Smart Energy with a little bit of Seoul.

My visit to Seoul this month was fascinating. The country of Korea built its infrastructure essentially from scratch in the last 50 years, and in doing so was able to use modern technology to challenge some fundamental assumptions that we make in the USA. IP-based telephony predominates based on pervasive free Wi-Fi. Custom tailors use radical outsourcing mediated by IT to provide near-instant services. The National Virtual Power Plant (NVPP) is as up-to-date as any, while using big-data tools in ways not often seen here. There is a desire to embrace the new without fear that seems young and fresh in the way the US often does not. But somehow, the single observation that stays with me is how the use of IT to challenges our assumptions about natural monopolies.

The Seoul Metropolitan Subway system is by far the best I have been on. The signage is unusually good. Many stations have large interactive maps. Every car has digital signs that display the next station in multiple languages. Music plays on the platforms to warn of each impending arrival. In the winter, automatic seat warmers make even the ride itself pleasanter than expected.

The fare system is seamless. The system pioneered in Seoul is now used in many US systems: a card, a wave in, and a wave out, and a charge based on beginning and ending stations. The systems to add money to your fare card will tell you the remaining balance instantly, without inserting the card, or needing to punch buttons. Unlike in the US, every station has prominent stations on which to drop your card and get cash back. The $0.50 deposit on the card itself is just as easy to get back. There is even competition for these cards as three subway cards, one credit card, and several debit cards can be used interchangeably with your transit card. In short, it is customer focused, consumer friendly, and feels like anything but the bureaucratic experience it is in the US.

The high-tech experience extends into the amenities as well. Subways in the US are often dead zones. In Seoul, each line provides choices of digital connectivity: 4G, WiFi, DMB, and WiBro. This supports the widespread use of IP-telephony in Seoul; without the legacy commitment to lines, almost every smart phone uses the almost universal WiFi. (More on that later.)

All of this is supported by an easy to use App, one that puts the well-regarded BART App to shame. The free App, available for all the usual platforms, works out routes and provides station by station information with precise departure and arrival times. The cost for each route and stop is computed and displayed in advance. A potential rider always knows whether to rush, and when he will arrive.

In the US, this would all be delivered through a semi-private agency, a Transit Authority. In the Seoul, the nineteen subway lines are built and operated by ten separate companies. Some routes may have a higher cost per kilometer, or per station, but that information is readily available before your ride. Fares are automatically allocated to the different companies based on the same services that compute the entire fare. With appropriate use of IT, the multi-vendor service is provided as if through a single provider.

Regular readers may recognize that this is the model of Transactive Energy.

The Seoul Metropolitan Subway system tears down assumptions about how natural are our regulated natural monopolies. To someone who considers the smart grid, it stirs re-thinking of how we consider last mile distribution in a distributed energy world. Just as South Korean phones use the connectionless protocols of the internet to avoid considerable high-cost build out of telecommunications infrastructure, transactive energy and distributed energy can provide better service at lower costs.

To gain these advantages, we must embrace the distributed multi-supplier business models that enable them. Trust capitalism. Embrace minimal market design to limit friction when changing suppliers several times a day if desired. Use IT to smooth any bumps in transition. I’ve written about this in papers on microgrids and autonomous power nodes. It was nice to see it in the field.

Privacy, Self Defense, and Smart Energy

I spent some time last week down a country road, watching the local power. I watched three phases that were greatly out of balance. I observed trapezoidal wave forms. We could see the home appliances of everyone else on the road, as they each turned on and off.

Together, we watched the power coming into his lab. They were his neighbors, and he knew them from observation. He could relate when they changed their appliances, and how they lived their lives. He could tell from the patterns how they affected the shared local electric distribution circuit. There were some especially odd patterns, second level harmonics that caused some unusual recurring spikes. It wouldn’t be hard, simple machine learning, really, to learn these special patterns for some types of equipment, and then to search for them.

This is all so much easier than it was even a couple years ago. Affordable gigahertz sampling is no longer cost prohibitive. Industrial espionage can be done from across the street. Soon private detectives will be able to read the activities in houses from down the street, using only a power connection, pattern matching against an on-line database, and a little creativity. Your house and business is now an open book, with or without the participation of utilities.

This technology was not built to look out, however. Monitoring and analyzing the distribution feed is a mere side effect of the system I was checking out. The purpose of these systems is not to spy on the distribution system, but to defend against the distribution system. What we could see on the samples is also felt by the building.

The purpose of this monitoring is to fix the power inside. Each phase of power is simultaneous corrected to near ideal wave forms. The effects inside the building are extraordinary. When supplied with an ideal power wave, electric motors become audibly quieter. While that alone makes an industrial space pleasanter, it reflects an underlying reduction in vibration and in generated heat. At the same time, the motor begins to operate at its faceplate output.

This is what I mean by defense against the distribution system. Excess vibration, and the associated noise and heat, are caused by the noise on the electrical supply, by wave forms that are less than the ideal. Traditional power conditioning systems often create trapezoidal or triangular wave forms—they may protect from spikes and sags, while they increase wear and tear. It’s too early to predict how much ideal power forms will extend the life of equipment, but reduced noise and reduced heat are strong benefits on their own.

While one can hear the change in motor operation, florescent lights and digital equipment benefit as well. Long time readers of this blog know that my house is beset by something that causes even my incandescent lights to fail in clusters. Having watched the power on this nearby local distribution loop, it seems likely that I have seen the answer, even while all parameters are “within spec for home distribution.”

The plan of course, is for the local distribution to get worse. While we watched, we saw changes to power on the entire loop when the charging of a single neighbor’s electric vehicle began. Even the best solar panel installations affect these wave forms, and most installations are far from the best. The effects not only damage neighbor’s equipment, but they may increase metered power use for those neighbors as well.

Defense from the grid, especially from the smart grid is an important new market. Distributed energy resources are in all our future, and they make such defense more important.

An allied outcome of this defense is that the view from the outside is obscured. The systems behind the power controller cannot be inspected as we inspected the neighbors. Unbalanced power use, that is, power unevenly spread across the three power phases is balanced on the outside of the controller. Power factor is optimized. This ideal power load reduces metered power, often substantially. The operation of individual motors and digital systems looks from the supply-side as a single ideal consumer. Energy-use privacy is protected and restored.

As consumers, we don’t yet know how to think about and use this kind of product. As smart energy, distributed energy resources, and electric vehicles become more widely deployed, we will want to learn.

Big Data, Buildings, and the Internet of Things

Big Data is the hot new buzz-phrase for something that buildings system integrators have long struggled with. Last Thursday (3/29), the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) launched its public initiative on big data for government, the Big Data Research and Development Initiative.

The purpose of big data is to support analytics, that is the massive crunching and correlating of data to find patterns. Early targets of the initiative include:

• putting the government’s own data sets into open formats
• pushing states to include a data or statistical literacy component in their education plans
• establishing ways to continuously collect data on prescribed topics as opposed to relying on temporary snapshots

The real time use of big data that is most commonly in the news click-stream and advertising analytics. This back-room technology only makes the news when there are privacy violations. Big data analytics are why Google is now in a death-match with Facebook, and why the European Union is in a privacy face-down with Google.

In government, the best known big data analytics are in security and crime prevention. Einstein systems gate all information in or out of each cabinet-level department, searching for patterns that indicate intrusion. The NSA and FBI are doing something with big data; the NSA may or may not be consolidating information on all internet communications at its Utah Data Center.

Buildings have long struggled with big data. They are not designed for storing or to processing too much. System instructions regularly warn to minimize trend reports. Product from a number of leading makers of environmental controls struggle with monitoring just a small portion of the buildings on the UNC campus. Building systems houses all aim at cloud-based analytics in their next release, but each that I have seen struggles with pushing information to the cloud. I have watched very fast networks struggling to handle data collection from a 100 buildings, and watched data edifices crack under the hundreds of gigabytes they produce each week.

We are just now entering the period in which the internet of things (IOT) becomes real, and the IOT stores its data in the cloud. Last month, Ninja Blocks (http://ninjablocks.com/) got its initial funding. Ninja blocks are consumer sensors that are as cheap as X10, and send their data to the cloud. Ninja blocks use open source hardware (download schematics from the site) to sense their environment: acceleration, temperature, current, humidity, motion, distance, sound, light and even capture video. You can create and sell your own Ninja Blocks to connect to the Ninja Cloud.

The Ninja Cloud connects this sensor information to social and cloud services. Sensor events can send tweets, SMS, or email. Ninja photos and video can move automatically into Facebook or Dropbox. The user plugs in a Ninja Block and then uses the web to develop scripts in the Ninja Cloud using point and click.

This may not be the same as energy management, but one of the more successful campus energy projects of recent years set up Facebook pages for buildings on the University of Mississippi campus. Students were encouraged to friend the buildings; systems in the buildings tweeted their energy use. The project raised Student awareness.

Ninja Blocks is a new company. They can probably do most of what they claim. Their team of entrepreneurial young engineers seems smart, quick, and committed. Their business plan is inspired using open source hardware to let others create new value sources for the Ninja Cloud. Still, I wonder whether their approach will scale well. They may hit the same wall that I have seen, when too many sensors are continuously logging too many points to the cloud.

Whether or not Ninja Blocks makes it, they are the future. Other start-ups, such as the Bluetooth-based, open source i-voltmeter will change the way we think sensors work. The data gathered by the internet of things will make its way to the cloud, where it will be Big Data. Building systems that do not participate will find themselves pushed aside.

The value of Big Data is in re-purposing and in re-use. The cost of gathering big data is going down, and will continue to go down. The Big Data from buildings will accumulate at an astounding rate. The value of Big Data will be in continuous re-harvesting for more information, the way click-streams and advertising are harvested again and again. Building operations and failure predictions are only the start.

Big Data from Building systems must learn to share well with others. This industry must consider its own version of the federal goals: open formats for data, better statistical literacy in systems, and the methods to collect and store very large volumes of data loom large. We may need to use the common semantics from Project Haystack as a common ontology for our big data. It will be mandatory to share with the Big Data from the IOT, both to accept IOT data into Building Clouds, and to send Building data into the IOT clouds, including the Ninja Cloud.

It will be a fast ride. Into the Clouds!

Forget Efficiency and Demand Response, Load Bank for the Grid

All the Smart Grid attention is on Demand Response, that is, on the half dozen times a year when the grid runs out of energy or has to turn to expensive energy sources. All the building attention is on efficiency, using the least energy inside the building possible. Neither approach supports renewables, or distributed energy resources. Efficiency may reduce the ability to respond to Demand Response signals. Buildings should turn to productive load banking instead.

When I am at home, my smart thermostat turns my home temperature up and down. In the winter, the temperature setting goes way down at night. The house becomes parsimonious just as the local wholesale power market goes negative. The price goes negative because it is expensive to turn up and down the power generation. I don’t see wholesale prices, so efficiency is what I do for now. In a better market, I would increase my use at night, and turn the temperature down when I get up. Instead, I efficiently use more energy by using it at the wrong time.

Load banks are familiar to those who test and install generators. Generators can burn out the circuits they are on, or the equipment on those circuits, if there is not adequate load to consume the power generated. Load banks are paired with generation to use any excess energy. Most load banks do little more than heat the air to burn off excess energy. If we can make our building systems create value while load banking, we will turn grid economics upside down.

Renewable energy, or rather intermittent generation, often generates energy when there is no market for that energy. Wind farms often produce far more energy than they can sell at that time. Just google “wind farm Texas toaster” for description of the problem. The problem is not, as many decry, subsidies. The problem is lack of markets. With no place to sell enough power when the wind is blowing, the great Texas toaster load banks wind power into heat.

Building systems should look at what they can do to use more energy, but at the right time. Ice Energy, which chills water at night to avoid air conditioning during the day, is better thought of as a daily load bank. The real impulse behind utility support of electric cars is that if charged only at night, they provide load banking while expanding their market.

I always laugh when I go to a conference “powered by wind”. I know that they are paying un-economic fees to a power source that is not the wind, which promises to buy wind at some later time. If you want to encourage renewable energy, you need to buy it when it’s available and cheap, not on some pretend market which sells you conventional power, and promises to buy wind later when it is not needed. If we instead bought energy when the wind is blowing, we would increase the value of wind energy. I the great wind farms could sell more than 40% of what they generate, they would be instantly more economic, without waiting for new technologies. Think of it as canning fresh tomatoes in summer. You don’t can tomatoes in summer to heat the house; that would suggest canning in winter. You can tomatoes in summer because that is when they are fresh and cheap.

The most efficient place to store energy is in the middle of a process you were going to do anyway. Ice Energy is effective because it stores cold in the middle of the air cooling process. My home well would be a great load bank if I had a means to store several days of water pressure. A maker of home water heaters marshals thousands of home units to provide fast 4-second load banking to meet the needs of the gird—and radically changes the net cost of water heating. Load banking that performs a useful service creates value you can see every day.

Look at your buildings, and ponder, what you can do in advance, and do it when there is a load banking opportunity. Look for ways to productively load bank your distributed energy resources rather than sell excess to the grid. Look for ways to use more energy, right now.

Demand response happens now and then. For the last couple years, with a down economy and lower industrial demand, it might not happen at all. Load surplus opportunities happen every day. If your building systems can take advantage of this surplus, consume energy when it is cheap and plentiful, to provide service when it is expensive and scarce, you can find new value streams from energy engineering, renewable energy, and building systems.