Collaborative Energy: Smart Grids and Intelligent Buildings together

Intelligent energy use acquires energy at the right time at the right price for the right reason. Intelligent buildings provide customer amenities and customer services at the right time. Collaborative energy works with the smart grid to minimize the incompatibilities of these two problem sets. Systems on the grid and in the building need to do a better job of sharing information to improve the performance of these functions.

Smart operations in transmission and distribution will provide only minimal help in adapting to new energy sources or in coordinating supply and demand. The improved situation awareness they provide can, however, deliver better market information to help smart buildings acquire energy at the right time.

Intelligent buildings need to know what services their occupants expect them to provide, and at what quality of service. Today’s intelligent thermostat makes the occupant think about the building. The occupant should tell the building what his activities are, and what quality of service he expects. The thermostat, then, should optimize service [comfort] delivery as well as economic performance on its own.

To optimize economic performance, buildings need four types of information from a smart grid. (1) A smart grid should provide the building with the price of energy now, and anticipated price in the future. (2) A smart grid should provide risk and reliability information, both now and for the future. (3) A smart grid should provide information on other aspects of electricity that the building occupant may be interested in, such as available carbon credits or green generation source. (4) A smart grid must provide the building with information on current energy usage, information that should be as frequent and as close to real time as practicable. With these information streams, the intelligent building can begin to use energy intelligently.

The plug in electric vehicle is just one more smart component of the intelligent building. The owner should provide a schedule of the services that will be required. This may include distance to work. It may include after-school sports and it may include evening choir practice or even community organizing. Energy use decisions by the car, including rapid charging or overnight waits, becomes merely another aspect of the functions of an intelligent building.

These capabilities are pre-adaptations for distributed energy. In biology, preadaptation refers to features evolved for one purpose that are ready to serve another purpose later. Distributed energy will be more intermittent than current electrical sources, and may be subject to more regulation as the when it may or may not be used. The intelligent building is what enables smart grids to accept distributed energy.

Collaborative energy is how the smart grid will deliver the most benefits to society. Those benefits will be social and environmental as well as economic. The purpose of the smart grid is to better coordinate energy supply and demand, even as the sources of that supply become more distributed and less reliable. But collaboration requires able partners; smart grids require smart buildings able to make intelligent decisions about energy use.

Smart buildings are more important than smart grids

Smart operations in transmission and distribution won’t help us much. An upgrade for utility operations is long overdue, especially if energy distribution gets over its severe case of not-invented-here. This upgrade may be absolutely necessary for the grid to support more dynamic energy markets, ones that will balance electricity supply and demand. The most important smart interactions will come from the grid’s end nodes: industry, commercial buildings and homes. To get the benefits of the smart grid, we must have smart load.

The electric distribution system of North America is falling victim to its own success. It has enabled for us the greatest life style ever invented. It has largely succeeded in creating electricity to cheap to meter…until we bundle the capital costs into the electricity. But that electricity is not reliable enough for sensitive electronics. Wholesale prices for that cheap electricity may leap several orders of magnitude on a hot humid day like today in North Carolina.

Many businesses have unflattering terms to describe their customers. Consumers. Marks. Johns. For utilities, the word is load. But cheap dumb load is becoming too expensive. New cybersecurity concerns may make direct control, and direct control liability, too expensive. Even the much touted benefits of direct control of electric vehicle load become elusive in the mid-term.

Distributed energy resources are a challenge as well as opportunity. Used unwisely, they can increase the difficulty of managing the grid. Some implementation of central supply management to support wind farms show more gas burned in fast-start generators than if no wind was used at all. This is why the lion’s share of priority smart grid standards are for economic interactions rather than for control.

Energy management systems in the end nodes will have to become autonomous systems able to respond to economic signals from the grid, including predictions about future prices. Those economic signals must be great enough to spur investment. Because the risk of adopting new technologies is lower for individual end nodes than it is for any utility, some homes and commercial buildings will be able to adopt new technologies more rapidly than can the grid. The smart grid roadmap points to standards to enable this change, and to create opportunities through dynamic pricing

A mix of purchasers, ranging from early adopters to the risk adverse, will result in more normal markets for energy technology, e.g., the Pemberton innovation diffusion and Rogers technology adoption curves. This will attract more venture capital to distributed energy, particularly to energy storage. It is a simple fact that there are more storage options at the smaller scale of the end node than there are at grid scale. There are a lot of ways to store energy, and the curious might look to IDEA (District Energy) to expand their perspectives.

End nodes may have a mix of energy storage technologies. Thermal. Chemical. Hydrogen. Capacitors. Once they are the, the proper use of excess on-site generation is filling storage rather than selling to the grid. This can arguably result in 20% efficiency gains for each alternative energy without requiring new technology. This is a significant step on the road to net zero energy buildings. And net zero energy buildings are the smartest kind of load, able to responds significantly to each price signal from the grid.

For too long, we have leaned on the utilities to maintain our life styles and our civilization. It is time to give them a hand. It is time for smart load.

The price of energy

It was a busy week at the smart grid SDO conference. I was working with three of what the smart grid roadmap (www.nist.gov/smartgrid) calls Priority Action Plans (PAPs). These action plans are schedule, price, and messages for Demand Response (DR) and Distributed Energy Resources (DER). The technology of the grid is harder, and riskier, but these standards are what will give them a path to market. These standards will define the competition to make products in the end nodes of the grid. By the middle of next year, we will have three key standards out of this process.

Two of these standards are components. These standards will live inside other communications. Because these components will be common to many domains, meaning they will be inside business and buildings as well as in the grid, they will be much more useful than if they were built as one standard. These components are schedule and price.

Readers of this blog know that I have long wanted a WS-Calendar. WS-Calendar will be the web service form of ICalendar. ICalendar is used to exchange schedule information with others. When you go to a travel web site book and click on “Add this to my Calendar”, you are using ICalendar. When I invite you to a meeting and you click on the attachment to add it to your calendar, you have used ICalendar.

Schedules coordinate behavior between people. Web services schedules can coordinate behavior between business processes. Smart energy coordinates activities between energy supply and energy demand, including building systems and business processes. A web service for schedules can flow across domains, and be understood by each. The Calendar Consortium (www.calconnect.org) has committed to delivering an ICalendar for web services by year’s end.

You cannot understand price unless you understand the product you are buying. You can have commerce with any product, but standards make markets. For electricity, a product may have other characteristics such as source (wind or coal) and regulatory burden (carbon offsets). Mike Oldak of the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) calls these attributes terms and conditions, because they define the power contract. Schedule is also a part of the electrical product; power delivered at 2:00 am is worth much less than power delivered at 2:00 pm. Price and product must go together.

Product definitions need to be machine readable to really change the way we interact with the grid. Nearly everyone who has anything to do with electricity delivery, from policy to substation has agreed to work together to define the product. The North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB), is taking the lead on defining the requirements. NAESB will work with the utility stakeholders to define the characteristics that are relevant to markets.

OASIS will take the product from NAESB and create an open standard for communicating price information in the Energy Market Information Exchange (EMIX) Technical Committee (EMIX). The EMIX TC will also incorporate the WS-Calendar specification from CalConnect when it becomes available. It is our goal to define a message that can be used throughout the grid, from the generator to the home. OASIS will then work with NAESB to bring the standard back into the business process and regulations of the grid. The EMIX TC is now in formation, and you can read the proposed charter at the link below. Contact me if you would like to join.

Some of you know the Energy Interoperability TC, already underway. The Energy Interoperability TC builds upon the work of the OpenADR (Automated Demand Response) specification. The Energy Interoperability TC blurs the distinction between DR and DER by communicating information about prices now, and anticipated prices in the future. To the grid, at some level, it is all the same whether I turn off the lights, run off a battery, and fire up a generator when I get a message to reduce demand. The Energy Interoperation TC will deliver market information (price, product, and schedule) to the end nodes (Industry, commercial buildings, and homes) of the grid. The Energy Interoperability TC has been meeting for a month, but you can still join it, too. A link to its charter is below. When it’s work is done, it, too, will be submitted to NAESB and the IEC.

Drop me a line to learn more or need help to join one of these committees.

Monday Morning at the Smart Grid SDO Workshop

Seven pre-meetings and a plenary into this workshop, it already feels like I have been here for a week. It has come a long way; everyone from the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to the state-side National Association or Regulatory and Utility Commissioners (NARUC) is on the same message. Smart grid interoperability standards must provide a platform for innovation. We must support more players and new entrants into energy markets. We must not make decisions in one domain that constrain the other domains.

Even before the conference started, I was talking to new people bringing their skills and knowledge to the problems of energy. Last night, I spoke for a long time with Greg Schwartz of CalConnect on the problems of coordinating activities across our daily lives, whether class schedules or energy prices, whether building systems or industrial operations. He identified his biggest problem as one of institutional awareness. CalConnect has key technical members in Oracle, Microsoft and Apple. Increased awareness is needed so that their calendar standards people will be given the time to finish the cross-cutting web services of scheduling.

The FIX Protocol consortium is here in force. FIX, a standard for financial information, provides the underpinning for the world’s major trading operations, from stock exchanges to commodities. The support and cooperation of FIX can help us get to transactional energy much faster.

Even at breakfast, I was talking to someone from the ASE, the automotive standards group. While she is here (Carolyn? - I wish I was better with names) to discuss the issues associated with electric vehicles. As the conversation continued with themes of competitiveness and knowledge drain, we turned to integration strategies. Cars have been under incredible cost and integration pressure, and have used service oriented integration of control systems to improve integration while reducing complexity. Detroit may be the place to hire engineers experienced in service oriented control integration.

George Arnold is emceeing the morning; anyone who has been following the smart grid process knows where he stands: informational interoperability, cooperation among the SDOs, and above all, speed of standards development.

Aneesh Chopra, the federal CTO described the goals of the administration and how they tied to this effort. He named key overall goals of enabling technical innovation, improving global competiveness, and open government. The meme he rode the longest was "verbs not nouns". Too often new systems and new standards are nouns. "Now we have a system". "Now we have a standard." He wants us to focus on effective use of standards. How many people can use each interface. What new uses or approaches to energy use these standards?

Now I may always here the same thing, but I heard "light, loose service oriented standards" in every bit of his talk.

Well that was the first half of the morning. More later.