Eight Agents for Energy

The Energy Mashup Lab (The Lab) is developing open source software for agents that will enable systems that use, produce, or store energy to self-assemble into microgrids. These microgrids can be standalone or grid-attached. If grid-attached, they present a single market or OpenADR interface to the grid, and that interface reveals only the net market position of the microgrid.

The microgrid is operated by a micromarket, trading in availability over time. The Lab uses open standards to transact between agents. Each system or group of systems being represented by an autonomous merchant agent that buys or sells Power for those systems. The software for this agent is Open Source and can be freely downloaded for use in products.

While there is a simplicity in a single Agent, we think there are benefits to creating more than one type of agent. While a single agent running a single set of code could encompass all behaviors could be created, agents that are optimized for specific types of market behavior can be smaller and more secure. Naming similar market behaviors across systems makes it easier for the integrator to understand how introducing an additional system will affect an existing micromarket/microgrid. We name these the Agent Personalities.

The descriptions below refer to electric power for clarity and brevity. The agent behaviors apply to any resource micromarket.

The Simple Agent Personalities

Each Agent Personality denotes a common set of market behaviors.

Homeostasis Agent

A homeostasis agent represents a system that consumes power episodically to support it’s a purpose external to the resource market. A homeostatic agent schedules power purchases to support providing a service external to the grid.

Two examples of systems that would use a Homeostatic Agent are an air conditioning system and a refrigerator. Each of them buys power to support processes that support a service external to the grid. Neither wants to run unless it is able to buy the entire power curve it needs for its next cycle. Each could advance or delay its purchases to some, or even skip a cycle, without harming the service it provides.

Preconsumption Agent

A pre-consumption agent is similar to the homeostatic agent, but it provides an asynchronous server and therefore has a bias to buying only when the price is low. The system is able to increase consumption in the short term to enhance its ability to provide service at a future time. If the refrigerator is a homeostatic agent, the ice-maker may be a pre-consumption agent. There may be overrides to the behavior, i.e., fill up before the party, or high priority when less than a quarter full.

Base Consumer

Base Consumer uses power continuously when the system it represents is providing a service. An example is a light which is either lit and consuming power, or is unlit and not consuming power. An agent representing one or many lightbulbs on a circuit changes in scale only. A base consumer is almost always a high-priority purchaser in the market.

Tiered Consumer

A Tiered Consumer differs from a Base Consumer in that it may be able to reduce power consumption by providing a lower level of services. An example is a dimmable light. More power might provide a better service, or a different service. Using for example the dimmable light again, a low level of light might support movement, a high level of light support reading, and a higher level of light support personal grooming.

Base Supplier

A Base Supplier supplies power continuously. A Base Supplier might include any controllable generator with a long cycle time. Long cycle time is situationally defined.

Market-Driven Supplier

A Market Driven Supplier supplies power intermittently, based on interactions within the microgrid.

Intermittent Supplier

An Intermittent Market Supplier supplies power intermittently, based upon inputs external to the microgrid. An example is a photovoltaic system, which generates power when the sun shines.

Storage Agent

A Storage Agent is able to consume resources later supply the same resource. It stores power. This is similar to a system able to pre-consume, but it is able to bring some portion of its pre-consumption back to the market at a later time.

The Platform Agents

Any of the Agents Personalities named above can in principal interact with any other agent through bilateral transactions. Some markets might be set up with all tenders going to a single entity who manages all transactions.

Broker

The Broker acts as an agent by executing public orders. It may operate a double auction. The Broker does not itself have a position in any trade. (Transactions to power the broker are an exception). In the home, a home router may act as a broker.

Market Maker

A Market Maker acts as a Broker by executing public orders left. It Market Maker further maintains an orderly resource market with a responsibility to buy for its own account in the absence of public buy orders, and sell from its own account in the absence of public sell orders. The market Maker personality may be associated with Storage or with external market sales and purchases. External market sales and purchases are not part of the internal maker that operates the microgrid.

How to use the Agents

Each of the simple agent personalities could characterize a single node or a collection of nodes. Microgrids can be characterized just as nodes are characterized. This point is fundamental to considering interactions within aggregations of microgrids, as to considering the dis-aggregation if a node into smaller component systems.

A system or device developer will be able to select the personality that he desires to represent his technology, and download it.

A set of agents sufficient to support systems with each of these characteristics is able to support all systems potentially within a microgrid. Such a set does not rule out potential hybrid systems, in which two or more of these characteristics coexist within a single system—such a system is a natural outcome of a microgrid at one level being a node at a higher level.

Leaving IB-CON with Microgrids and DC Distribution in mind

I write (and post,you have to be amazed at the technology we so take for granted) this on a plane flying away from a great IB-Con, the REALCOM Intelligent Buildings Conference. It is a trade show like no other, with deep involvement of both the technology leaders in Real Estate, i.e. CIOs and CTOs of the largest REITs and those that would sell to them. The panel discussions were embued with new issues tied to deep adoption of IT not only into the corporate operations of estate, but into the operations of the hidden systems within.

Deep analytics and deep security concerning embedded systems, BAS and others were recurring themes this year. There were frank discussions of using the BAS to get to corporate information, and of using hacks to destroy building internal operations. There was just enough White Hat “think like a hacker” to keep the talks interesting.

But what really stands out at REALCOMM in the focus on emerging technologies. Jim Young and Howard Berger have a genuine interest in start-ups, identifying the ones that could do a lot of good, and helping them to meet their early hurdles. New companies may get coached on messaging and presentation. They go out of their way to introduce potential risk-takers with the new technologies. I have even listened in as companies just out of angel funding get coached through their next steps. The unseen services these two provide are immense.

On the other side, they create a real community among the technologists on the ownership side of real estate. Some come back year after year to challenge each other with the changing world of real estate. I have written here before of the challenges of setting up start-up office for millennials, of coffee shops and food trucks replacing the in-house conference rooms and in-house sandwich shop.

Some of these owners have set up their own coaching for new tenants, helping them with marketing, and financial planning, and other topics the young founder of a new venture may not know. At one level, this is raw self-interest, for a tenant that goes out of business is a tenant that breaks his lease. But at another level, and I think a truer level, it is a commitment to helping other flourish, so long as they learn and work hard, so that we all flourish. And I think this commitment and community starts with Jim and Howard.

My most immediate concerns this year were microgrids and semantic frameworks, as well as the Energy Mashup Lab. These topics are no surprise to my regular readers.

A moderated a microgrid session with CleanSpark and Stem, two technical companies with quite different focuses. Because another vendor, an early start-up, dropped out, I expanded my own comments on personal microgrids. What was remarkable was how each participant agreed on the big issues, the big benefits, and the driving forces. As an industry, microgrids are now know where they are going. Years ago, I moderated similar sessions, and the speakers were coming out of the labs, with vision, but not yet much delivery. Today, either of them, and maybe a dozen more vendors, can deliver systems out of the box.

Those systems are quite different though. They share a commonality of benefits: lasting reduction of energy risk, capabilities to work with real energy markets to reduce costs, a capability of consuming local storage for local purposes rather than the dead end of net metering, and privacy and security for the building and its occupants. The prices are coming down, leading to three-to-five year ROIs on pure energy costs without pricing the other elements. The risk is now low. The question is now moving toward “Does a microgrid make sense in this state with these regulations?”…and regulatory frameworks are starting to predominate. Keep an eye on these technologies, because if you have a site with greater than average price risk, or reliability risk, or security risk, you should be considering a microgrid now.

At the end of the day, I finished in a discussion of low voltage DC lighting. Again, long-time readers know I have been enthused by this technology for five years. It is now coming to market (LumenCache) with standard parts, standard high-performance LEDs, modular component s anyone can install and maintain. I hope to learn more about this company and its products in the weeks ahead.

Which makes me look ahead. Is it time, at last, for the eMerge alliance, and for DC-based distribution inside the building to come to the fore? Storage (batteries) are DC. Solar PEV is DC. Digital electronics and LEDs are DC. With less need for heat shields and conversion, LEDs are cheaper, safer, and more reliable. Without the need to convert from DC to Ac to DC (storage) and from DC to AC to DC (storage to use), there is a 30% “free” increase in efficiency. With enough distributed energy generation, DC power, as Edison thought it should be, may be back.

That’s all for now. I’m tired and travelling.

Launching The Energy Mashup Lab

After nearly two years of work, The Energy Mashup Lab is creaking into public operation. Since Dave Cohen and I initially sketched out its activities in the Fall of 2013, we have been putting the pieces together. William Cox joined us in 2014. Our goal is open source software agents for self-assembling microgrids.

Much of the work is routine business. We are incorporated as a 501C3 non-profit. We have a working web site, www.TheEnergyMashupLab.org, We have a merchant account to process memberships. We have set up secure private forums and list servers. Dave has contributed his award-winning software for energy-aware agents for home and office systems. William is creating the stub architecture and is days away from the secure code repository in which to nurture the work.

Some of it is refining the mission. The Lab is aimed at the microgrid owned and operated by the owner and operator of the site is supports. A microgrid that is operated by its inhabitant, personal or commercial, should have no interaction with its containing grid other than economic negotiations over supply and demand. For microgrids to be everywhere, you must be able to put them together easily. Our goal is that a homeowner can pick up a major appliance on a Saturday and have it fully integrated into his home microgrid before dinner.

Such a microgrid is a necessary enabler of rapid technology innovation. By limiting interactions to standards-based economic communications, the larger grid has no need to see or understand the technology within the microgrid. The owner can readily adopt new technology (for use, recycling, generation, conversion, storage, ...) of energy, because the larger grid can see only the net effect, i.e., the negotiations over supply and demand.

As the most valuable loads (lovely name the utilities have for their customers) are smooth and predictable, these economic interactions reward the microgrid that internally smooths its load curve (no jitter) with storage, whether up or down. They reward the microgrid that can predict (or even better commit) to a particular load at a particular time. The transactive agent is able to get better terms for being a better partner. Smooth, well-chosen forward transactions for particular load shapes augmented by the ability to take advantage of spot markets to adjust position up or down are most rewarding.

That’s where the agents come in. The agents are participants in an internal market negotiation over time. If you consider the matter, the laptop, or the tablet you reading this with fits almost every definition of microgrid. It can disconnect from the grid and continue to operate. It deals with supply and demand internally, adjusting operating parameters based on whether power is available or not, and whether they are in active use. It has internal energy storage. What it lacks, though, is an economic interface on the plug. In the same way, the consumption-only Heat Pump microgrid and the consumption-only Refrigerator microgrid need know nothing about each other—they need only know not to buy at the same time from the home’s internal market. As supply and demand align, the load curve is smoothed and the aggregate market position is improved.

An economic interface is the lightest path to integration. The Lab’s agents will need to go beyond the published OASIS specification Energy Interoperation to discover the market it is in. These standards-based economic behaviors will be grafted onto the energy-aware autonomous agents.

Odds and Ends: Looking to 2015

I have been quiet here for too long, and have made a New Year’s resolution to get back to writing. Many of my recent projects I cannot write about, for competitive or contractual reasons. Still, there are some big themes coming to light, ones that I have been writing about for years, and that are now hitting the market.

Microgrids, broadly defined, have been a place with a lot of demonstrated movement in this last year. The most expensive thing about the obsolete grid is the assumption that everything happens centrally, and that the local node does not have any responsibility. This might be true if our world was run on incandescent light bulbs and ceramic space heaters. In a digital world, aggregate load and rhomboidal curves are growing problems, ones that cost a lot of power and shorten the lives of a lot of equipment.

Storage remains the most important enabling technology for alternate and distributed energy. The storage symposium at the California Energy Commission on December 1 brought some powerful choices into the open. Grid-scale storage is important, and will grow more important. I think that neighborhood scale, and even commercial building scale storage will have more effect in the long term. Look to announcements in the mid-year.

Smart water and smart energy continue to entangle themselves. Pumped water is pre-consumed energy, stored for future use. Reliable distributed energy fits naturally with reliable distributed water pumping, which is the key to avoiding sewage spills. This challenge has been met with portable generators and other technologies that require nimble deployments of work forces. Batteries with up-front capital costs and life spans of only four or five years, don’t make sense here. I look to experiments with 25 and even 45 year storage systems in 2015.

Golf courses have a reputation as despoilers of the environment, with over fertilization and chemical pest control leading to run-off and despoliation of habitat. For years the best practices in turf management have made that reputation un-true for the best run golf courses. Look to a combination of distributed energy, energy storage, water pumping, and the DC club house to appear at selected locations this year. Golf courses may be just the right size to lead the way in new microgrid approaches.

New players keep cropping up applying digital signal processing to power distribution. Early players, some of which I have written about before, have struggled to connect work in their labs to customer service oriented organizations. Early adopters are scared off by costs that have not dropped yet, and not quite understanding the offerings. New players like 3DFS are preparing production offerings. One of these guys is going to make it big, particularly in light industrial or commercial settings which rely on motors.

The high cost of per-site integration remains a brake on microgrid deployment. Semantic integration is going to be critical to reducing this integration cost. Maybe this is the year…

I hope to be more diligent in writing this year. Keep those notes coming.

tc