM defined by ISO 20022. Building systems have information models defined within the divers building control system communities. Enterprise operations beginning to define their interactions using information models from defined by EBXML (electronic business XML) or UBL (Universal Business Language).

The first key agreement of the two days of meetings was to respect the multiple information models on these inter-domain interfaces. For elements and communications that are purely power management related, everyone agreed to use to use the TC 57 CIM. When the communication element involved business transactions, or schedules, or some other area, the communication would use the informational models from that domain.

A common understanding on semantic models, including when to use such models from outside the domain of power management, was important to bringing the divers interests together.

Smart buildings are more important than smart grids

Smart operations in transmission and distribution won’t help us much. An upgrade for utility operations is long overdue, especially if energy distribution gets over its severe case of not-invented-here. This upgrade may be absolutely necessary for the grid to support more dynamic energy markets, ones that will balance electricity supply and demand. The most important smart interactions will come from the grid’s end nodes: industry, commercial buildings and homes. To get the benefits of the smart grid, we must have smart load.

The electric distribution system of North America is falling victim to its own success. It has enabled for us the greatest life style ever invented. It has largely succeeded in creating electricity to cheap to meter…until we bundle the capital costs into the electricity. But that electricity is not reliable enough for sensitive electronics. Wholesale prices for that cheap electricity may leap several orders of magnitude on a hot humid day like today in North Carolina.

Many businesses have unflattering terms to describe their customers. Consumers. Marks. Johns. For utilities, the word is load. But cheap dumb load is becoming too expensive. New cybersecurity concerns may make direct control, and direct control liability, too expensive. Even the much touted benefits of direct control of electric vehicle load become elusive in the mid-term.

Distributed energy resources are a challenge as well as opportunity. Used unwisely, they can increase the difficulty of managing the grid. Some implementation of central supply management to support wind farms show more gas burned in fast-start generators than if no wind was used at all. This is why the lion’s share of priority smart grid standards are for economic interactions rather than for control.

Energy management systems in the end nodes will have to become autonomous systems able to respond to economic signals from the grid, including predictions about future prices. Those economic signals must be great enough to spur investment. Because the risk of adopting new technologies is lower for individual end nodes than it is for any utility, some homes and commercial buildings will be able to adopt new technologies more rapidly than can the grid. The smart grid roadmap points to standards to enable this change, and to create opportunities through dynamic pricing

A mix of purchasers, ranging from early adopters to the risk adverse, will result in more normal markets for energy technology, e.g., the Pemberton innovation diffusion and Rogers technology adoption curves. This will attract more venture capital to distributed energy, particularly to energy storage. It is a simple fact that there are more storage options at the smaller scale of the end node than there are at grid scale. There are a lot of ways to store energy, and the curious might look to IDEA (District Energy) to expand their perspectives.

End nodes may have a mix of energy storage technologies. Thermal. Chemical. Hydrogen. Capacitors. Once they are the, the proper use of excess on-site generation is filling storage rather than selling to the grid. This can arguably result in 20% efficiency gains for each alternative energy without requiring new technology. This is a significant step on the road to net zero energy buildings. And net zero energy buildings are the smartest kind of load, able to responds significantly to each price signal from the grid.

For too long, we have leaned on the utilities to maintain our life styles and our civilization. It is time to give them a hand. It is time for smart load.

Data centers are just the start of unsustainable IT

Lots of people consider data centers, those great energy sucking heat producing resource hogs. Data centers have become the PR battlegrounds for corporate sustainability. Heads of large corporations have been known to charter jets to inspect operations of data centers and declare their interest in reducing carbon footprints. This is somewhat overwrought; that flight may have a larger carbon footprint that savings for a year. Such posturing is well known; today, I am writing of IT’s unsustainable interactions with basic building operations.

I am not concerned today with the workstations left on all night to support overnight patches. That too is well known. Besides, any competent IT manager who manages his PCs by policy has had a palliative long ago. Group policy extensions for energy management have been available for years. The Windows 2008 server policy extensions make is straightforward to manage workstation energy use.

The rogue data center is one of the more common barriers to more sustainable building operations. The rogue data center includes the server in the law office supply closet. On the college campus, it includes the small Beowulf cluster under the post-doc’s desk. That post doc may bike to work, with a save-the planet logo on his back pack, but his rogue data center burns energy night and day and requires the building to do so as well.

Rogue data centers prevent any reasonable program of building set-backs. Set-backs are simply doing in commercial space what a programmable thermostat does at home. Setbacks program the building to use less energy when unoccupied, but they run afoul of heat from the rogue data center. At UNC, rogue data centers are revealed after spring break, when even the least controlled buildings are manually set back. They overheat and their owners are on a rampage…

But even in an environment with better control over policy and server security, the communications closets present a significant challenge to sustainable operation of buildings.

At UNC, most of the buildings have pneumatic controls. This means they are very reliable at keeping the building at a fixed temperature all of the time. We are trying several approaches that have recently come to market to let us do setbacks, i.e., raise the night-time temperature in the summer. We can put digital radio-controlled thermostats on the walls and turn them down based on a program. We have had some problems, such as the heater coming on to heat the building up to the new temperature. It seems that these systems need some more work

We also ran into another problem. The communications closets in these older buildings get their air conditioning from the rest of the building. The communications closets are filled network gear that generates a lot of heat. When the buildings are set back, the equipment in the communications closets overheats.

For now, we are building Rube Goldberg-style work-arounds. We are putting SNMP temperature sensors in the closets. When things get to hot, they send alarms to the data center. The data center can then send a standard message to the building’s wireless retrofits to cool the building for an hour.

The needs of IT remain a regular hurdle on the road to sustainability.

Collaborative Energy—the Smart Grid and the End Node

A significant goal of the smart grid is to encourage rapid innovation in the end nodes, that is in the commercial buildings, homes, and industrial sites that consume most of the electricity produced. Today’s North American power grid is probably the supreme engineering feat of the twentieth century; it has made possible the greatest life style ever lived. Its reliability, though, is insufficient for the digital world. Every system margin has been pushed too thin. The introduction of any significant portion of intermittent source energy, such as wind and solar, will make things much worse.

It is time to engage the end nodes in supporting system reliability. Today’s buildings have higher requirements for reliability and quality than the grid was ever designed for. Site-based generation and site based storage are part of the solution, but they could make the system even less reliable. It is time to begin the move to collaborative energy.

The Smart Grid Interim Roadmap highlights the Energy Management Service (EMS) as the sole service in the end node (Industry, Commercial Building, and Home) that communicates with the grid for purposes of load shaping and load curtailment. Over time, the load shaping signal will become primarily economic. Load curtailment, the mandatory response to critical issues on the grid, may not ever be adequately handled by economic signals. Load shaping and load curtailment comprise the function referred to by the utilities as Demand Response. The external signals to the EMS are being defined in the OASIS Energy Interoperability TC, building upon the work of OpenADR.

The EMS marshals the energy response from the building. This may range from the simple "shut off, turn on" to a nuanced response to enterprise and occupant driven priorities. While those priorities and their management are left, as they should be, to the market, we need stadata models to free the appliance, building system, and consumer electronics manufacturers to innovate. These standards go under the currently imprecise name "energy profiles".

Energy profiles will define the interaction patterns of the smaller systems. How much energy is it using? Can it respond to a price signal? How much can it respond to a price signal? How long will it take to respond? Will it use more before it uses less? The answers to these questions must be aggregated by the EMS and offered up to respond to OpenADR signals. The EMS should be able to access the meter to verify its own operations.

This model should support multiple levels, as several building systems may present one face to the EMS, or several EMS’s in a campus may present one face to the grid. The model does not include detailed operations of the EMS, nor does it define EMS user interfaces. These areas are best left to the creativity of the market.

A key function of the EMS is to support remote operations. Third parties will use the EMS to offer remote energy management services. Today, many utilities see themselves as the sole provider of these services. Increasingly, companies such as Enernoc and Constellation Energy are challenging that assumption. With proper standards, energy managers will flood the market, driving prices down. Those left standing will compete on higher level services.

There is still time to join the OASIS Energy Interoperability Technical Committee—drop me a line and I will tell you how to join.