Energy, Innovation, and E-Tech

The culture of information technology is one of innovation and rapid change. The culture of energy is risk-adverse and slow to change. We need to move from energy to E-Tech to address today’s problems of climate, of security, and of reliability. E-Tech will embrace diversity to customize each solution for each situation. E-Tech will support rapid quick adoption of new technologies. E-tech must not be constrained by the slow adoption of the regulated utilities. E-Tech must be more tolerant of poor power quality. E-Tech must provide better support of digital systems for business and entertainment than do today’s systems.

Today’s energy distribution systems are deeply integrated and intolerant of diversity. Utilities routinely demand new components based on 20 year old technology. SCADA security relies on physical defense of dumb systems. Every decision is made to preserve a static hierarchy of systems from generator to final user.

Tomorrows energy distribution must acknowledge and accept distributed generation and diversity of technology. Every demarcation will potentially support energy flows in either direction. Net energy users will be able to negotiate with different suppliers. Todays presumption of hierarchical control will not support this.

As new technologies hit the market, new sources of energy will appear in a patchwork across the distribution networks. Some of these will be competing brands of existing technologies. Some of these will be radical variants and extensions of existing technologies, perhaps leveraging intelligence or nanotechnology to create something that is qualitatively distinct. Some of these will use whole new approaches to electrical generation, such as the bacterial system I wrote of last fall.

Other approaches will change the way energy is used. Energy storage, conversion, and recycling are all parts of the Net Zero Energy (NZE) building. If some of these approaches create excess energy that can be sold to the grid, our interface should support it. As the price, i.e. scarcity, of electricity grows, a building may wish to redeploy more and more of its energy for sale. It is imaginable that the mix of energy sources inside a building may be unique. It is certain that the mix of energy sources in each building are likely to change over time.

The current models of grid operation will not support these new scenarios. Deep process-oriented integration will be a barrier to rapid innovation. Current assumptions of a paternalistic utility providing all control will not be sustained. New models of loose integration and symmetric interactions are required.

Today, new energy technologies have an additional hurdle to get to market; they must be accepted by the utilities as a proper peer with full process revealed. This can add years to the trip to market. This presents a huge barrier to venture funding of energy project. We must remove that barrier, through adopting service oriented integration and abandoning process integration. When we do, many more energy ventures will be funded. When we do, we will have gone a long way toward making E-Tech as agile and innovative as high tech.

Smart Buildings, Smart Energy, and the Road Ahead

I arrived in Chicago for the AHR show with the early Sunday morning budget flight crowd. I was not surprised that most of the van worked with HVAC. I was gratified to be recognized by Terry Reynolds of Control Technology. Terry told me that he was using oBIX in his jobs. “We are just starting to crack things open” he observed. We compared notes on projects ranging from the UNC EBMS (Enterprise Building Management System) to the New York City public school energy management system.

He went on to ask me of  what is going to drive adoption faster. I think there are five elements of smart energy that are now on the horizon.  Each of them will accelerate the deployment of open systems for energy-using and supplying systems. Each will also expand the use of oBIX.

WS-DD and WS-DP are going to bring automatic discovery and configuration to embedded energy systems. Most people use these technologies already. Their use in building and energy systems is new. When you have plugged your computer into a network and found the printers, you have performed device discovery (DD). When you further found that the printer supports duplex printing, but not color, you have used a device profile. The WS stands for Web Services and these protocols are being developed into standards at OASIS.

The fascinating part about WS-DD and WS-DP is that one of the world’s largest makers of electrical switch gear and building systems, Schneider Electric, is part of the standards committee. Sooner or later, we will have profiles for building systems just as we do for printers and digital cameras. Just as they do now for cameras, these profiles will describe functionality and use, rather than sensors and actuators. Perhaps these profiles will delineate predefined oBIX contracts for performance. If so, this will at last make it safe for business applications to interact with building systems.

WS-Calendar is an effort to formalize and standardize schedule elements for web services. Interactions with business functions always begin with agreeing on a schedule. Business interactions with the smart grid will always begin with a price and a schedule. Schedules will award the developer of autonomous systems; just as the use of ICalendar schedules the interactions of autonomous people. When I invite someone to a meeting using ICalendar, the responsibility to get up in the morning, eat breakfast, drop of the kids at school, etc., is the onus of the other meeting attendees. In the same way, responsibility for preparation of a meeting space, including economic negotiations with the grid for energy, will fall to the building system.

New standards to provide situation awareness to first responders will lead to the WS-ready standardization for techniques to visualize building system operations. 911 operators and first responders will be able to query building systems. There will be an open source SVG-based framework to tie floor plans to sensor data, and to provide a source of meaning to the underlying sensor data. (SVG is a standard displaying scalable graphics in a way that can use standard interactive web techniques such as AJAX. SVG is available on Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and many cell phones; Google is even making an SVG plug in for Internet Explorer.) Once we have a code requirement to visualize building operations in an open standards-based way, it will be natural to use the same interface for maintenance and operations.

OpenLynx is an open source oBIX server, available on SourceForge. Peter Michaelic has defined it with a pluggable architecture; any underlying protocol can be plugged to the inside and exposed as oBIX on the outside. OpenLynx reduces the barriers to providing standards-based web services to any underlying system.

OpenADR is a developing standard for Automatic Demand Response. Demand Response is what utilities call the interactions to manage demand by sending messages, including price signals, to their customers. Utilities have a growing interest in what they call fulfillment, i.e., they care not only that processes are followed, but that contracted energy goals are met. This means that building systems, and their operations, are about to be linked directly to corporate revenues.

When I was in high school, I learned to swim out and wait for the big wave. They always came in sets, and the first wave of the set was not the biggest. So I would tread water, and count the swells. Each of these efforts is currently underway. Together they will remove the barriers to standards-based middleware for building systems. I’m counting energy swells and waiting for the big one.

Coordinating Time and Energy

Buildings use 46% of the energy used in North America. Consensus guesses are that buildings could reduce their energy use by a third while improving the amenities they offer, by becoming enterprise-responsive without other change in technology. Clearly the most basic enterprise interaction is what is the schedule for each room, and how many people will be using the room.

The best guesses are that half of the electricity generated each year in the North America is wasted due to poor alignment of generation and consumption. The way to align the behaviors of these two groups, each autonomous, and each with quite different values is price signals. As each price signal, and each energy contract, would include a schedule component, we need a standard way to discuss schedules in web services for power negotiations.

17% of North American generation is used for less than 110 hours per year. Utilities want to manage the consumption patterns using a process they refer to as Demand-Response. Demand Response always has a scheduling component. It would be nice to use the same xml object for buildings, energy markets, and demand response. Add in weather arbitrage for distributed generation and more domains need to share common scheduling information.

So I went looking for a calendar standard for web services I could use. I as surprised not to find one. I am looking for a small "micro-specification" that would not exist on its own, but would be incorporated into other specifications. I call this WS-Calendar. I want to keep WS-Calendar (or whatever) small as I think that we can get it off the ground and completed quickly. oBIX has gotten about half way there, but I fear a component of a control system standard will not be picked up elsewhere (for social reasons).

oBIX needs it because a significant component of enterprise responsiveness is letting building systems easily receive scheduling information from business programs. Most of us regularly invite 7 people and a room to a meeting. If the "room calendar" could inform the building systems to be ready on time, and to ventilate for 8 people, more efficient operations would result. We have all been in conference rooms that are freezing with 4 people in attendance, and sleepy when 15 are in attendance...

There are some remaining issues in such a standard. Do I put my performance contract inside the Calendar (as a meeting is) or outside but within the same payload? Would I refer to one, or several, oBIX contracts from within the Calendar? Could contracts refer to one or several calendar items? It seems to me that the same issues would come up if the calendar was part of a BPEL, or part of OpenADR, or even part of WSDM.

Watch soon for discussion prior to the formation of the WS-Calendar Technical Committee in OASIS. And drop me a line if you want to participate, or if you have other use cases you want to share.

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!