Whither Grid Standards

On last Friday’s phone call about advancing the OpenADR specification to a national and perhaps international standard, we agreed to continue the discussion in an open forum at the OASIS site (www.OASIS-Open.org). OASIS, or the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, has long been the home for the underpinnings of e-commerce, for web security, and for service oriented architecture. OASIS is also home to a number of domain-specific standards, such as LegalXML, Open Office, and OpenDocs as well as the foundational web services registry UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration).

OpenADR (Automated Demand Response) is a California developed specification developed for the regulated electricity providers in that state. Demand-Response (DR) refers to live negotiations between the grid and its end nodes (buildings) to reduce demand before a shortfall causes problems. DR is a very important first step on the road to transacted energy, and solves some big problems in the short term.

One effect pulling OpenADR to OASIS is a perception that it is largely an economic transaction. The end nodes of the power grid contain far too diverse a mix of systems for grid operators to control well. As Gale Horst, who works in the Whirlpool Corporation Research & Engineering Center, has observed, a washing machine cannot respond to a grid request to shed [electrical] load unless it determines that the grid unless it has determined that there is no bleach in its current load of laundry. Every system in a home or business has similar rules that matter within its own domain. For all but the smallest response, DR will require an economic incentive and decisions from the agents running all the systems.

Even before OpenADR began discussions within the OASIS framework, a number of standards potentially useful to the new intelligent grid were underway. oBIX created a specification normalizing the operations and reporting of control systems as web services. The WS-DD and WS-DP committee, standardizing web services for device discovery and device profiles, includes members not just from software and printer makers, but from a maker of electrical switch gear as well.

There may be several of what I call micro-specifications that come out of this. As far as I know, there is still no standard way to exchange scheduling via web services as there is ICALENDAR in email. Such a specification would be useful not only for transmitting schedules from OpenADR to building systems managed by oBIX, but also would be useful in forward pricing of power generally. It would also be useful in a number of other standards, such as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language).

Emergency signaling is an important area or work within OASIS. One critical area is standardization of location. These standards include addresses, geographic points, and geographic territories bounded within a closed polygon. DR specifically, and utilities in general need the same information. When a DR aggregator reports the commitments he has received up to the System Operator, the operator would like the information aggregated by territory. New standards for emergency communications anticipate buildings submitting alarms directly into 911 queues. Components of the power grid could do the same, notifying police to increase patrols in blackout areas and to send officers to direct traffic. It would be very useful for the power grid and for emergency response to use the same standards.

New business models will encourage a move from hierarchical command and control operations to symmetrical peer to peer negotiations on the power grid. Renewable energy sources will decrease reliability. Distributed generation will create more power sources not under the control of traditional utilities. Zero Net Energy buildings will make each end node both a buyer and seller of power. OASIS standards such as WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management) may find a place in the new grid.

The panoply of WS-Security standards, including federated identity management, would require more room than I have here – but OASIS is their home.

There is no replacement for the IEEE and IEC standards at the core of deep control; increasingly, we will have interactions that are more arms length and economic than that.

To join the smartgrid-discuss@lists.oasis-open.org list, send email to smartgrid-discuss-subscribe@lists.oasis-open.org. The list is open to all, and there is no commitment to join OASIS or participate in a technical committee implied. For a general discussion of applying e-commerce standards to new energy, you may be interested in reading http://www.oasis-open.org/resources/white-papers/blue/

Distributed Generation and Lightweight Integration

Distributed generation is a big part of the anticipated new grid. Distributed generation refers to having many small sources of power on the grid. A traditional power company can own distributed generation or someone else, perhaps the building owner, can own it.

Wayne Longcore has described distributed generation today as akin to the early days of personal computing. The big centrally managed power plants have the role of the mainframe, the site where all real power generation occurs. Pocket generation plants, including solar generation on household roofs, are akin to the poorly networked early microcomputers, only able to get on-line with great difficulty, and unable to do much in the big grid. In fact, today, grid operators often cannot tell if some homes are selling power back to the grid. I guess this means that industrial sites with in-house cogeneration are the equivalent of the old minicomputers. Some readers might recall minicomputers and large workstations made up much of the early internet.

Wayne’s point was that users of the sluggish single-purpose computers of the day would have had trouble imagining the internet revolution of the 90’s. They would have had even more trouble imagining a conference like the one Wayne was speaking at, where most people carried several small computers, more powerful than the minicomputers of the day, ones able to play music and videos and surf the web at speeds unimaginable just a little while ago. After all personal computers were toys. Just like micro-generation today.

Pervasive communicating computers required the development of many small light-weight protocols. IP defined inter-computer communication. TCP defined how communications travel a wider network. DNS defined the way to find computers at a distance. Distributed generation will need many small protocols as well. The power of these protocols is that different brands of computers, or even quite different types of systems, can use them, making no distinction between mainframes, personal computers, or, now, even phones.

One protocol we need for distributed generation is a small lightweight pluripotent protocol for connecting small generation to the web. Today, grid operators expect to see a large and complex interface, specific to each type of generation, just as they do on their own substations. While new variants are derived from old, it can take as long to develop a new standard as it does the technology. The sheer number of these standards makes it difficult to integrate new generation points.

Zero Net Energy Buildings will have a mix of generation and storage systems. In most places, any building with storage is not allowed to sell energy back to the grid. Under today’s rules, a building with some solar power, a wind generator, and a diesel generator would need three separate interfaces to sell back to the grid. There is no defined interface for the myriad of low-voltage DC generating systems soon coming to market. These may not sell power to the grid, but may offset other internal needs, and thus influence power sold by “normal” generation. If each of these scenarios needs to be connected to the grid using current approaches, we will not connect many of them.

We need a common lightweight protocol to support agile integration of these new point sources of power to let distributed generation develop. There are some facts that grid operations needs to know about each substation, and it needs to know them about generating buildings as well. The grid needs this information not only for safety, but also for interoperability. But it does not need to know everything about the underlying technology, technology which may change over time. It certainly does not need the information to operate the underlying technology.

I will write about what I see as the requirements of this interface soon.

DC, Service, and Bacteria

Regular readers know I am intrigued by DC (Direct Current) power systems in buildings. This fascination was born while examining a data center UPS system several years ago. The potential efficiencies shouted out to me. This week, I found something new that fueled my interest.

Most consumer devices are DC powered. That brick outside your laptop is to convert AC (Alternating Current) power to DC. Your television has a similar brick built inside it. That annoyingly large plug on your cell phone charger is another AC/DC converter. The digital world is a DC world. The exceptions in your homes are the incandescent lights, and the motors in your appliances: refrigerator, dishwasher, and washing machine.

In commercial buildings, the designers and maintenance staff often refer to building systems and their controls collectively as the low voltage systems. The low voltage systems are powered by DC The controls that manage the air conditioning system and all their sensors are powered by an isolated low voltage DC system. The security system with its window sensors is DC. The video cameras and their network are powered by DC. We live in a DC world.

Several years ago, an APC salesman generated an epiphany as he proudly demonstrated his new data center racks. The racks has built in power conditioning and batteries, and seemed sturdy and well designed. The servers were fed from the batteries at all times, protected from power dips, sags, and spikes by the constant power source. All power coming into the racks was converted into DC and fed into these batteries, keeping them fully charged. The power coming out of the batteries was converted in AC power, and routed into plugs for the servers. Each server, as they usually do, had a plug in the back into a little removable brick, just as in your laptop, converting that power back to DC.

It was the proximity, I guess. I have the same set up supporting the server room at work, but the refrigerator-sized battery is down the hall, invisible during normal operations. Seeing the batteries and the servers so close, I could no longer ignore their absurdity. I was converting power to AC to go a yard to convert it back, losing 10-30% of the power each way, only because it was the way things always were.

Since then, I have paid more attention to DC systems. Since then, I have often wondered how many "almost there" technologies are held back by infrastructure assumptions. How many solar projects, for example, that don't quite make economic sense, are held back by the double tax of DC to AC and back again....

So why this week? Why do I bring this up again?

For the last two mornings I have had the pleasure of breakfast at the B&B with a quiet electrical engineer, unassumingly working on a project I am calling bacteria-powered low-voltage distribution. Much of metabolism can be envisioned as getting rid of electrons to the most available receptor; his company is offering bacteria wires as the as the most available receptor.

He sees his system being used as a third world power source He only needs enough power to light LEDs at night. In many areas wood is burned for light in the evening, contributing to deforestation and reducing the fuel available for other purposes. His company has recently received stage one funding, and is looking for short term revenue in other areas. One potential project is yard lights that are powered by the soil they are pushed into, and that work better than solar for northern latitudes in moist climates.

I got a call from the folks at FreeLight yesterday, to discuss their progress with in-place hybrid installation of DC in existing buildings, and the availability of low power DC lighting. Such lights are programmable to display any color, or even pictures and text. Such lights are very light, with high efficiency, and no local power conversion.

Can such systems work together, moving the power for emergency lighting off the grid and away from batteries? Would labor cost avoidance (maintenance for batteries) be the factor that drives adoption?

Future buildings and local generation are coming. There is no need for future building systems to be powered like those of today. Challenging our power distribution assumptions will be as important as changing our power generation assumptions.

At FIATECH, I spoke on specifying buildings by services, not by technology or process. The engineers at FIATECH agreed that service and performance specifications would free up their creativity and innovation. Energy distribution strategies might be part of that innovation.

How to Enable the Energy Revolution

This weekend, I read what may be the most important book yet for those transforming today's grid into the Intelligent Grid, and transforming today's buildings and the systems inside them into Smart Buildings. No, it is not Thomas Friedman's "Hot Flat and Crowded", although that work has set the table nicely for discussions of the importance and opportunity of this effort. It is not and of the chap books from the Department of Energy, or the IEEE, or EPRI. It is not one of the many books on environmental eschatology. Nor is it any of George Gilder's visionary history books that bring perspective to technology.

I recommend that anyone involved in these efforts read "The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It" (TFOTI) by Jonathan Zittrain. TFOTI is at first glance a sober history of technology and culture and regulation. TFOTI tells how the internet grew from its roots in telephone systems and closed garden communities into the amazing engine for transformation, innovation, and new wealth creation we know today. This happened because of a series of legal decisions and technological choices that let people place any device on the communication on-ramps, and create or install any program on their devices. Zittrain calls the capability of the internet to generate and support new technologies and new capabilities "generative".

Zittrain warns that we may be losing this generative aspect of the internet. The internet is being neutered by the growing deployment of locked-down devices, systems that do only what their manufacturers allow. The glamour and ease of use of the iPhone is afforded by locking down the system to approved programs. Xboxes and PlayStations offer connectivity on locked down computers. The social networks are becoming walled gardens; once again business users are establishing accounts on FaceBook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Plexus as they once established multiple email accounts on COMPUSERVE, AOL, Prodigy and others.

Zittrain is concerned that we are losing the future opportunity of the Internet. We are recreating the dynamic of the time share system, and loosing the generative features of the internet. The siren song of ease of use can lock in today's internet and forestall future advances. Even the multimedia free-for-all risks turning into one large Cable TV system, with predicable results and one-way communication. Zittrain shares his vision of how to develop new technologies and social structures that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively, participate in solutions, and to thus preserve generativity of the Internet.

When we look at the power grid today, we see ATT way before the breakup, perhaps even before the Carterphone ruling. Today's power grid is essentially closed to the wall outlet, and with walled garden communications to the meter, at best. You can use power with any technology you want, but no technology that generates, or stores, or converts energy is allowed to participate in the wider grid. All access to the energy networks is jealously guarded by the utilities and the utility commissions. The Carterphone lawsuit opened up the old phone network to new technologies such as answering machines and fax machines. We need a similar opening up of energy networks.

The challenge of interoperability, and standards, as we move into the era of energy technology, is if we can create a system for energy creation, distribution, and use that is generative. Solving the most pressing problems of our time, those of energy and its effluents, requires engaging the creative talents of as many as possible. No one knows what the innovations of tomorrow might be. We must learn from the lessons of other large networks and build something that is generative.

Get TFOTI and read it. Send a copy to your utility commissioner as well.

(Full Disclosure: In the mid eighties, I was coding for CitiNet, briefly the largest walled garden BBS in the Northeast. Last spring, I ran into fellow CitiNet alum and star salesman Myron Kassaraba; he was talking up his smart energy venture Outsmart Power Systems. I see former CEO/CTO Tom Considine at Christmas each year. I would love to hear from any of the rest of the gang ...)