A Caffeinated view of Aging Energy Infrastructure

The local coffee shop, The OpenEye Cafe, has an outsized role in thinking about smart buildings and the smart grid. Each day when I leave the gym, I go to the OpenEye to caffeinate myself out of my post exercise torpor and to write.

The OpenEye is a great college town coffee shop, even if it is in Carrboro, the town next door to the college town. Its main room is huge for a coffee shop, fitted out with as many old couches and comfy chairs as it has little tables surrounded by mismatched chairs. It has numerous small side rooms, a patio in the back, more sidewalk seating in the front.

This size gives it a wonderful variety of subcultures, as there is the construction contractor corner, klatches of endurance runners, and every college town’s PWDIBs (people who dress in black). On weekends, the Men Who Run in Kilts fill one end, while students come in to tolerate Mom & Dad buying them some coffee. The Baristas and their friends, of course, display a cornucopia of piercings and tattoos.

So yeah, it’s a great coffee house, but how does this tie to aging infrastructure, aside from the fact that I write there?

At any time, there are 15 to 40 laptops running in the main room. When the OpenEye moved into these larger quarters, they ran surface mounted conduit and put plugs all over the walls. Window seats, with a plug under the table and a view, are at a premium. Cords snake out from the walls to the couches in mid-room tables. I wonder how significant electricity is as a cost of the shop.

There are frequent scheduling negotiations as well. Are you leaving soon? Can you plug this in for me? Excuse me you seem to have knocked out my plug. I hate those Macintosh plugs with the transformer right on the wall plug. Because they need their bottoms supported, their owners always plug into the top plug, blocking the lower plug.

But still, where is the aging infrastructure? Well, just as none ever thinks of the aging grid, no one ever thinks about wearing out receptacles. Despite being just over two years old, every receptacle in the store is one out and “loose”. Normally a receptacle hugs a plug, and provides some friction to sliding out. Not so here. With every receptacle being plugged and un-plugged countless times a day, they have actually worn out. I have to watch the battery display at the bottom of the screen, for the plugged in laptop may no longer be charging.

Still, it’s a great coffee shop, and a great community crossroads, even if it needs “plug maintenance”

Cargo Cult Energy

I spent last week in Chicago and by of Silicon Valley, talking about new energy. In Chicago, we were talking about the smart grid, and how it enables new markets in energy. Out by San Francisco Bay, the conversation was, of course, about ventures and new businesses and high tech. There were exciting conversations in Chicago, ones that may lead getting the underlying structures of smart energy markets right. There were innovative projects in California, ones that are beginning to answer "What would your stuff do, if it knew the price of energy, now.?" In both locations, there was a tendency to fall into a trap that I call Cargo Cult Energy.

The phrase Cargo Cult names a reaction of some isolated islanders in the South Pacific to what they experienced in World War II. Some of these islanders had never seen internal combustion or manufactured goods or any food that they had not themselves pulled from the sea or hewn from the land. One day a stranger would come, or several. These strangers seemed very determined to cut down trees, and to flatten the land. The strangers were so obsessed that the islanders helped them, even going so far as to build a tower at the end of the flat space.

The strangers would go up into the towers and call down huge flying machines. All the supplies necessary for industrialized war would flow through this airstrip on an isolated island. The leavings dropped by the runways, and pilfered from the warehouses were more wealth than the islanders had ever imagined. The war ended, and the strange men left, and the flying machines came no more. On some islands, myths grew. If only the towers were maintained, if only the right rituals were performed at the end of the runway, then the machines, and then wealth would return.

In Chicago, fat too much of the conversation, before the GridEcon started each day, was of incentives. Over breakfast, alas, the conversation was often not of systems, and technology, and business process. Too often, plans were being built around short term incentives. What incentives do they have in New York? When do the tax incentives expire in Illinois?  We are not talking about priming the pump here. The business plans are short. Can we get in and get out when the incentives expire?

The venture capital guys were clear. They were not interested in funding any project whose business plan was based on tax credits, of utility rebates. What government gives, what the public utility commission grants, can just as easily be taken away tomorrow. Venture money wants long term value. Each technology should be sold on its clear and identifiable business value. Once that case was made, credits, and rebates could be a sweetener, a way to accelerate the business cycle.

Around the bay, I saw some many technology plans. I saw novel integrations of existing technology, in which simple things were made smart, particularly in how they used energy. I saw polymath projects, in which technologies and approaches from all over were combined into a novel product that used smart energy. There is a buzz of something ready to happen. Unfortunately I also saw folks tempted to lose their virtue.

Silicon Valley prides itself on a "virtuous culture of innovation", in which good products win, bad products lose, and hard work gets you ahead. I saw some very interesting, and perhaps some very good products. Too often, though, the management team forgets about the building the internet of things around energy, and gets lured by the siren song of third party programs. It’s great – they won’t even have to pay for it! We’ll pay for the installation with DR dollars! The homeowner won’t care because they’ll get a tax credit! We are not talking about priming the pump here. The business plans are short. "Can we get in and get out when the incentives expire?" In other words, these plans were without Silicon Valley virtue.

The energy markets in the US have been poor markets, looking to the regulators rather than to competitors for 100 years. To the extent that the smart grid enables new markets, successful new ventures will chase those new markets. Unless of course they get seduces by unnatural signals coming from the externa of the old markets. Unless they build their business plans around Cargo Cults.

The Talmud and the Smart Grid

I received an animated Christmas card in e-mail from a leader in demand-response last month. The e-card used flash animation to explain demand-response. The flash animation told a tale of demand-response during a holiday season. Santa and his sleigh flew into a transmission line, causing power shortage. DR aware equipment rapidly responded to signals sent out. DR-aware Christmas lights dimmed just a little. DR-aware electric menorahs turned off every other light. The animated card told a story that demonstrated that demand-response could be efficient, effective, and doubly offensive.

Demand-Response (DR) is an approach to power management developed by the electrical power industry. Peak power is the most expensive power. It is usually generated by the most polluting power sources. When consumers demand is greater than the system can provide, brown-outs and even black-outs ensue. If consumers in buildings, homes and industry could respond rapidly to signals that the grid was nearing capacity, it would greatly reduce the costs, both monetary and environmental of providing electrical power while improving reliability.

The menorah is part of celebrating Chanukah, also known as the festival of lights. Chanukah celebrates the re-dedication of the Jewish Temple following the defeat of the Seleucid empire. When the temple was re-dedicated, there was only enough sacramental oil to light the Temple’s eternal flame for one night, yet the lamp burned for eight days until acceptable reserves could be found. One might consider this in itself to be a miracle of DR.

Jewish tradition recounts a great dispute between Hillel and Shammai as to the proper order and means of lighting the menorah. The dispute swung on a fundamental question of faith and the practice chosen illustrated that faith. Modern practice follows Hillel, and the lights are lit in a particular order on particular nights. A quick explanation can be found at http://www.ou.org/chagim/chanukah/machloket.htm. Clearly blacking out every other light on the menorah in response to DR is offensive to tradition.

There is another offense from the misuse of the menorah. The Talmud prohibits using Chanukah lights for anything other than publicizing and meditating on the Chanukah story. For this reason, there is an extra light on the menorah, used to light the others. The extra light also provides ambiguity; if one were to read from the lights—something prohibited—then it's not clear whether the light one's reading from was from the Hanukkah lights or the extra light. Clearly using lights on an electric menorah, other than the extra light, would be for neither publicity or meditation. I see no reason why the extra light could not be used for DR—but not the others.

Acceptable DR must be based upon local control and local autonomy. Central control will never be sensitive to the local concerns in each home and each building. Failure to take those concerns into account will cause resentment. It is easy to come up with other scenarios in which an engineered demand response would be offensive in other traditions at other times. Resentment will limit response by limiting participation.

To be truly affective, grid-scale power management must respect local autonomy. The best way to do that is by economic signals to communicate scarcity and value. After receiving these signals, each business and household can decide.

Packing Peanuts and Corn Ethanol

It is hard to figure out the full cost of the government’s corn ethanol mania. Random observations during the holiday season suggest that they are still larger even than reported already. A full accounting, if it were possible, would sound a cautionary note as a new congress and a new administration consider how to stimulate new energy and E-Tech.

The most believable numbers suggest that the full production costs of corn ethanol use more oil-based energy then it replaces. These numbers are of course, in dispute as they include assumptions about fertilizer production and tractor driving and a twisted maze of hiddensubsidies. Holiday packing peanuts are part of the picture.

A notable facet of this century’s world economy has been the entry of the poorest of the poor into the world economy. We have seen this in reports of cell phones in rural India and cell-phone banking in Africa. Driven by Corn Ethanol, food costs around the world skyrocketed. Worried about feeding their families, third world famers retreated from market crops and returned to subsistence farming. As the first world economies stumble, and consumers reduce their purchases, the emerging economies, now cash poor, cannot buy. The world economy, like our crops, has been made more brittle and one-dimensional.

Some problems may be masked as political rather than non-economic costs. There were riots in Mexico, where staple tortillas were priced out of reach. The resulting growing desperation may have recruited more to the drug armies fighting it out with Federales and the police, so much reported this last year. If so, this problem may outlast the short-term corn prices.

Every year at Christmas, I receive boxes from my large family spread across the country. Many of these boxes are professionally packed by the package stores, placed in branded boxes, and packed in commodity supplies. For the last few years, these boxes have been filled with biodegradable packing peanuts, made from expanded corn starch. This year, every such box was filled with plastic peanuts. Corn Ethanol has apparently been a boon to the petrochemical plastic peanut industry, as it priced competitors out of the market.

Christmas is always a time in which the family purchases more pre-made food. Whether for a convenient meal for the family re-gathered or for a special side dish or desert to augment a holiday meal, or even for a quick meal grabbed to allow time for holiday errands, I have performed my annual longitudinal survey of the food containers in local use. For the last few years, these containers have been increasingly made of a corn starch-based polymer that degrades in a host compost pile. This year they were once again, as they were five years ago, plastic.

I hope we will learn from this that good intentions are not enough. I hope that we will learn from this that one-dimensional approaches to sustainability may be less sustainable than their predecessors.

I hope that as we re-make energy markets, we eschew the hubris of central planning.

I hope we have the self discipline to resist the easy answer. We need better markets, and less central planning. This is too important to make the same mistakes again.