Lord of the HAN: One Agent to Rule them All

The National Institute for Standards and Technology has divided the users of the power grid into workgroups for each different area. Industry to grid (I2G), Commercial Building to grid (B2G), Home 2 grid (H2G) and even Vehicle to grid (V2G). Clearly there is a lot of overlap. The large home may have more sophisticated responses than the small office. When we are all done, I hope we have one common set of interfaces for all of them.

Each have their strengths. I2G hosts the most advanced conversations relevant for distributed generation (DG), with its long experience of local steam plants and of cogeneration. B2G, sometime called Business to grid by its members, has the most advanced expectations of the arms-length negotiations with the power grid. V2G presents the clearest models for distributed identity and lifestyle interactions. But I think that H2G has the most advanced system architecture, driven by the diversity of technology and personal preference in the home market.

The model adopted by the H2G seems the closest to a service oriented architecture relying on loose choreography. Homes have appliances and entertainment systems as well as environmental controls. Homes are values driven, and so are early adopters of generation technology that may not yet make economic sense. Homes are personal, encompassing all the different life styles, sleeping patterns, and everything else that makes each household different.

This model relies on the autonomous agents plugged into the HAN, each defending its mission, each interacting with prices from the grid. When I say agent and mission, I’m thinking of Gail Horst’s (head of grid responsiveness for appliance maker Whirlpool) that a washing machine cannot respond to the grid unless it knows there is no bleach in the current load. There is also the concept of the home agent, coordinating the responses and programs of each.

This master agent (“Your personal Energy Day Trader Friend!”) might run on your PC or MAC, use WS-DD (Device Discovery) to feel what’s on the HAN, WS-DP (Device Profile) to understand their capabilities, and instruct them as to the homeowner’s wishes. This model maps well to the findings of the Olympic Peninsula Project as well on to developing visions for the NZE (Net Zero Energy) home.

Lynne Kiesling described the inside the building energy market as the most efficient clearing mechanism with the lowest technology bar to integration at the B2G summit sponsored by NIST in Chicago last week. This makes for some extremely interesting home generation distributed generation, agent-by-agent prioritization concepts. (What if the dishwasher can never outbid the grid for the solar panel energy?)

Is HAN leading the way for B2G with this vision? The master agent for the commercial building would have to be enterprise aware, or perhaps tenant aware, depending upon model. Is HAN leading the way for I2G in this model? The master agent for I2G would need to be aware of manufacturing schedules and other enterprise functions, perhaps even labor contracts.

Do these other entities need what is architecturally already part of the HAN?

Working with the Wind in Chicago

Chicago has long been known as the windy city, for its promises of its politicians and the quantity of its conventions and conferences. Next week, there will be a lot of wind surrounding the AHR Expo, the largest conference anywhere dedicated to the efficient movement of air, and thereby the biggest energy-related conference of the year. Numerous engineering and energy related conferences and meetings will be in town to take advantage of the more than 50,000 attendees. I, too, will be blowing into town, giving some talks, participating in some meetings, and planning still others. This may be the last time I am in Chicago until March, so drop me a line to schedule a meeting if you want to discuss plans or alignment while I am there.

The GridWise Architectural Council (GWAC) has put together several sessions as part of an AHR conference track explaining the mission of the GridWise Alliance and opportunities created by the smart grid. On Monday, I will speak on academic energy initiatives, their problems, and their promise. Many academic leaders have signed the American College and University President’s Climate Initiative, committing their institutions to change how their schools are operated in ways that are verifiable and repeatable. Unfortunately, these efforts often are characterized more by proper feelings than by proper actions, and the results are often poor. Examples abound of efforts such as the Oberlin College Lewis Center, designed to be a net zero building, yet actually producing poor performance for years before retrofits finally delivered on its promise. Other green initiatives, including some at the University of North Carolina, have made performance worse. Efforts that address only new buildings using new standards without providing for cost effective inclusion existing buildings will have little effect.

This session will provide an overview of the initiative and its participants. I will discuss existing and developing standards for making building operations and energy use visible beyond the confines of the traditional campus maintenance and operations organization. I will describe efforts to make building operations responsive to the academic and research activities, and how these actions interact with growing campus concerns over security and emergency awareness. A clear understanding of these issues is needed for any college and university to meet these goals. A clear understanding of the problems and developing standards will help the energy professional compete and perform better in this market. These same knowledge and skills apply to the challenges of new national energy initiatives and will help the professional respond to anticipated Obama federal infrastructure programs.

On Tuesday, also at the AHR show, I will be teaming up with Ken Sinclair, editor of the Automated Buildings e-zine, to aim a little farther out. We will discuss the vision of interactive buildings as full participants in the smart grid. Building-to-Grid (B2G) interactions will create whole new business models outside buildings. Developing communication standards between building and grid will make the economic consequences of each operating decision visible. These communications will be critical to the development of Net Zero Energy (NZE) buildings. Economic service interactions will create new markets for building-based equipment and new models for building system integration. Come to this session to learn what these new markets will look like, and how today’s system designs are changing to prepare for them.

On Wednesday and Thursday, I will join a couple of Department of Energy (DOE) summits on the new standards. Wednesday afternoon, the B2G Summit will bring together an impressive group of thought leaders in technology and policy to brief the HVAC and BAS industry on the business opportunities from the smart grid. The conversations between and after sessions at the Summit are always as informative and useful as the sessions. On Thursday, the DOE Commercial Building Energy Alliances have announced their own summit for HVAC, Refrigeration, and Controls Suppliers. The summit will focus on retrofitting existing buildings. The summit will address all products related to energy efficiency in buildings, except for lighting. Drop me a line if you want to catch up with me at either of these events or to schedule a discussion on how these standards might work into your plants.

The activity I am personally most excited by, however, is meetings to plan GridEcon. GridEcon will explore the economic and market requirements of the smart grid. None of the smart technologies I write about will be adopted without a firm basis in economics and markets. The primary benefit of informational interoperability in building systems and in smart energy systems will be the creation of dynamic markets, markets that reduce technological friction and reward innovation. GridEcon will take advantage of the great Chicago-based markets in commodities and weather, and of the technologists behind their trading systems, to help create the market rules we will need. Watch for future announcements of this conference which will be in Chicago in mid-March.

See you in the Windy City!

Gamboling through the Clouds

Some months ago, I wrote about how Software as a Service (SaaS) was going to be used in building controls. The UNC Enterprise Building Management System (EBMS) and Hosted Controls already use that model for monitoring and operations of building systems. Others like Sensus offer building analytics and knowledge-based maintenance from their own data center. Now Harrah’s Entertainment, the largest of the casino operators is moving into the clouds, and the outcome may change building systems again.

It has been best practice for a while now to interface building systems to hotel customer operations. The check-in process can activate the room systems, which then save energy when not rented. Front door access control sensors can read the room key and turn on the room conditioning as the guest comes in the front door. The Hotel Technology Next Generation group has even included remembering customer preferences for the operation of room based systems in their customer retention strategies. Traditionally, these approaches relied on direct interaction with the reservations system.

Harrah’s has outsourced its systems for managing reservations, for air travel, and for player relations to the SaaS vendor SalesForce.com. This is a strong statement, as no industry relies more on customer loyalty programs than the gaming industry, and Harrah’s is known for the most data intensive approach to this problem.

One of the concerns with outsourcing core business functions like this is vendor lock-in; you have committed yourself to integrating your other business functions with an external computing resource of which you have no control. It is easy to view these operations as a simple user interface for the customer making a reservation, and for the clerk checking the customer in. The hotel reservation has a host of interactions, however. Housekeeping needs to know not only when the customer arrives and departs, but also any requirements for special bedding, or extra towels. The restaurant may support one free drink on the night of check-in; tabs for breakfast on the departure date may need expedited processing. In today’s hotel, third parties may run housekeeping and the restaurant, increasing the complexity of the interaction

These interactions, and their importance to the enterprise, are why service interfaces and service definitions are so important.

If we take these interactions to building maintenance and operations, and to new energy markets, the service interaction problems continue. The reservation process should drive the operation of each room. The hotelier may want to balance spreading guests out for maximum privacy vs. bunching guests on a few floors because of anticipated high energy costs or energy reliability signals. Organizations such as Harrah’s demand close integration of tenant service and physical security.

Harrah’s provides high amenity facilities wherein an extra feel of luxury creates an increased willingness to gamble. Harrah’s has global distribution with considerable site-based diversity. Knowledge based maintenance and central management of facility quality are particularly valuable to Harrah’s.

Standard service definitions can put all operations into cloud computing, whether the low hanging fog of facility operations or the core customer relationship management that Harrah’s has outsourced. Building controls are grounded concrete systems—but their heads should be in the clouds.

EBMS Takes its First Steps

I have written before of UNC’s Enterprise Building Management System (EBMS). EBMS talks to legacy systems in more than a 100 buildings on the UNC campus. EBMS uses a half dozen variants of web services to monitor and operate building systems using nearly every brand and every internal protocol. All data is normalized and brought into an industry standard database, currently we are adding 42 million transactions a day to that database.

Phase II of EBMS is finishing up before the end of the year. The system is going through final tuning and acceptance testing; the developers from Cyrus Technologies are still sleep deprived but have that light in their eyes that coders get when the end of a death march is in sight.

While commissioning the system, we found errors in our old proprietary system, including sensors that had always supplied bad data. Building integrators had “solved problems by the expedient of not displaying bad data. In at least one case, this bad data explained years of expensive maintenance and replacements. When EBMS is complete, our operators will have a single web-based console for all of these buildings.

We are just beginning to get other sources of data into the EBMS database. EBMS now includes historical weather data. Metering data for all utilities in the building is just starting to flow in. Even though we have in-house utilities providing electricity, and steam, and chilled water to the buildings, we have had as much difficulty getting live information as if we were getting information from a third party. The barriers have been political, or perhaps more fairly cultural. Still, the information is now flowing in.

One of the final steps for the developers was setting up an OLAP framework for looking at the data. Online Analytic Procession (OLAP) is using multi-dimensional analysis of data to find underlying patterns. OLAP is typically used in business reporting for sales, marketing, management reporting, business process management (BPM), budgeting and forecasting, and financial reporting. OLAP has not traditionally been available for building operational data. We now have an OLAP framework in place for 100 buildings.

This week, we are interviewing candidates for a new position, for a new role in this, or perhaps any, organization. We are hiring a full time data analyst, looking for experience in quality management or marketing rather than in mechanical systems. This positions full time job will be to look for anomalies and patterns in the operational data.

Perhaps we are moving toward predictive maintenance based upon analysis. Perhaps we are finding sub-optimal building response arriving from technology choices made years ago. Perhaps we will be able to understand the relationships between different departments and how buildings perform for them. We are entering the era of knowledge-based operations.