What buildings have to say to smart grids

The challenges of smart energy are well known. How can we as a society based on cheap plentiful always available energy, adapt to shortages, intermittent availability, and a continuing shortage of capacity to move energy from where we make it to where we want to use it. Local shortages and outages will become the norm, although local surpluses might create greater challenges. Most importantly, how can we adapt without abandoning the life-styles that we enjoy, and that we hope our grandchildren can as well.

The national Priority Action Plans (PAPs) for smart grids and smart energy aim to accelerate development of enabling specifications for smart energy. Most look solely to the internal operations of the electrical grid itself. These activities, while important, can only enable the innovations we need; electrical grids themselves will not be the basis the most important changes.

Others PAPs look to extend grid operations into our lives. PAP11, for example, looks to control and track personal vehicle use in service to the grid. We are not willing as a society to assume our position as cogs in the machine. Utilities and policy makers see this as the happy efficiency of well-ordered future; the public instead sees the dystopian factory of Chaplin’s Modern Times. Perhaps we should be glad that while other action plans focus more on openness and change, this activity is being developed under a veil of trade secrets and inside pool that will only speed the early failure of its model.

The newly formed PAP17 launched the ASHRAE SPC (Standard Project Committee) 201, Facility Smart Grid Information Model. SPC 201 offers a consumer-centric model that can support the rapid changes in the ways we use and manage energy. The focus is on how the systems in buildings can interact to create what grid operators call Distributed Energy Resources (DER). Building-based DER addresses the intermittent shortages and outages of the smart grid directly.

Traditional grid-building interactions use direct control. Turn this off, turn this on, to support the needs of the grid. PAP17 assumes the economic communications of price and availability developed by the market-oriented PAPs, and considers what a building needs to communicate internally so it can be mature market participant.

If each building has its own portfolio of DER, sun, wind, perhaps limited pump storage offered for voltage regulation, batteries, ice, load shedding….That building may use a different suite of internal responses each time it sells a response to the grid. Market participation becomes based on reliably producing a change in power use rather than turning on and off a device. If SPC201 fails, it will fail by failing to embrace this economic model, and letting its engineers revert to a model of direct dispatch by the grid.

A distributed energy resource (DER) may be:

1. A private asset of the building, used only for the buildings purposes, perhaps when the grid is unavailable, and not revealed to the grid at all
2. A component of a building’s demand response, so turning off the chiller or turning on the generator are indistinguishable to the grid
3. An intermittent asset of building with availability characteristics which are *may* be revealed to the grid, i.e., the grid operator may contract to know whether it is sun or wind, so the operator may better estimate when it can be relied upon
4. A building asset that happens to be operated by a third party. That party *may* happen to be a traditional player, perhaps one called a “utility”. It could just as easily be an ISO, depending on scale and location. Or it could be some new form of energy service provider
5. Owned by the building but effectively leased to the grid operator, and treated as a forward deployed asset of the grid
6. Owned and operated by a third party and used as a forward deployed asset of the energy services provider

(4, 5, 6) are the ones that look like direct dispatch as we understand it today—but they need not be. Whether the grid sends market signals that are flash traded to negotiate individual contracts for use of DER, or whether that contract is pre-executed, actual use of that DER is best thought of as a call for performance on the contract. Third party service providers will pay better for guaranteed response, and will demand greater penalties for non-performance when a high service level was promised.

During the National Roadmap efforts in 2009, we used the catch-phrase “Every end-node is a microgrid”. A microgrid is responsible for meeting its own needs and purposes by managing its own energy use, generation, storage, recycling, and market operations to deal with surplus or deficit. Note that the market operations are last. Microgrids are defined recursively (as per Galvin): A suite in a building or a production line could be a microgrid. The office park or campus could be a microgrid containing the building microgrids.

At ConnectivityWeek last May, heard a speaker from the DOW described his big goal that every building be able tolerate 8 days of grid down-time with no loss of amenities. Contemplating this requirement suggests what a poor partner the smart grids will be. SPC201 is reaching toward the information sharing that equipment and systems in buildings and homes will need to support us despite smart grids.

If there is a flowering of Green-Tech, it will come from consumer based markets that can tolerate rapid innovation and change. Those markets will require low integration costs based on loose coupling and energy information sharing.

Continuous programming for Smart Energy Buildings

Best practices in high performance buildings recommend continuous commissioning. Keeping building systems at peak performance requires knowing what high performance looks like, and how that performance changes over time. But performance requirements change over time. Policy based system management requires that we know the purpose of each room. We need continuous programming for buildings.

Building programming is the name of the pre-design conversations about what an owner expects to get out of a building. Designers ferret out each purpose. The design team and the owners establish clear expectations of the expected performance for each function. Some praxis defines the energy performance expectations for each space as well. This one time activity is complete before serious design begins.

This program should guide the initial commissioning requirements. Does this space support the ventilation requires of a dining area within it energy budget. Does another space meet its energy budget while supporting high-end retail? Does the ventilation support maintaining alert cubicle workers throughout a long day? These considerations can support policy based building system management.

There are two barriers to developing systems to support this model. There is no standard for passing the original program information to the commissioning process. Programs change.

It is quite common at Universities to spend 100 grand to renovate a brand new building. During the years between programming and construction, some purpose changes, some new program started, and 4 offices are now a classroom. The break area is now a data center. The back lab is now a reception space for the new academic discipline; it now has an exterior door. In commercial buildings, each new tenant may have new requirements. Things change

Even without renovations, the building program changes, and with it, the performance requirements. The squash court becomes a spinning class, supporting many sweating exercisers rather than two. The conference room becomes a break room, and adds a refrigerator and microwave. The new break room must be better ventilated, to avoid tormenting the work force with the smell of microwave popcorn. These changes create new program requirements that should in turn update the energy performance requirements.

To meet their promise, LEED buildings need to be commissioned against their designed performance, the design that was built on the original programming. To maintain that performance, this commissioning should be continuous and automated. To keep that commissioning meaningful, it its targets should be updated as the buildings program requirements change. And that requires continuous programming.

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.

Risky Business – Removing barriers to Free Energy

It is no secret to readers that I think we can best balance energy supply and demand using pure economic transactions. Whatever you feel about flash trading, those markets with millions of 14 millisecond transactions prove that we know how to run markets fast enough to manage even the most demanding decision making on smart grids. Free energy, that is energy markets unencumbered price and reliability arbitrage, is certainly the fastest path to the technologies we need to balance supply with the increasingly volatile supple we foresee. But today’s utilities serve a social justice purpose that I have been unable to reconcile in my mind with free energy until now.

We need free energy because we need to unbundle two of the most significant services provided alongside today’s energy delivery; availability risk arbitrage and price risk arbitrage. These services create a moral hazard we can no longer afford. Availability risk arbitrage removes performance incentives for end nodes to install systems for energy storage and generation. Price risk arbitrage reserves all economic incentives for energy storage and generation to the grid, where it is too expensive and innovation adoption is, of necessity, to slow to support the type of venture creation we have seen in high tech.

The basic problem is that our electric grid operates with lower margins for error than it ever has before, and current policy is to reduce them further. No community is clamoring for more power lines in its back yard even as our houses are filled with ever more energy consuming equipment for computing, telecommunications, and entertainment. It is becoming too expensive, in generation costs, infrastructure capacity, and social will to maintain constant oversupply of traditional energy. We wish to use new energy sources that are unpredictable and episodic. Attempts to smooth out supply volatility at the grid re too expensive or too few. (Ask me some time why natural gas sales went up when gas generation was replaced by wind in Colorado.) The ability of the grid to supply availability arbitrage is failing.

With fixed prices, the economic incentives for end nodes to participate in energy generation and storage are non-existent. The most basic market rule is buy low and sell high. Without dynamic pricing, the rule for homes and commercial buildings is sell low (wholesale) and buy high (retail). Efforts by local regulators to repeal that rule are as artificial as efforts to repeal gravity.

Dynamic pricing changes all that. With the volatility of energy supply fully exposed, end nodes will buy technologies to manage their risk. With the volatility of energy prices fully exposed, end nodes will find the business case to manage their power purchases. Bottlenecks in the power grid will result in local congestion pricing, letting the true costs neighborhood infrastructure decisions to be seen by the public.

Utilities today must play not to lose rather than to win. They cannot adapt new technologies quickly because they must always be reliable. Market actors that cannot accept risk, cannot afford to innovate. End nodes can voluntarily accept risk, and so can afford to adopt new technology. If Denver, where we met this month to form the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP), is plunged into darkness for a week, it is a dire outcome; if my home fails for a week, is provides entertainment to my neighbors. The difference between grid-level innovation and end-node innovation is the difference between tragedy and comedy.

Smart grids will transfer risk to their end nodes. Economic agents which assume risk will expect to be paid for it. These payments will be the fertilizer for an untold number of new technologies. The best way to transfer risk and payments together is self-balancing, self organizing free markets in energy. Systems that can participate in these markets for us as well as systems that can store or generate energy on-site, will be the reward.