AC/DC without the wailing

The American Scientist has an excellent summary on issues of AC/DC this month, including some confirmations of points made here earlier, sometimes eliciting howls and snarky email.

One interesting account is that of the municipal ISP in Gnesta, Sweden which opted to build a DC data center years ago. They did not order specialized equipment. They replaced their existing UPS systems with one supplying a steady 350 watts of power into existing systems. As odd as it seems, they did not fry any hardware; they simply saw a continuing 28% reduction in energy use. The worst problems they faced were over-riding some safeties during equipment start-up. One can only imagine the savings if the system were actually designed.

This account leaves out that since their system runs on the batteries of their UPS, the batteries now have 28% longer life. As the electricity in data centers is converted directly to heat, the air conditioning needs of the data center have a similar drop.

One last interesting point is that after Westinghouse and Tesla won out, Consolidated Edison continued to offer legacy DC services in Manhattan to support DC elevator motors and such. The surprising thing, to me, is that this service was finally phased out just this last fall (or possibly the fall before depending upon the publication lead times for the American Scientist).

To reprise the argument, now with more confidence, most modern equipment is DC (Direct Current) internally. Power coming over the lines is AC (Alternating Current). . Those little warm bricks and “wall warts” on the plugs convert AC power to DC. Batteries are DC. Solar power is DC. Wind Power is DC. AC has an advantage in long lines transmission. If power were converted once when it came to the house to DC, then the heat of conversion, now separated onto so many systems, could be better used.

Every DC source today must be converted to AC so it can be converted back to DC. This wastes energy. If the internal distribution of power in the home and office were DC, energy storage would be more effective. On-site generation would be more effective.

In any case, I recommend reading the article.

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/56694

Some things that should be Easy (but aren’t yet)

I get a lot of correspondence indicating that we now have enterprise ready interfaces. Pshaw. We have a lot of control protocols that are serialized to look something like well crafted XML.

We have a lot of points exposed, without any means for the non-engineer to evaluate what they might mean. These points suffer because they lack what Bob Smith of Tall Trees is teaching me to call an upper ontology. Without the fancy words, we have access to a lot of numbers that don’t mean anything.

What follows is a list of some things that should be easy to do. They should be doable by a non-specialist. Exposing the ability to wire these things together should not involve exposing or interfering with the inner workings of each system.

• A tenant entering a lobby door after hours uses a card reader or keypad to gain access. Simultaneously, the HVAC starts and lighting turns on in the tenant's space so the tenant is safe and comfortable when entering their space. The building manager receives the necessary information to bill the tenant for use of the environmental systems from the time they walk in the door until they later leave the building.
• A new employee is enrolled by human resources and a photo badge is printed. Simultaneously, that badge is activated as a credential in the access control system and parameters for when and where they can go are downloaded into controllers and readers.
• An "after hours" security console provides graphical information of alarms for security and HVAC for emergency response at a multi-building office campus.
• Dorm residents leave for the summer. Their card credentials are disabled - but not deleted - until they re-enroll for the fall semester. Student Housing, Administration, and Security all save many keystrokes.
• The provosts office sets up class schedules and space assignments and the building automation systems automatically schedule the appropriate spaces for occupancy
• A building occupant who operates very energy-intensive equipment can access real-time energy use and pricing data to take advantage of time-of-day energy rates when running major pieces of equipment
• An administrative assistant in a conference facility can have a desktop application the enables room scheduling and set-point control for the entire conference facility without any interaction with Building Automation System staff
• A professor in the School of Business or in Information Science can assign undergraduate research that easily makes use of near real-time data from energy producing and consuming equipment to develop business models based on building analytics.
• A High School theatre department can disable a smoke alarm for the duration of a play, confident that the safety systems will re-enable themselves without expensive and hard-to-schedule involvement of a controls company.
• Tenants can directly monitor QOS agreements in provision of services
• Landlords can directly monitor QOS of outsourced utility services such as steam and chilled water.
• Special needs areas within Universities and Biomedical research companies can meet regulatory needs for direct monitoring of key areas (animal care facilities, pharmaceutical storage) gaining instant access to temperature, humidity, and air-turnover rates, information that is today available only within the Building Automation System control silo
• Students wish to be able to manage their own environmental footprint, and see their own net energy use in sustainable dorms, as well as having dorm-to-dorm comparisons during the annual Green Games.
• A doctor’s office is able to integrate the environmental controls of its examination rooms with the schedules for patients into those rooms, enabling the practice to improve patient comfort (warmer rooms when a patient is undressed) while saving money over all (less conditioning when the room is vacant).

The question is, why are any of these things difficult, and why do they require the work of buildign operations staff or an engineer?

Data Centers aren’t anything special.

Normal business now need to defend themselves from the power systems just as data centers do.

Long time readers know that I consider that power companies and utilities commissions over-estimate power reliability by focusing on the presence of power and not on the quality of power. I often note that my home, halfway between a major research university and a nuclear plant suffers multiple outages a month, outages long enough to require that I reset all the devices in the house, whether microwave, DVD player, or alarm clock. This probably has something to do with the frequency with which I must replace home electronics. Yet homes are “adequately supplied” with power.

On the other side is the data center. Data centers have long acknowledged that utility power is neither good enough nor reliable enough for their purposes. Data centers use multiple strategies for on-site energy storage, on-site energy generation, and on-site energy conditioning to protect themselves from the product supplied over the power grid.

Non high-tech businesses are considered as something more similar to the home than to the data center. They were not worth protecting in the way data centers are protected.

Two weeks ago, some friends open up a bakery and sweet shop in Chapel Hill. Sugarland is an all-natural bakery and gelato shop. Its business equipment is kitchen equipment and retail refrigeration. It seemed the worst problem they were going to have was keeping up with the swarms of students that found them as soon as they opened, before their staff was all trained. Doc and Katrina were exhausted, but pleased. The snacks were delicious. Rush hour warm cookie time was a success.

Last Sunday a wind storm came through the southeast. In town power would flicker, then flicker again. One would think that this business would be mostly unaffected, not much different from the businesses the grid was designed for in the 1950’s.

Modern ovens, however, have computer systems the run them, computers that reset with each flicker. Modern gelato machines have processors that stop when the power dims a little. The cash register is, of course, a high touch system for inventory control and minimal staff training, until its database corrupts.

I went by Sugarland on Sunday as Katrina threw out 250 cupcakes that deflated when the oven re-set. She did not dare start more cakes for the morning until she knew the power would be reliable. Doc had given up on trying getting fresh gelato out to the waiting lines. Neither knew what to prep that night to prepare for the early morning baking on Monday.

The absolute shut-down and loss of business for flickering power in a modern retail bakery is as big a hit as in any data center. Bakers, too, need to defend themselves from what comes over the power line with

Monday’s short stock is now over. The power has been adequate this week. The shelves are stocked again. But I will no longer consider data centers as having special needs; merely needs that are better recognized.

I think I will head downtown now – I hear the grapefruit gelato is superb.

Water & Power

Water policy is a bit afield for me, but sometimes it is worthwhile to look at the spaces nearby to see better, what one works with every day.

Water is in always in the news here in the southeastern U.S. Winter rains have done little more than put the ongoing drought in a holding pattern, not getting any worse, but not yet getting any better.

The towns in the triangle are running low. Mandatory water restrictions are in effect across the Research Triangle. Mandatory restrictions do not seem to result in any actual reduction for most users. Neighborhoods in Durham are still arguing over whether their homeowner’s associations still legally require them to water their lawns.

The most recent restrictions do seem to be cutting into certain businesses. As they pay for their domestic water with unemployment checks, I am sure that the displaced workers appreciate that their domestic water is still priced for affordable lawn watering.

I am keeping an eye on Durham, which sank to less than a month of drinkable water, and suddenly discovered that it had a larger water supply, now designated a “Premium” and “Normal”. I guess it’s a lot like the quality electrical service I have at home, which is up all the time if you don’t count the flickers.

The water systems don’t appear to price their product high enough for capital renewal. There is more than one main break a day in Raleigh—one reported noted dismissively that in the last one “only 200,000 gallons” were lost. All spending is determined politically, and the mayor has declared that in 2008, more pipes will be replaced. Again, it sounds like to power grid, which has plenty of money for storm repair, but no money for storm proofing.

Price signals are even worse for water than they are for electricity. To save money, the water bills are sent out every two months. On a recent plane ride, my neighbor told me how her water heater leaked when she was out of town for a few days. The heater was in the attic, and the outflow saturated the walls and created a pool in her crawl space. Three pumper trucks were required to drain under her house. She moved out for six weeks while the walls were rebuilt. The water company did not notice and her bill was under $160.

Water pricing is kept artificially low, that is why there is no capital renewal. Since prices are how we communicate scarcity and value, end users treat water as an abundant valueless resource. Regulators occasionally step in with pretend solutions that are despised (like the flush-twice toilet). Real innovations, which would be driven by price signals, do not occur.

Water may soon be recognized as a more critical issue than energy, causing us more degradation of life style sooner than does global warming. Rarely do people have some sort of event that consumes an order of magnitude more electricity than usual, as did my flight-mate above. Perhaps we should plan now to add AMI (Automated Metering Infrastructure) to water as we are now doing to electricity. If so, we should commit now to an open interface that included the customers.

And while we are at it, why not collect customer email addresses and cell phones as well, and email/text them when their water use suddenly shoots up in a sustained way. They can always ignore it if they wish.

Let me see. Scarce resource creeping toward a crisis. Inadequate capital expenditures driven by misguided progressive populism. Too-low prices causing society to substitute regulation for innovation. Nothing in common here.