Data Centers aren’t anything special.

Normal business now need to defend themselves from the power systems just as data centers do.

Long time readers know that I consider that power companies and utilities commissions over-estimate power reliability by focusing on the presence of power and not on the quality of power. I often note that my home, halfway between a major research university and a nuclear plant suffers multiple outages a month, outages long enough to require that I reset all the devices in the house, whether microwave, DVD player, or alarm clock. This probably has something to do with the frequency with which I must replace home electronics. Yet homes are “adequately supplied” with power.

On the other side is the data center. Data centers have long acknowledged that utility power is neither good enough nor reliable enough for their purposes. Data centers use multiple strategies for on-site energy storage, on-site energy generation, and on-site energy conditioning to protect themselves from the product supplied over the power grid.

Non high-tech businesses are considered as something more similar to the home than to the data center. They were not worth protecting in the way data centers are protected.

Two weeks ago, some friends open up a bakery and sweet shop in Chapel Hill. Sugarland is an all-natural bakery and gelato shop. Its business equipment is kitchen equipment and retail refrigeration. It seemed the worst problem they were going to have was keeping up with the swarms of students that found them as soon as they opened, before their staff was all trained. Doc and Katrina were exhausted, but pleased. The snacks were delicious. Rush hour warm cookie time was a success.

Last Sunday a wind storm came through the southeast. In town power would flicker, then flicker again. One would think that this business would be mostly unaffected, not much different from the businesses the grid was designed for in the 1950’s.

Modern ovens, however, have computer systems the run them, computers that reset with each flicker. Modern gelato machines have processors that stop when the power dims a little. The cash register is, of course, a high touch system for inventory control and minimal staff training, until its database corrupts.

I went by Sugarland on Sunday as Katrina threw out 250 cupcakes that deflated when the oven re-set. She did not dare start more cakes for the morning until she knew the power would be reliable. Doc had given up on trying getting fresh gelato out to the waiting lines. Neither knew what to prep that night to prepare for the early morning baking on Monday.

The absolute shut-down and loss of business for flickering power in a modern retail bakery is as big a hit as in any data center. Bakers, too, need to defend themselves from what comes over the power line with

Monday’s short stock is now over. The power has been adequate this week. The shelves are stocked again. But I will no longer consider data centers as having special needs; merely needs that are better recognized.

I think I will head downtown now – I hear the grapefruit gelato is superb.

Safety Net for Zero Net Energy Buildings

When thinking about Zero Net Energy Commercial Buildings, the most important thing is how you get to net. Many have willfully (it seems to me) accepted the delusion that carbon credits will be a useful or perhaps even significant component of this net. Such people suffer from a failure of imagination. They do not imagine that there will be new technologies.

They have also fallen into the fallacy that tomorrow will be a straight line from today. Today you can buy carbon credits fairly easily. My favorite source is free carbon offsets. These will not be so easy to come by in time. For one thing, the FTC is already looking into their fraudulent issue, sure to reduce the supply. The more important reason is that if we move in any significant way toward the 2030 challenge (or should I call that, after EPACT 2007, the 2025 mandate?) there will be many, many more buyers. More buyers chasing less product will be, as always, a prescription for rapidly rising prices.

The more important net is the honest balance of consumption, generation, storage, and purchase. Most sites will need all four.

Consumption gets most of the attention today. Reducing consumption gets the press. We know how to reduce consumption. It will not get us to zero, though.

Generation is pretty well understood as well. We will need to keep a close eye on real life metrics to make sure we are not swapping relatively clean distant generators for dirty (and noisy) generation locally. This demand will provide a ready market for renewable of all types as soon as we learn to smooth demand. And that will require storage.

Storage is the wild card. Storage will need to be a mix of technologies, and even energy types. I have written of storage before (And the winner is…) and of how future markets will create more ways for people to store energy. Some of these, especially some forms of thermal, change the order, i.e., store first, generate (or transform to a more useful form) second. The inefficiencies may even drive the more rapid adoption of the DC Commercial Building.

Nanoptek has recently demonstrated its new store-first, generate later technology, a process that greatly enhances the generation of hydrogen in sunlight by doping nanostructures with titanium. Technology such as this will make it easier to store energy now, and generate later.

We should probably add a fifth item to the energy toolbox of each Zero Net Energy Building – load shaping. Peak shaping can only reduce amenity and performance, albeit in return for price concessions. Load shaping, in which the energy use is not curtailed, but shifted to a different time of day can greatly improve the operation of the power grid. Load shaping is an approach that is more amenable to profound shifts in energy consumption patterns. Load shaping is what makes the other strategies work.

If you own a commercial building, you may be load shaping already. Even without formal storage systems, you may be over air-conditioning in the early morning to save air conditioning during business hours. There are power companies out there that will not only give you discounts, but will pay you for load shifting. And if you build the infrastructure to account for load shaping, you will have the infrastructure you need to manage generation and storage.

Pity, you will probably not be able to get a carbon credit for it. I wonder of the ISO's might award them....

Kombikraftwerk - energy reliability through diversity

At the University of Kassel in Germany, researchers are assembling a reliable power grid from a number of unreliable components. Kombikraftwerk (Combined Power Plant) is a grid assembled from 36 biogas, wind, solar and hydropower plants in a distributed network. The project was designed as a demonstration project to prove that it is possible for the German power grid to be reliable even if based entirely on non-traditional power sources.

This is a demonstration (again) of the old principle that you can gain additional reliability and availability from multiple technologies then you can from any single technology. While it is certainly possible that with additional research, development, any one (or two) of the technologies could be made ever so much more reliable, such efforts soon run into the age-old 90% problem. (This is usually expressed as “After you've done 90% of the project, you have the other 90% to do.”) Achieving each additional increment of reliability from an existing technology usually requires large amounts of additional effort.

A problem in scaling Kombikraftwerk will be the fallacy of large scale control. As the size of community to be orchestrated increases, the complexity of orchestration increases. Sooner or later, the Kombikraftwerk will fail due to the deep integration and direct control  of power production that appear to be embedded in its model.

The other apparent problem in Kombikraftwerk is the fine tuning of energy production to meet actual rather than anticipated needs. This requires additional spin reserve (Plants that are operating but not supplying the grid) to handle surprises. Some spin will always be required, but it is easy to imagine scenarios requiring much less than we require today.

These issues are just the sort that the abstract interoperability and intelligent end nodes envisioned by the GridWise Architectural Council (GWAC) will solve easily. GWAC is working toward abstract e-commerce style interfaces between each component of the grid, including generation, transmission, distribution, and end customer face. Both sides of each interface are assumed to be intelligent peers, able to defend their internal missions.

The GWAC smart grid is the simultaneous optimization of the diversity problem (which combines a number of unreliable technologies to produce a reliable cloud) and the complexity problem (it is difficult to control a mix of systems with different operating characteristics into a single large-scale control system) and the money problem (how do we fund this in such a way that each innovation can be rewarded).

Generating systems can signal their operating postures and capabilities using abstract messages. These interfaces hide the underlying diversity to prevent the overall grid management from becoming too complex. New technologies for storage and generation can come to market faster, and make money faster, because they need only interface to the simpler abstract interface rather than undergo deep integration.

The GWAC customer face addresses coordination of the demand side. Local agents representing smart buildings become participants in the smart grid. Initiatives like the Zero Energy Building foresee hybrid nodes, usually consumers of energy, but occasionally selling back site-stored or site-generated energy.

Kombikraftwerk and GWAC are compatible approaches that can easily build off one another. Because the defined interfaces of the GWAC are abstract and standard, new generating technologies can join the mix without extensive review. Easy recombination enables innovation by shortening time to market. More innovation enhances reliability by adding additional sources of diversity.

Money is the best, and most universally accepted, abstract interface for communicating scarcity and value. When we add money to each interface request, the natural target for the building-side of the interface is the enterprise and the tenant, not the systems. It may be that the best demand/response decision, when incentivised with pricing, is to shut down the office building, declare a telecommuting day, and run the building generators (whatever they may be) flat out. Such decisions would only further enhance Kombikraftwerk.

Looks like Kombikraftwerk and the GridWise Architectural Council could work well together…

References:

• Kombikraftwerk  - http://www.kombikraftwerk.de/index.php?id=27
• GridWise Architectural Council (http://www.gridwiseac.org/)
• Demand Response Automated Server (DRAS) http://www.akuacom.com/solutions/index.html

And the winner is….Thermal storage (for now)

Energy storage is about to get big. New Technologies. Demand Response. $100 a barrel oil. All the old pressures are getting stronger. Grid reliability. Microgeneration and microgrids. Unreliable but attractive renewables. The incentives for energy storage have never been as good. Hydrogen. Vanadium redox. New technologies for energy storage are just over the horizon.

But I am guessing the old fashioned low tech thermal storage will be the first big winner. Well, maybe a little higher tech than it used to be. Peter Drucker observed that a new technology must be an order of magnitude better in either price or performance than a pre-existing technology with market standing to supplant that existing technology. The existing technology can always leverage its market position, its market penetration, and the current producer’s experience to make its own leap forward.

New market conditions are placing a premium on energy storage. Time of day pricing is becoming more common and the price differentials are only going to get bigger. New sources for thermal energy to store are coming out of the new things we do in buildings. New ways to use thermal storage are coming to market.

The needs of the power grid are leading to ever larger price differentials between different times of day. The more sensitive systems in today’s buildings require that buildings establish their own reliability. The greater cost of both minor outages and of using energy at the wrong time now swamp the energy lost during storage. The economic case for buying energy when it is cheap, to be available when needed is getting easier to make.

There are new sources of thermal energy to harvest. Building chillers can harvest heat from office space. Data centers throw off huge amounts of heat that can be stored for reuse. If we can use this energy, then it will be worthwhile to gather and store this energy.

We now can use even moderate-temperature thermal energy for purposes other than heating and cooling. Old models made ice during the night to take advantage of cheap energy, or collected heat from the sun during the day. Stored thermal energy was used only to cool during the day or heat at night. New microprocessor controlled Stirling engines have improved the efficiency and efficiency of low power electrical generation. Prototypes have generated electricity off temperature differentials of 6C, although production units seem to require five times that.

In the short term, thermal storage will create reliability. In the mid-term it will midwife markets based around energy storage and temporal displacement. In the long term, those markets will be the playing field upon which new technologies complete. But I in the short term, I’m betting on thermal storage.

Note: immediately after writing this, I read about a system using black-top roads for thermal energy collection with geostorage. Perhaps some other time….