Divvying Up Grid Interoperability

The NIST Grid Interoperability Workgroups began by splitting into work groups along traditional market segments. I think the initial cuts (I2G, B2G, H2G&V, T&D) (Industry, Building, Home (and vehicle) to Grid, and Transmission & Distribution) were necessary, I think keeping them makes it far too easy to pave the cow paths, to streamline existing market models while allowing minimal room for new markets to develop.

As I look across the groups, they feel to me as if they are split up incorrectly. The home deserves the same DR possibilities as does the office. A hospital may want the same grid information as does the data center. The privacy liability incurred by the utility developing intimate knowledge of the home operations may be as great as they would incur in a bank.

Background

I was talking to representatives from The Green Grid yesterday. The Green Grid is about Grid Computing, not the Power Grid. Grid Computing is the most efficient process ever defined for converting electricity to raw business process, with a hundred % waste as heat.

The Green Grid concerns are the immediate supply chain issues for its raw materials and support requirements, primarily energy and cooling. The Green Grid questions, which it wants to ask to each battery, each power strip, each switch panel, each transformer in each substation, and even the grid as a whole:

• How much more capacity can you give me?
• How reliable do you feel ? Any risk you will fail in the near future? (same question whether battery or empty diesel fuel tank or overheating transformer or extreme DR event on the power grid)
• What price is the current power? What about the additional capacity? (This should arguably factor cost of diesel, or natural gas, or even inefficiency of battery, but that is another question.)

These same questions are essentially the same as they ask the building’s cooling systems.

These questions are also the questions I might want to ask the thermal storage in the basement, or the PE power on the roof. If I am using waste heat from the Data Center for re-heat in my AC, I may want to ask the same questions. These are the generic questions to ask an energy resource within or without the building, whether in the off-grid home or in the site generating neighborhood, or in the office.

My memory stick is an instance of a USB storage device, and so has a user interface on my computer that presents the same as an internal disk drive. In the same way, these are all attributes of sources of energy, and make no pre-suppositions about the devices or process behind them. This kind of interface enables interoperability while not preventing future innovations, even radical new technologies.

I think we should incorporate the The Green Grid abstractions into the DEWG interoperability suite. But where?

My Proposal

I have proposes that we consider the interactions into a few business/semantic groupings. Grid interoperability should consist of surface interactions; deep interactions are a barrier to scalability and to innovation. The semantic grouping I propose are:

Capability & Reliability: (The Green Grid interactions, to be used in building system domains as well) Capacity / Capability / Availability (including time windows) / Anticipated Reliability / Marginal Price

Market Operations: Power Use curves, Negotiation & Contracts, Offer and Acceptance, Scheduling options, Periodic price curves. Settlement. Contracted Curtailment? DR

Multi-party & Mobile transactions: PHEV, Non-Utility vendors, identity, transactional charge override

Operational Information: does not need to flow across domains, primarily T&D for this discussion. Allied domains, say, inside building systems aligned on results rather than procedures.

Security: borrow compositional security from other domains.

Billing & Charge Processing: borrow from other domains

Attributes & Amenities: Carbon, Wildlife, Location…Optional attributed for later definition and market building.

Do I have them all?

Interfaces for the Power Grid

This week has been crazy busy, but I managed to submit the following to the B2G interoperability group at NIST

Each interface around each process of the grid should allow bi-directional buying and selling. The interface should support discoverable diversity, allowing the standard to grow over time. Ideally, the interface would be the same for different forms of energy, allowing the same economic interface to be used for buying standard power from the grid, solar energy from the neighbor, or thermal energy from the data center in the basement. I should be able to set my heat pump with gas pack to switch not only on peak efficiency, but on the price for each fuel.

The interfaces should be non-hierarchical and composite. Remote power generation, the local sub-station, and the campus micro-grid should have full peer interfaces; my decision to buy from a remote plant or a local storage facility should be through the same interface.

So, what are the characteristics of this interface?

E-Business Interfaces
Offer and Acceptance

Price is clearly the first component; price is how we indicate value and scarcity. Short of a surprise malfunction, every brown-out is a failure of pricing. As pricing may occur in the context of an auction or negotiation, prices must go two ways, as an offer, as a bid, as a request for quotation.

Price Scenarios

Note: in the scenarios, day (or tomorrow) can be replaced by week, month, year or any other period one wants to contract

• Your current power costs is this much
• Power costs this much tomorrow.
• The price curve for tomorrow is…
• The price for up to so much power (perhaps as a per cent of yesterday) is x, for over that amount y, for an arbitrary number of levels,
• One-time urgent offer with no bid.
• One-time offer to be bid until market clears
• Demand Response is either a new auction or it is a RFQ for power buy-back already negotiated.

Transaction Scenarios

• Your instantaneous use is…
• I want to purchase this amount of energy tomorrow.
• If the price curve for tomorrow looks like this, my purchase will look like…
• We accept your offer as above and wish to enforce it.
• Short term request to relinquish previously agreed to power.
• Short term request for additional power bids
• Long term request for significant give-back, say a summer furlough
• Failure to perform will result in power costs of…
• Other Transaction Details
• Penalty for underperformance [as producer] is…
• Penalty for underperformance [as consumer] is…
• Contract is enforceable, and consumer use will be throttled to meet agreement.
• Contract was authorized by …
• The following power qualities are critical to this contract….
• This security token / ID / account overrides normal billing process (especially for electric cars)
• Qualities of Power Delivered

Other qualities of power must be transmitted along with price. In some circumstances, these other characteristics might trump all other considerations, as projected reliability might concern a data center as much as price. It may be a condition of contract that the supplier notify the buyer of changes (or predicted changes) in a “critical quality” (see Other Transaction Details) as quickly as they would of a DR or other rapid response scenario.

More may be discovered in the future, but an initial list might include:

Quality of Power

• Predicted Reliability of Power during time of contract (perhaps derived from EERP).
• Additional capacity in critical bottlenecks. This attribute may be a quality of a substation, or it may, stripped of price and transaction, be a quality of an internal UPS or electrical panel.
• Remaining power at current or predicted burn rate. This may describe diesel generator, or fuel cell, or …
• Remaining Time / capacity to fully recharge storage.
• AC or DC
• Carbon accounting of supply
• Environmental accounting (wildlife, habitat, renewable, etc) of supply
• Geo-location of supply (allowing Buy Local and NIMBY to each affect markets with their dollars)

Should power stored in a battery report its effectively higher carbon load when it is sold or consumed?

Other Market Issues

All interfaces should support many-to-many interactions. A customer should be able to select from any of several aggregators if available. A customer should be able to buy from specific generators beyond the local T&D if desired. There must be a way for the buyer to discover power sources that meet the characteristics he desires and to negotiate with them. There may be times when local transmission conditions want to find emergency load use rather than emergency shedding.

Market Fables

These are use cases, but they have been selected to push away from traditional scenarios. Traditional use cases have already been well handles by others. What follows are edge cases, designed to test the limits. If we do our work well, what Fred Krupp calls the “winners of the race to re-invent energy” will be able to innovate in ways I cannot anticipate.

The Electric Car

In the evening, the electric cars come home, drained from a day of driving. Perhaps they were doubly drained, used to carry their office buildings during the afternoon brown-out. What will people want from their cars next….

• To sit in the garage overnight, slowly charging.
• To be ready to drive 15 miles in twenty minutes when I go get one last kid from athletic practice.
• To be at least half charged and ready for anything in two hours when the baby sitter arrives and mom and dad head out for an evening on the town.
• To quickly get to at least a 40 mile range in case I get an emergency call from the nursing home, and thereafter just be sure to be ready for the morning commute.
• To get a charge for 15 miles by 8:15 when I head to choir practice at church. Better make that 25 lest we stop for coffee afterward.
• It's two hundred miles to the beach and we plan to take full advantage of the expensive week-long rental by getting there tonight! Kids, grab your bags, we are leaving in 20 minutes. Oh, and the car needs a full quick-charge, no matter the expense.

The above require a wealth of power signals. Some of them (capacity of current storage) can be transmitted back using the same interfaces as we have for capacity of a house battery. Not all interactions will be with the home base of the car.

When parking downtown, I want to plug in my car. I may want to choose between a quick visit, for a cup of coffee, and an all-day back-to-school shopping event.

The Green Garage™ offers locally generated wind power for re-charging at its own special rates that vary with the wind. Having been burned once, I want to check prices before I leave the car.

When I go over to your house for dinner, I want to plug in. Being a polite guest, I of course want the charges to go onto my own bill.

The whole family gathers in the next town for Thanksgiving dinner. All cars are drained, and need to recharge over the next five hours except for the college kid, who arrives at the last moment, and leaves as soon as he can. Grandpa decides to overrule all normal agreements and cover all the charges for cars plugged in at his house.

The Transacted Household

Zero Net Energy Buildings will be built around local energy generation, storage, conversion, and recycling. These diverse systems will be too complex to manage as control systems, and will have to be interact as agents exposing services. In this model, we will leave them to negotiate power usage among themselves. These devices should use the same economic interfaces rather than detailed control interfaces.

I could ask my dishwasher to run itself, and manage its own budget for the month. I could also set service standards that the dishes always be clean before dinner the next day. This leads to a relatively simple and consistent user interface.

I could tell my solar panel to sell to the grid whenever the price is above a certain amount, and to store any excess energy. The grid might consistently outbid the dishwasher—and that’s OK. If so, the dishwasher would still run only at night.

I could tell my whole-house storage system to buy power at any price until it has four hours on hand. Thereafter it might buy whenever energy is below a target price. I could even let it take bids from the household systems and devices, or from the neighbor. This system would need to charge an appropriate mark-up based upon its inefficiency of storage.

The right sort of abstract business interface between the power grid and our buildings can also be used between buildings, or within buildings.

Third Parties

There must be ways to delegate authority and rights cleanly between parties. Intelligent buildings will move toward knowledge-based maintenance based upon building system analytics. This service will be supplied by remote specialists. These specialists will need access to live use rates and pricing to supply business-ready information (Change the filters on the 3^rd floor; at your energy prices, it will costs you $146 per month until you do). Today, it is difficult to assign rights to such “privacy” sensitive information.

Conclusion

My chief concern is that we do not over-integrate and thereby stifle future innovation. The Grid’s interfaces needs to be lightweight, composable, extensible, and able easily to interoperate with the service, security, and e-commerce standards of business and the internet.

Business Exchanges on the Grid

Notes on SmartGrid Domain Experts Workgroup, NIST, August 5, 2008
NIST (National Institute for Standards and Technology) started by making a strong claim for ownership in this area, citing Title XIII, 1305 of EISA 2007. NIST set out an aggressive agenda including a preliminary report at GridWeek on 9/24 and a NIST workshop on developing standards at Grid Interop in Atlanta November 11-13.

NIST wants to have in place tight working relationships with the target SDO’s (Standards Development Organizations) in place before 2009. NIST and the GridWise Architectural Council are working together to direct the standards direction toward e-commerce and interactions with building operations and with the building occupants. Some of these standards will be e-commerce focused, some will be looking to the Building Information Models, and to the energy models they support. I am excited that this might push these design approaches into continuing use during operations.

B2G Breakout (Building to Grid)

We quickly agreed that goal of the SmartGrid standardization efforts is to design the information exchange and informational interoperability to enable healthy markets to emerge around energy use in buildings. Success was defined as enabling buildings to trade their energy.

The group was in violent agreement that we needed to work on business to business interactions, and not on machine to machine interactions. Services inside the building would be coordinated by the business processes of the occupants. Grid messages would go to the business agent of the occupants. Interactions, including pricing and bidding, would be between the grid agents and the building agents.

But market development for what? The problems that need solving quickly include real time pricing and automated demand response. The solutions should encourage the development of distributed generation and local energy storage. The Pricing Models and Buying Models for Energy should also work inside microgrids such as the building or neighborhood.

We spent a considerable time defining the characteristics of live pricing. There was intense interest in moving beyond static prices to curves, i.e., if the prices move like this tomorrow, I will commit to energy consumption in a curve that looks like that. Automated contract execution and on-line exchange of tariffs are both desired.

One thing that everyone agreed is that automated metering infrastructure would never meet its potential unless full live real-time access to all meter information is made available from *both* sides of the meter should be the standard. Parties could then collect the data in accord with the schedule that made sense to them.

This has been about the business exchange – soon I will write about the attributes of these transactions and product differentiation on the grid.

We have the PAN where’s the PAG?

One of the edgier concepts in computing has been the Personal Area Network, the network that surrounds a person. Seemingly way out there, the PAN is already surprisingly pervasive. What we need is the Personal Area micro Grid to go with it.

I first saw a PAN in an IBM proof of concept in the mid 1980’s, in which a small computer hidden in the heel of a shoe used body conductivity and perhaps sweat, for all I remember, to transmit information, Wearers of the shoe were able to exchange contact information by means of a simple hand-shake. This demonstration was half creepy, and have Maxwell Smart.

Today’s PANs are less exotic. Point to point networking between Bluetooth headsets and personal devices, whether they be phones, PDAs, or music players, make up the bulk of systems. The occasional user has even figured out how to share contacts phone-to-phone, or PDA to PDA.

Niche applications are creeping in to expand the PAN. When my son Josh worked in the Cleveland Clinics spine center, he described wired interfaces enabling people limited remote control of their own paralyzed bodies. With paternal sensibilities raised, I noticed engineering grads building open source responsive homes for the handicapped, using Bluetooth receivers cannibalized from old headsets.

Many people carry a surprising number of electronic devices with them every day. Charging them up requires a rats nest of different chargers. These chargers are as cheap as they can be made, and often draw nearly as much whether the device is plugged in or not. Keeping these devices charged throughout the day would keep them unplugged at night, as well as keeping them ready to use.

Meanwhile, personal power generations has slowly been creeping into society. My daughter spent the money from one of her summer jobs for a solar backpack when she was in high school, demonstrating her cred as a math and computer aficionado. Scott eVest markets a solar jacket to go along with the wiring harnesses in their TEC PAN.

But solar is not enough.

Recent reports talk of systems to generate power from kinetic energy. Science reports normal body movement. One system is reported to generate 13 Watts while reducing the effort of walking. Looking like a garden variety knew brace, the system harvests energy while reducing effort. At the end of a stride, a person must exert energy to slow his moving leg. The brace's generator helps slow the leg for the wearer, capturing energy in much the same way that a hybrid car harvests power from braking.

Others are working on bra-based generators. One lab is capturing swing and oscillation in a complex fabric-based generator. Another effort is focusing on piston-like energy capture from the brassiere straps. The [female] engineer note that different women have different power generation potential; I observe that there may be advantages to keeping that iPod set for dance tunes….

Microgrids use local energy production and storage to be self sufficient. The best reliability comes from a mix of technologies, with different performance characteristics. We have just begun to explore that the Personal Area Micro-grid might look like.