General Relativity and Control Systems Standards

I suspect most of my readers can just about remember light speed, the 100 foot barn, and the 110 foot log from learning about relativity. The barn had doors at each end, and one set would close the instant the other doors opened. The challenge was to transport the log through the barn. The answer had to do with light speed and collapsing space, so that as one got close enough to light speed, the log shortened, and it could fit through the barn. It was a simple enough calculation as to how fast one could go to make the log shrink how much. When each of us had completed the math, the professor sprang the surprise on us: "OK, what is happening from the perspective of a cockroach on the log?"

I haven’t been writing much recently, because I have been writing all of the time. The national smart grid roadmap is a project being completed in double time. The EPRI team is diverse and whip smart. The workshop participants are opinionated and have hundreds of millions on the line. I would be surprised of the process was not contentious.

The real problem, though, is no one thinks of the cockroach. Each player on the multi-disciplinary team sees the problem set up the way that they want things to work. Power grid engineers see homes and offices as just one more set of slow devices to turn on and off. Homes and offices see the grid as a secretive and not very reliable partner they have to work with. Green and sustainable energy folks seem to see the laws of thermodynamics as as much a social construct as are the tariffs and business procedures of the grid. Utilities executives see distributed generation as an inefficient way for middle class hobbyists to get their obsessions paid for by those less well off.

The cockroach was moving every bit as fast as the log he was sitting on. While an observer saw space, and the length of the log, contracting, the cockroach was sitting on the log and saw it remaining at 110 feet. The cockroach actually saw the barn getting shorter still, and not likely to let the log pass. However, the cockroach also saw was time dilation instead of space dilation. To the cockroach, the two doors no longer open and close simultaneously, giving the log just enough time to slip through.

And that is the problem with the smart grid. The grid operators do not see the problems of the buildings. The building owners do not see the problems of the grid, because they are hidden by the rules and market design. Venture capitalists do not see a path to profitability in funding projects with years of indecision by the utilities built into the sale cycle. “If only those others would learn about how hard my problems are…” None of them will embrace the perspective of the others; they happen to have other jobs.

Today, I have been wrestling with “Architecturally Significant Interfaces”. Grid architects tend to see the world as late 60’s open plan houses, with no proper rooms to divide the houses activities. Open up the kitchen to the dining room and living room. (I wonder how much great rooms are responsible for the tendency to eat take-out in front of the TV.) Open up the master bedroom to the great room as a loft; it is open and honest, and who cares if it scares the kids. Heck, pry the doors of the bathrooms, so everybody can interact, no matter what they are doing.

A good architecture divides the house into rooms, and thereby defines how people live there. It does not determine the furniture or the wall paint. The conceptual model of the smart grid (read it yourself, chapter 3) describes the functions of the grid and the buildings and people who participate in it. The Architecturally Significant Interfaces could define how information is handed between them; if selected correctly they will free up those in reach room to innovate, without concern for those in other rooms. If we end up with an open floor plan, we will have a mess, wherein in the name of openness we will need a family meeting to before we can decide to change anything.

Relativity—it relies on acknowledging different perspectives. Without acknowledging a few architecturally significant interfaces, the smart grid will assume a perspective held by no one. And that will be a prescription for failure.

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.

New Energy and Legacy Buildings

Building systems used to be fully compatible and interoperable. Prior to digital controls, the best systems were built with pneumatic controllers. Electric signals are complicated. There’s voltage. There’s there is binary packing of data. There’s non-standardized xml vocabularies. Pneumatics were simple. Pressure was everything.

Many institutional owners of buildings resisted the new-fangled digital controls for a long time. When own a large number of buildings, interoperability is more important. Before real standards for networking and remote communications, the most important interoperability was with the maintenance technician. As Roger, the long time head of HVAC for UNC explained to me “No matter what the problem, we can clear it from here with a tank of pressurized air”. This means that at UNC, and on many campuses, most of buildings still have pneumatic systems.

Pneumatic systems work best for continuous operation. They usually cannot perform automatic setbacks. Setbacks refer to adjusting the building temperatures up or down (depending on season) outside of business hours. Just as in the home without a digital thermostat, it is a rare building operator who will consistently and reliably perform manual setbacks.

At UNC, we have been looking at some innovative approaches to retrofitting pneumatic systems for automated central operation.

Cypress Semiconductor is one of the old-line silicon valley firms. Cypress has come up with a digital retrofit for pneumatic thermostats. The digital thermostats are then linked by a wireless network back to a central controller, enabling the thermostats to be re-set remotely. Cypress further claims that the thermostats collect data on system health through analyzing fluctuations in air pressure. The central controller is a standard PC, so an operator can use the web to re-set the thermostats.

The external interface to that PC is a traditional building system protocol. Cypress would have better served itself if they had reached further. Buildings that have pneumatic systems do not usually have effective or extensive building operations systems in place. At the next level, owners are trying to crack the façade of proprietary building systems and to achieve enterprise interaction. Interposing traditional building control protocols just gets in the way.

Enterprise interactivity will let these systems respond to the business of the occupants. Conference rooms could be heated and cooled based upon schedules in the corporate calendar. Larger building operations could respond changes in business schedules and to changes in staffing. In this year’s tight economy, building operations could respond to Friday furloughs in response to signals from human resources. Enterprises expect abstract web services such as oBIX, not low level protocols, even if repackaged in TCP/IP or even XML.

Cargo Cult Energy

I spent last week in Chicago and by of Silicon Valley, talking about new energy. In Chicago, we were talking about the smart grid, and how it enables new markets in energy. Out by San Francisco Bay, the conversation was, of course, about ventures and new businesses and high tech. There were exciting conversations in Chicago, ones that may lead getting the underlying structures of smart energy markets right. There were innovative projects in California, ones that are beginning to answer "What would your stuff do, if it knew the price of energy, now.?" In both locations, there was a tendency to fall into a trap that I call Cargo Cult Energy.

The phrase Cargo Cult names a reaction of some isolated islanders in the South Pacific to what they experienced in World War II. Some of these islanders had never seen internal combustion or manufactured goods or any food that they had not themselves pulled from the sea or hewn from the land. One day a stranger would come, or several. These strangers seemed very determined to cut down trees, and to flatten the land. The strangers were so obsessed that the islanders helped them, even going so far as to build a tower at the end of the flat space.

The strangers would go up into the towers and call down huge flying machines. All the supplies necessary for industrialized war would flow through this airstrip on an isolated island. The leavings dropped by the runways, and pilfered from the warehouses were more wealth than the islanders had ever imagined. The war ended, and the strange men left, and the flying machines came no more. On some islands, myths grew. If only the towers were maintained, if only the right rituals were performed at the end of the runway, then the machines, and then wealth would return.

In Chicago, fat too much of the conversation, before the GridEcon started each day, was of incentives. Over breakfast, alas, the conversation was often not of systems, and technology, and business process. Too often, plans were being built around short term incentives. What incentives do they have in New York? When do the tax incentives expire in Illinois?  We are not talking about priming the pump here. The business plans are short. Can we get in and get out when the incentives expire?

The venture capital guys were clear. They were not interested in funding any project whose business plan was based on tax credits, of utility rebates. What government gives, what the public utility commission grants, can just as easily be taken away tomorrow. Venture money wants long term value. Each technology should be sold on its clear and identifiable business value. Once that case was made, credits, and rebates could be a sweetener, a way to accelerate the business cycle.

Around the bay, I saw some many technology plans. I saw novel integrations of existing technology, in which simple things were made smart, particularly in how they used energy. I saw polymath projects, in which technologies and approaches from all over were combined into a novel product that used smart energy. There is a buzz of something ready to happen. Unfortunately I also saw folks tempted to lose their virtue.

Silicon Valley prides itself on a "virtuous culture of innovation", in which good products win, bad products lose, and hard work gets you ahead. I saw some very interesting, and perhaps some very good products. Too often, though, the management team forgets about the building the internet of things around energy, and gets lured by the siren song of third party programs. It’s great – they won’t even have to pay for it! We’ll pay for the installation with DR dollars! The homeowner won’t care because they’ll get a tax credit! We are not talking about priming the pump here. The business plans are short. "Can we get in and get out when the incentives expire?" In other words, these plans were without Silicon Valley virtue.

The energy markets in the US have been poor markets, looking to the regulators rather than to competitors for 100 years. To the extent that the smart grid enables new markets, successful new ventures will chase those new markets. Unless of course they get seduces by unnatural signals coming from the externa of the old markets. Unless they build their business plans around Cargo Cults.