A Caffeinated view of Aging Energy Infrastructure

The local coffee shop, The OpenEye Cafe, has an outsized role in thinking about smart buildings and the smart grid. Each day when I leave the gym, I go to the OpenEye to caffeinate myself out of my post exercise torpor and to write.

The OpenEye is a great college town coffee shop, even if it is in Carrboro, the town next door to the college town. Its main room is huge for a coffee shop, fitted out with as many old couches and comfy chairs as it has little tables surrounded by mismatched chairs. It has numerous small side rooms, a patio in the back, more sidewalk seating in the front.

This size gives it a wonderful variety of subcultures, as there is the construction contractor corner, klatches of endurance runners, and every college town’s PWDIBs (people who dress in black). On weekends, the Men Who Run in Kilts fill one end, while students come in to tolerate Mom & Dad buying them some coffee. The Baristas and their friends, of course, display a cornucopia of piercings and tattoos.

So yeah, it’s a great coffee house, but how does this tie to aging infrastructure, aside from the fact that I write there?

At any time, there are 15 to 40 laptops running in the main room. When the OpenEye moved into these larger quarters, they ran surface mounted conduit and put plugs all over the walls. Window seats, with a plug under the table and a view, are at a premium. Cords snake out from the walls to the couches in mid-room tables. I wonder how significant electricity is as a cost of the shop.

There are frequent scheduling negotiations as well. Are you leaving soon? Can you plug this in for me? Excuse me you seem to have knocked out my plug. I hate those Macintosh plugs with the transformer right on the wall plug. Because they need their bottoms supported, their owners always plug into the top plug, blocking the lower plug.

But still, where is the aging infrastructure? Well, just as none ever thinks of the aging grid, no one ever thinks about wearing out receptacles. Despite being just over two years old, every receptacle in the store is one out and “loose”. Normally a receptacle hugs a plug, and provides some friction to sliding out. Not so here. With every receptacle being plugged and un-plugged countless times a day, they have actually worn out. I have to watch the battery display at the bottom of the screen, for the plugged in laptop may no longer be charging.

Still, it’s a great coffee shop, and a great community crossroads, even if it needs “plug maintenance”

The Impulse to Run Around Naked

We were discussing the proposed Energy Market Information Exchange (EMIE) Technical Committee last week when a participant asked "What’s wrong with having devices communicate in their own native languages and over their most optimal media?"

At its heart, this query is a request to let first costs equipment trump all other concerns. It ignores cost of ownership. It ignores the costs of security. It even ignores initial integration costs. It is a naïve plea for a simpler world.

When they were young, I remember my children regularly escaping after the evening bath and scampering through the house. As we’d capture them to stuff them into their warm winter pajamas, we’d hear the joyous plea "Want to run around naked!" It was a happy request, one that always made me smile.In my, uhmm, mature and fully deployed state, few would be as charmed if I made the same request.

Look, I don’t care if you and your family walk around naked in your house. When you go on the street, and expect to interact with others, then societal expectations for behavior and dress kick in. I don’t care if you create small naturist clubs where you can walk around naked with a larger group. Every naturist camp always has a sign by the door "Did you remember to put on clothes?" Streaking, though, is always disruptive. As someone who has managed any number of "native protocols" interacting on a campus backbone, I know that those are far more disruptive then the kids who streak the library each semester before exams.

Tunneling protocols over IP is the like late night explicit romantic phone call. It may be an expedient solution to a short term problem in a niche situation, but it is no architecture. Such phone calls have their own protocol, and their own semantic choices. If that same communication style extends to other phone calls, you get social problems, and potential law suits. Tunneling protocols, xxxx over IP, are just as problematic. They are barriers to interoperability. They don’t recognize external costs. I have seen dozens of high-dollar man hours expended to avoid a second $500 gateway. I’ve seen larger numbers of man hours expended again and again by network operations staff to sustain the protections that these tunneled protocols need.

Based on experience and battle scars, here are a few principles that *I* hold dear:

• Anything that can be attached to the internet, will be. This means that it will be exposed to unanticipated protocols, hostile interactions, and even accidental DOS attacks. We should define interfaces to systems accordingly.
• Systems should be small and coherent, and should not have the internet in the middle.
• If the internet is in the middle, or perhaps even if IP is in the middle, what you have is two systems, and you should treat it as such.
• Internal "native" protocols should not be used to communicate between systems.
• The communication stack at the edge of a system should be well tested and well debugged, and have been used in as many open scenarios as possible so that all exceptionalism will have been eliminated. I never want to discover a new "unanticipated interaction"
• When any combination of systems gets to a sufficient size, interoperability (or the lack thereof) becomes the most significant determinant of expense.
• In any significant system integration, you will be unable to prevent diversity. (Every now and then, someone asks me "Wouldn’t it be easier if we just picked one vendor, one brand, and..." I point out that if we did that, it would take us 20 years to get the "one true protocol" installed, and by that time, we would be unable to buy the legacy systems any more.)

At the edge of each system, we should have well defined discoverable interfaces. There will be circumstances, few and rare, in which we legitimately need to split a system in half<—>but not many. There will always be a need for tunneled protocols, just as there will always be those late night phone calls. We rely on them when we must, but are fooling ourselves if we rely on either one by design.

System providers should always ask these questions.

• What is the interoperability requirement?
• Do you want the integration to scale?
• Will one integrator be responsible for all systems, and all systems that interact with them?
• Over time, will the system ever interact with additional systems?
• Will there ever be any new security requirements.

Answer all five questions. Ask yourself how you define system. Consider whether you are able accurately to predict the changes that will occur in the internet over the life of the system, which may be 20 years? Then, and only then, is it time to consider the justification of the native protocol outside the core system. Then consider if you would be willing to put *that* full explanation into your sales literature...

As your systems mature, as they begin interacting with others, don't let them run around naked.

Cyborg Beetles, Cyber-security, Smart Buildings, and the Smart Grid

Cyber beetles provide an interesting glimpse into agent based interactions. Smart grids and smart buildings are integrated today using deep, integration, and complete control of the underlying processes. As more and more nodes are added to any system, the overhead of maintaining all interactions at a central point becomes more significant. In grid-scale systems, system designers have managed complexity by limiting diversity; a system may be managing ten thousand substations, but at least they are identical systems. A current DARPA project dramatically demonstrates a better approach.

At a recent IEEE meeting in Italy, Michel Maharbiz of the University of California demonstrated his Cyborg Beetle. His team has implanted electrodes in a giant flower beetle and mounted a wireless receiver on its back. The team is able to cause the beetle to take off, to hover, to turn left and right, and to land. Someday, a system like this may be used for surveillance or to guide rescue operations.

The beauty of the system is its simplicity. It uses an off-the-shelf wireless receiver. The signals sent to the beetle are very simple. The beetle performs all complex acts without requiring direct control. The biggest challenge is placing the electrodes. The interface consists of six electrodes implanted in the basal nodes of the flight muscles and in its optic lobes.

The beetle is arrives able to maintain its equilibrium. It comes able to synchronize its muscles to maintain efficient flight. The system uses the minimum signals needed to make the beetle do so. Like scratching a dog on the side to get that hind leg going, the cyborg beetle gets an itch to fly and takes off. Because the messages are so insignificant, this approach saves battery life as well programming complexity.

The beetle has evolved for efficient flight and balance. A core principle of ecology is that the most intense competition is always intra-niche competition. Beetles compete with other beetles, and compete most intensely with beetles that seek the same food, and live in the same place. This is a good model for the smart grid and for smart building interactions.

We want the most rapid development we can get for each of the nodes of the smart grid, and for each of the technologies of smart energy. To get this rapid development, we must put these technologies in direct intra-niche competition, and not allow competition to be lessened by large product lines or entrenched systems.

We can do this by limiting the control and integration we use between each node on the grid. We must eschew deep integration and direct control of the processes of each substation. Just as the Cyborg Beetle operators leave flying to the evolved processes, we should leave substation operation to the substation, and home device operation to the home devices. We want a rich, diverse ecosystem of energy strategies, an ecosystem with intense competition.

Control of the Beetle is limited to deciding whether to hover or to land, to turn left or to turn right. The beetle knows how to fly, and how to land. A beetle that will not fly can be replaced. That’s how it should be in the smart grid and in the smart building and home. Let the node take care of security. Let the node take care of operations.

You can watch the flight of the Beetle at MIT Technology Review Multimedia (http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=217)

Energy Interoperability Standards: Smart Buildings, Smart Grid

Earlier this month, Bill Cox of Cox Software Architects proposed the formation of standard committee for Energy Interoperability at OASIS. The core of the proposed work is the definition of XML and Web services interactions for so-called Automated Demand Response, growing out of work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Demand Response Research Center. The proposal comes from the context of many discussions in and related to the OpenADR Technical Advisory Group, GridWise Architecture Council, Grid-Interop, the NIST Smart Grid project, and GridEcon (an upcoming conference on the economics of the Smart Grid - http://www.gridecon.com/ ).

The UCAIug, whose members are largely utilities and their suppliers, is an identified source of requirements, goals, data models and comments. Before chartering, the committee wishes to identify other stakeholders with other perspectives. Collaboration with other groups of stakeholders is actively being sought. Other stakeholders include energy market makers, Independent System Operators, and policy and regulatory groups.

Smart buildings are critical to the success of energy interoperability. Owners and integrators of smart buildings are invited to participate. The proposed committees work will be particularly important to those working on Net Zero Energy (NZE) buildings.

The proposed work offers a path to national and perhaps international markets for energy-responsive systems. Today, such communications are balkanized and suppliers must re-develop all core functionality for each state. A national standard is expected to speed innovation and adoption of new E-Tech products.

The original proposal can be found at http://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/smartgrid-discuss/200902/msg00007.html To join the smartgrid-discuss@lists.oasis-open.org list, send email to smartgrid-discuss-subscribe@lists.oasis-open.org. There is no commitment to join OASIS or participate in a technical committee.

The discussion is part of a broader effort within OASIS to apply applying the standards and methods of e-commerce to new energy. You can read about this effort, known as OASIS Blue, at http://www.oasis-open.org/resources/white-papers/blue/.

For information or inquiries about either the Energy Interoperability committee or about OASIS Blue, contact me.