Start with a Zombie Fortress

In smart energy, it is easy to get distracted by utility incentives and demand response and other tariffed actions. Utility tariffs are set in stone months or years before an actual set of market conditions arise. Demand Response events miss the supplier’s pain-points while ignoring opportunity for the building owner. “Running a meter backward” is a silly demonstration project that works only so long as very few people do it. All of these are regulatory fantasies that violate the laws of economics and physics. For a smart energy engineer, it is better to start with a more realistic fantasy.

Smart Energy starts with a Zombie Fortress.

Many today who are uneasy about politics and culture and technology dream of a place to get away if things fall apart.  Zombies have no politics, no ideologies. They are mindless, and ugly, and the perfect nightmare for a time when any judgment potentially offends. The coming Zombie Apocalypse is the perfect non-specific eschatology for our time.

The Zombie Fortress is where you go to be safe from the world. Folks can share their desire for a Zombie Fortress without getting into discussion of politics with their friends. The Zombie Fortress names a non-political escape, a bolt-hole to go when everything goes wrong. (Some might claim that the editor of Automated Buildings has retreated to a Zombie Fortress.) Plans for a Zombie Fortress cannot assume that the grid will work, or that the neighbors will be a useful source of supply or resilience.
The challenge of the Zombie Fortress is to live a full life within the site-generated power. System efficiency is critical, certainly, but it is swamped by the power usage efficiency; the operating margin must go as close to zero as doable. This means no power spikes, and no wasted power. Systems must be negotiate so that intermittent systems do not run at the same time. Any extra power, moment to moment, must be pre-consumed or stored.

Above this is a policy layer. If you habitually use power into the night, that is the basis for the power storage goals. Weather reports may set to pre-consumption goals. Systems must decide how important they are and run, or not run, accordingly. Engineers will be in short supply after the Zombie Apocalypse, so the systems in the fortress must integrate themselves.

But maybe the burning times have not yet come. For now, you decide to use the Zombie Fortress as your Party Pad in the in the mountains. Maybe the Fortress cannot produce enough power each day to keep the lights on, the water pumped, and the environment comfortable during sustained use. If the Fortress plans, if it it stores power all week, though, it can support a two day weekend. Maybe a three-day weekend requires two weeks of storage.

But you want to throw a big party. The last party was automatically base-lined by the Fortress. You contact the Fortress from afar, and ask when it will be ready. The Party Pad / Fortress informs you that it will need four weeks to accumulate enough stored energy, five if you send in a cleaning crew during the week in advance. This is the right level of owner interaction.

Transactive energy within the fortress is the simplest integration strategy devised. Traditional integration requires detailed knowledge of all systems, solving what economists call the knowledge problem. Transactors don’t need knowledge of their trading partners, merely common agreements. New systems must merely introduce themselves to the market. Each system, to participate competently in the market, needs to understand its own patterns of use and load shapes.  Operating parameters are created by setting budgets for systems and functions.

Proposed regulations are already making some power producers nervous about next winter. More intermittent power sources are going to make the power grid a less reliable partner. The Galvin Perfect Power Initiative states the reliability comes from within each node, and resilience from a node’s neighbors. The Zombie Fortress is the ideal node to participate in a smart microgrid, whether it encompasses the back-country bolt-holes, or an in-town neighborhood. Zombie fortresses are self-aware, at least so far as energy use, and ready to trade.

Don’t plan for short term inducements and temporary incentive. Design systems the self-integrate with other systems in the facility. Design systems able to negotiate with their peers for predictable load curves, effective pre-consumption, aggressive storage and full use of “excess” energy

We need systems designed for the Zombie Fortress.

The Right Time at the Right Place

Smart Energy uses schedule negotiation and schedule coordination to operate systems and equipment at the right time to take maximum advantage of variable energy supplies. As the internet of things grows up, it will move from gathering data from sensors to coordinating things to enhance our lives. The future of business breaks down into smaller entities with stronger missions that coordinate activities over time to support customers as if by a single business, only better. We all took steps closer to these seemingly simple coordination results, at a meeting at AOL headquarters.

For the last decade, the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium (CalConnect) has worked to improve the interoperation of tools that coordinate schedules. We use their standards to run our personal and business lives, every time we accept a meeting request by email. Their work is critical to smart buildings and smart grids. This week, they demonstrated how to extend this work to support live machine to machine (M2M) schedule negotiations, including schedule auctions. My mind is buzzing with the implications.

Representatives of the US Veterans Administration (VA) were at CalConnect this week. The VA is in the news and under fire this week for failures related to scheduling and appointments. One can look to procedures and people and motivation, but under all is a cumbersome system that makes it difficult to accomplish some essential scheduling functions. These problems encourage employees to augment the system with a variety of out-of-system manual processes. These manual processes present opportunities both for mistakes and for gaming. Tragically, there was some of both.

VA management recognized the problems with scheduling systems well before the current scandals. It takes time to change anything so big. Last year, the VA held a competition to demonstrate standards-based approaches that could not only address the problems they have now, but can also prepare for more powerful stresses on their systems in the future. But knowing they had problems was not the same as knowing where and who the problems were. We have all found that out publicly in the last few weeks.

The story of the VA and open standards and how they hope to transform their monolithic systems in agile systems able to embrace outsourcing, insourcing, and distributed operations, is too long to fit here. I will write of it soon. I had the privilege of contributing to one of the competitors (my team came in third).  This week, the VA and those who hope to work with the VA were at CalConnect.  

CalConnect, now a decade old, ebbs and flows as does any organization. CalConnect was founded in a flurry of activity to address minimum capability cell phones, and worked through such problems as coordinating recurring meetings on a device too limited to compute once-a-week meetings. Today’s phones are more capable than personal computers then, and CalConnect has moved on to the problems of personal calendars in the age of social media. Calendar federation and social coordination bring new challenges.

Five years ago, CalConnect led the refresh of the aging standards for calendar information. iCalendar (RFC5545) is flexible and extensible, and describes key semantics and essential structure for everything you might see in your personal calendar. ITIP (RFC 5546) describes how to negotiate information between calendar-aware systems. You use it not only when you accept an email invitation, but also when that meeting is moved or cancelled.

Three years ago, CalConnect produced vAvailability, now moving to a standard in the IETF. (The Internet Engineering Task Force is the organization that manages the key specifications and communications of the internet.) . VAvailability is used in smart energy to advertise changing schedules for energy supply and for demand response. EMIX (Energy Market Information Exchange) defines contracts for Energy Reserves as financial options linked to vAvailability. OASIS developed WS-Calendar in close coordination with CalConnect.

But that is in the past. This week was exciting for the demonstration of new work that expands the tools for schedule coordination.

This week at CalConnect, multiple organizations demonstrated working interchanges of live schedule negotiations and schedule auctions. I will write more about the new standards such vPoll, CardDAV, and iSchedule later. The news is that this week CalConnect demonstrated three-server three-organization demonstration of standards-based schedule polling and auctions. The essential interactions for resource advertising and exchange were front and center. Direct server-to-server communications of schedules without the usual email were demonstrated, along with specific hooks for authorized interactions between web sites and personal calendars, and between trusted business partners.

Distributed schedule-based auctions are at the core of smart energy, including the budding efforts for interoperable transactive energy agents.

Standards-based scheduling engines will expand the reach and availability of specialized veteran’s services for today’s more mobile population. Open specifications for schedule negotiation can support more efficient and auditable queuing of complex scheduling requirements to be performed by multiple clinics. Distributed schedule-abased auctions will enable the VA to expand services and schedules to incorporate community resources far from the big VA Hospitals.

The next step of computer service is schedules for systems big and small to interact with our lives. The next step of business is improved provision of services across multiple businesses acting a single personal concierge, in medicine and in other personal services.

The tools for this were demonstrated at CalConnect this week. This work has powerful implications for smart energy, for medical scheduling, academic scheduling, and for social media. More later.

CalConnect invites interested organizations and companies to join CalConnect in moving the work
forward. www.calconnect.org

Making New Homes ready for Smart Energy

Smart energy names the techniques and technologies needed to manage energy flows and energy supply and demand when energy generation and energy storage are as distributed as energy consumption is today. Grid assets are managed by central control. This only works so long as the assets are central and the assets are centrally owned. Distributed assets should have distributed ownership. We must turn the centralized model on its head. Smart energy manages from the edges, not from the center. Smart energy treats homes and commercial buildings as microgrids responsible for their own power.

The concern of smart energy policy is to remove barriers to enable rapid entry and virtuous markets for new technologies. Policy is implemented by regulations and codes. Today’s post arises because I am wondering when we will have a model building code for the smart energy-ready residence. What should a commodity builder do if he wishes to claim that each home in a neighborhood is “smart energy ready?”

Let’s start with the interconnect. Today’s rules for distributed energy focus, as they should, on safety first. To this end, they mandate anti-islanding, i.e., if the grid goes away, power systems shut off. This prevents a linesman from being electrocuted when the downstream side of a downed line is “hot.” The model smart energy ready building should instead choose safe islanding. Local power systems, generation, batteries, even electric vehicles, should work safely within the home no matter what the local conditions. Software and hardware at the building entrance should support this safe islanding.

Within the home, there should be an emphasis on safety and extensibility. The Electrician working in a house needs to be just as concerned with unexpected power sources as does the linesman outside the house. If there are distributed energy resources, then there will be unexpected power sources in the home. The interconnect in the house is as important as that between the house and grid.

So we need two interconnects.

Rooftop solar requires paths and connections. If added during construction, conduit to the roof to support the eventual installation of PV costs almost nothing. This conduit can be put in while the walls are open and before siding is installed. Designed-in conduit is less likely to leak then after-thought retrofits. Preparing for roof-top PV likely means planning for an inverter closer to the home’s power distribution panels. 

A similar logic suggests that garages should plan for plug-in electric vehicles, even as the standards for them have not gelled. My guess is that this area will come to be dominated by smart charging stations coupled with storage. Whatever the technology, there will need to be wiring able to safely support high power flows over long periods of time. In the smart energy ready home, empty conduit may be enough for now.

The smart energy ready home should plan for power storage. Chemical based storage systems may lose much of their capabilities at extreme temperatures. There should be some space for storage installation that has an adequate and safe path to and from central power distribution. Again, empty conduit may be adequate for now.

To achieve reliability goals, some homeowners will opt for site-based generation. At its simplest, this requires a pad and conduit back to the central power distribution for the house. At its most complex, it requires very complex configuration. Because utilities today must pay above market rates for solar generated home power, they must watch carefully to make sure that the homeowner is not selling them “solar power” sourced from a backyard gasoline generator.

The answer is to get rid of the above market rates, and let the homeowner operate in the market. Distributed energy resources are first and foremost to serve the needs of the distributed site.

When I consider smart, distributed energy, I always call to mind the words of Doug Gwyn, when asked of a feature in UNIX: “UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.” We must be careful that we apply the same thinking to distributed energy.

To get more participants in smart energy, we must make it easier. A good start would to be to define the requirements for a smart energy-ready home. We can then see if builders would be willing to build them, and whether the market will bear the trivial costs, or at least trivial if designed in.

Solar Consultants are a Big Barrier to Smart Energy

Smart energy names the techniques and technologies needed to manage energy flows and energy supply and demand when energy generation and energy storage are as distributed as energy consumption is today. During the early years of distributed energy, distributed energy resources were so small as to be losable in the noise of the grid. Installations were treated by utilities as if they were just another utility installation. This design approach has become the single largest barrier to distributed energy. So when are we going to get smart about distributed energy?

Grid assets are managed by central control. This only works so long as the assets are central and the assets are centrally owned. Distributed assets should have distributed ownership. Their purpose is often local, and the local owner has their own reasons for deploying them. As I have written before, today’s integration techniques actually discourage distributed storage. Distributed storage may be the single most critical requirement for smart energy to succeed. 

The first generation of PV consultants are so focused on the utility that they do not even know why the consumer is installing the system. Their reports to potential customers emphasize gaining payments from the utilities over obtaining on-site benefits. The reported risks to the customer are regulatory, i.e., will the local commission hold firm in forcing the utility to pay these rates. Even financial matters look to the utility: will utility throttling of generation interfere with PV as an annuity.

When asked about local benefits, of self-sufficiency and of resilience and of local control, few of the first-generation consultants have any answers. They look discomfited for a minute, they go back to reciting interconnect rules. From their actions, one would induce that they see no value to the site at all, merely an opportunity to loot the public weal.

This looking to the utility reduces the value proposition to the customer. The central control model reduces innovation in systems. As many realized after Sandy, forward assets of a central authority are of no use after a crisis. Without central control, they simply turn off.

The answer is to turn this model on its head. Smart energy manages from the edges, not from the center. Smart energy treats homes and commercial buildings as microgrids responsible for their own power. Each of these microgrids is a node within its neighborhood, able and willing to share its excess power as needed. A microgrid that contains generation or storage may even decide to serve those neighborhood needs before those of its constituent nodes. Those decisions, though, must be negotiated using sound market approaches.

If Solar consultants would start acting as if they believe solar energy is a good idea for the customer, and not just a way to extract regulatory rents then solar installations would increase. Until they do so, every installation will take longer, and cost more, than it should. Customers currently in the process find the solar consultants, and their regulatory-centric models, to be the biggest barrier to installations.