Energy Collisions and Autonomous Appliances

Appliance manufacturers are moving beyond energy pain points to energy collisions. Utility-based energy standards are stuck on energy pain. Energy collisions can offer much more benefits to smart grids than can pain points; they can offer still more to the off-grid or near grid building. Collisions are part of a wide variety of autonomous energy behaviors we will see in the near future—if only the energy suppliers will stop blocking them.

Too many energy suppliers are stuck on models of direct control. When they accept using prices, they want to use them to create direct control. (There is a name for this in Economics—drop me a line or comment if you know what it is…). To use a cartoon version of this approach, if I knew that when the yellow light comes on, I will be charged $1000 / minute to run the air conditioning, that yellow light is as good as an on / off switch. This mechanistic approach, seeking only for the right price that will achieve direct control, will not get any better results than the direct control of the 1980’s

The appliance manufacturers have a more engaging vision, in which they can compete as to how well they engage the consumer in better energy decisions. Most appliances can run in high and in low energy modes. The low energy mode may use half the energy but take three times as long. If time is money, this approach asks the question, “But how much?” Do you want that shirt clean and ready in 30 minutes [high energy mode]? Is it OK if it takes 90 minutes [low energy mode]? Is it OK to wait for 10 minutes until the energy price drops? How about 45 minutes? How about seven hours to get the overnight energy prices—or the wind-sourced energy?

The appliance manufacturers know how to do this already. They are starved for information. They want not only information about the price now, but predictions about price in the future. They want to compete on how well they can communicate energy decisions to the consumer.

This model of autonomous response can reach past the relatively low energy appliances. The intelligent thermostat may want to cool more now to in anticipation of higher prices later. The Plug-In Electric Vehicle (PEV) must support the household schedule while deciding when to charge.

There is renewed focus within the autonomous appliance community on energy profiles to support this model. Energy profiles as defined by Open Smart Grid efforts or by ZigBee have a simple model of energy use, low energy mode, turn off mode and ramp time. Building systems and appliances have a more complex mode. That washing machine may use no energy while filling, and then plenty while agitating the clothes. If an appliance understands its own energy profile, it may start filling its tank five minutes before the price drops—and time its final spin to complete before energy prices step up.

And then they began talking about systems working together to avoid energy spikes…

One of the foundational approaches in networking is collision sensing and detection (CSMA/CD) on a shared bus. Nodes on a network can transmit message whenever they want. Each is responsible for detecting when another node is transmitting at the same time, called a collision. When a collision is detected, each node waits a random period of time and then re-transmits. You may recognize this pattern as what humans do in conversation.

Today’s appliance manufacturers are talking about comparing energy profiles avoid the spin cycle and the refrigerator’s compressor cycle from running at the same time. With almost no degradation of performance, these autonomous systems can begin to shape the overall load profile of a building—or of the green neighborhood.

This approach can provide a smoother, more predictable load to the utilities. When combined with price responsiveness. It could produce a very predictable market. It really becomes interesting, however, when it applies to off grid buildings, and something that I call near-grid buildings.

If a building is running on site-generated energy, it has very distinct energy budget. That budget is not merely aggregate energy over 15 minutes, but hard, clear limits on maximum energy use at any moment. That upper limit may be continuously varying as, say, the speed of the wind changes. Continuous autonomous load shaping, based upon detailed energy profiles, may be critical to a distributed energy future.

To get there, we must get beyond price as a proxy for direct control. To paraphrase General Honore, don’t get stuck on pain.

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.

Plumbing and the Man about the Net Zero House

Maybe the ongoing attempt to over-domesticate males is a barrier to sustainable energy. Maybe Swedish feminists are simply insensitive to carbon issues. Maybe Gaia just needs a man about the house. Maybe the essential appliance needed for the net zero energy (NZE) house is a urinal.

A report last week from Ohio University describes a catalyst capable of extracting hydrogen from urine. More efficient generation of hydrogen would be a great step to more effective energy storage, one without the major shortcomings of today’s batteries. Hydrogen storage would not wear out through regular re-charging the way today’s chemical batteries do. Hydrogen storage combined with transfer technologies such as micro-beads might solve the fast re-charge problem for vehicles that do not use carbon-based fuels.

More efficient multi-purpose energy storage is the most important single issue for the smart grid. Want to shift load to reduce the requirement for new generation? Want to manage peak transmission? Storage is essential. Current social and political decisions mandate the use of more unreliable power sources in the grid. Providing instant remediation of gaps in power generation at the grid-level is difficult and expensive; there are reports that efforts to use fast starting gas generation to backstop wind have used more natural gas than if the wind had never been hooked up. Efficient storage, especially distributed storage in homes and buildings, would be offer a profound benefit to grid operation.

Efficient local storage would also make site-based generation more sensible. Selling electricity back to the grid rarely makes economic sense. Expensive grid upgrades can be needed to improve monitoring and guarantee power quality; these costs are usually foisted onto other rate payers. Because the grid cannot rely on the local storage when it needs it, utilities may still need to build the generation to support peak capacity.

With efficient local storage, site based generation would be placed in storage rather than sold back to the grid. Solar generation would go into storage all afternoon. Wind generated electricity, no matter what speed the wind is blowing would simply go into storage. Expensive-to-fix issues in power quality and availability could be simply eliminated.

So what if urine is part of the answer? The problem, of course, is that we typically dilute urine into a lot of water before flushing it away. If the approach in the report pans out, perhaps each home should have urinals to enable the storage system.

Our society’s on-going war against nature has been trying to re-write the old riddle "What does a man do on two legs, a woman do sitting down, and a dog do on three legs?" Man’s ability to stand while micturating has been declared aggressive, oppressive, and unsanitary. Sitting and standing, and whether a teenager preferred the former was recently a critical issue in a custody battle. Legal discussions of this case have been surprisingly impassioned. Maybe they have not been impassioned enough.

Maybe we should be planning for urinals in homes. Water-free urinals are an effective if controversial means to reduce water consumption. Up to 40,000 gallons per year in water savings are claimed for each public urinal that goes waterless. Home urinals could be the foundation for home-based hydrogen generation and storage.

You should install a home urinal. It’s for the planet, after all.

Intelligent Buildings talk to Smart Energy

As I write this, the Interim Roadmap for the Smart Grid has not been published. THis is a personal, un-endorsed view of how this area will develop.

Intelligent buildings filled with clever devices and intelligent systems will negotiate with the grid and with their occupants to provide new models for reliable power. The benefits to the grid will come from coordinating supply and demand using economic signals. The benefits to the buildings will be increased value by providing higher levels of amenities to their tenants and inhabitants for lower cost. The benefits to the tenants and occupants will be better services at the same or lower costs and more autonomy as they separate from grid dependency. The benefit to the clever devices will be longer life and more reliable operations from eliminating the power shocks that assail them now.

The benefits to building owners will be economic models that offer incentives to pay for improved equipment. The benefit to building integrators will be national markets based on common signals from the grid, allowing them to provide more services to those owners for less. The benefit to ventures and technology development will be the entry of all those building owners into the markets for generation and storage; those owners will offer a shorter sales cycle and more openness to innovation than ever will the utilities.

This requires a small simple model for interactions. To create this model, we must think clearly about the business process of each of these participants. Today, we have the virtual company in every niche of our economy. UPS and FedEx offer logistics services that are part of the internal processes of thousands of companies. Tomorrow we will have virtual energy services companies as well, assembled from the services offered by a community more numerous and diverse than today.

Each building will communicate with the grid by two services: the metering service and the energy management services (EMS).

The metering service (which does not necessarily mean the meter) will provide live and interval measurement of energy flows into and out of the building. This service will be symmetrical, meaning both the supplier and the consumer will be able to see the same information at the same time. The meter service will also be the end point of the energy distribution control system, providing telemetry to enhance customer service and downtime recognition.

The EMS will be the focus of business interactions. On the outside, the EMS it will manage the business negotiations for each building. On the outside of the building, the EMS will be the locus of energy market operations. Buying, selling, and price decisions will flow to and from the outside of the EMS.

On the inside of the EMS, developers and integrators will build applications to manage moment by moment energy use. The energy management applications will respond to the needs of the Industry, Office, or Home. The EMS will inform them of market negotiations on the outside. They will catalogue the devices and systems inside the building. They will marshal potential responses the smart grid market signals. They will share these responses with the EMS agent to inform its negotiations in energy markets.

A key service offered by the EMS will be to relay energy management services to external parties. Many businesses and homes will want to out-source their energy management; the EMS will support this. Some utilities will want to offer this outsource energy management to their customers. Some utilities will mandate, as they do today, that they accepting their energy management services is a condition of participating in certain programs.

I have written before on this blog, when discussing plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs), that eliminating regulatory barriers to retail re-sale of energy will help achieve some benefits of the smart grid. At the EMS, this means that sometimes there will be additional EMS systems below the EMS that talks to the smart grid. The educational campus, office park, and military base may have many buildings, each with their own EMS. Even office buildings may have an EMS in front of each tenant. Between the EMS at the edge of the grid, and each EMS below, there can be a whole new energy market.

Distributed generation and distributed storage are important aspects of the smart grid. The EMS must be able to marshal and generation and storage the building side to respond to market signals from the grid. If these resources are inside a building, then there can be a micro-market inside that building. On the base or campus microgrid, these resources may be directly attached, external to the buildings. In either case, the messages and market operations on the client side of the EMS should be the same as those on the outside.

The smart grid roadmap cites loose coupling, layered architectures, composition, and symmetry as critical design values. The EMS as defined above uses loose coupling and avoids direct control. Symmetry enables us to define the same services on either side of the EMS, and for the meters to report net use and net supply identically. Layering lets the conversation above proceed without ever mentioning data paths or transport protocols; it works the same whether the EMS is separately attached to the internet, or bound to the meter and communicating over utility infrastructure. Composition lets price and supply and value flow through multiple domains.

Smart Building professionals should watch the development of the EMS, and consider what new value we can deliver once we define the interfaces. If you want to participate in developing the interface, write me about the Technical Committees defining Energy Interoperability and Energy Market Information Exchange.