Social interactions will define success of Electric Cars

This was the post I started writing a couple days ago until the first paragraph just metastasized to fill up the page. Once we have more than a few electric cars in town, then those cars will be potentially the biggest stress on the grid.

The peak stress on the power grid starts during the afternoon, during heat-of-the-day air conditioning and work, but it continues through the early evening. Offices are still turned on. Programmed houses are kicking in with their air conditioning in preparation for their owner’s arrival. Families are cooking dinner. The power grid is still working nearly as hard as it can.

Now let’s posit the electric cars coming home, drained from a day of driving. Perhaps they were doubly drained, used to carry their office buildings during the afternoon brown-out. What will people want from their cars next….

• To sit in the garage overnight, slowly charging.
• To be ready to drive 15 miles in twenty minutes when I go get one last kid from athletic practice.
• To be at least half charged and ready for anything in two hours when the baby sitter arrives and mom and dad head out for an evening on the town.
• To quickly get to at least a 40 mile range in case I get an emergency call from the nursing home, and thereafter just be sure to be ready for the morning commute.
• To get a charge for 15 miles by 8:15 when I head to choir practice at church. Better make that 25 lest we stop for coffee afterward.
• It's two hundred miles to the beach and we plan to take full advantage of the expensive week-long rental by getting there tonight! Kids, grab your bags, we are leaving in 20 minutes. Oh, and the car needs a full quick-charge, no matter the expense.

Gasoline handles all these scenarios. Many of them involve discretionary electricity purchases during the early evening peak. We will never solve these problems at the level of machine-controls. We need time of day pricing, to allocate the scarce resource. Just as many restaurants offer Monday-night specials, we need day-by-day pricing, to encourage people to choose when to schedule their evening activities. Electric cars will require live power pricing, by the minute, and by the day.

Let’s consider driving the electrical car further into our lives, and further into our infrastructure. Sometimes I will want to charge my car when I am not at home. This will require that cars identify who they are at the plug.

• When parking downtown, I want to plug in my car. I may want to choose between a quick visit, for a cup of coffee, and an all-day back-to-school shopping event.
• The Green Garage™ offers locally generated wind power for re-charging at its own special rates that vary with the wind. Having been burned once, I want to check prices before I leave the car.
• When I go over to your house for dinner, I want to plug in. Being a polite guest, I of course want the charges to go onto my own bill.
• The whole family gathers in the next town for Thanksgiving dinner. All cars are drained, and need to recharge over the next five hours except for the college kid, who arrives at the last moment, and leaves as soon as he can. Grandpa decides to overrule all normal agreements and cover all the charges for cars plugged in at his house.

The technical feat of creating amazing batteries and lightweight materials, however astonishing and inspiring, will be undone without the capability easy interaction with the lives and aspirations of those who drive the cars. Electric cars will require powerful intuitive systems interfaces, able to learn their owner’s tastes and habits. These systems can only interact with the power grid through simple standard economic interfaces.

Electric Cars will not be useful for Demand-Response

If a performing electric car were to arrive today, with adequate batteries at reasonable cost, it could well push today’s non-transactive energy infrastructure over the edge. Usually I write about intelligent building agents; when I write about the power grid, it is to discuss transacted energy purchases between those agents and an intelligent transaction grid. Today, I am going for those transactions on that grid, but leaving out the building. But first, a little on the building with cars.

There a lot of hopeful scenarios in which peak shaving is enabled by commuter cars plugged into office buildings. Peak shaving, initiated by what are called Demand-Response (DR) signals from the grid, is when buildings lessen their electrical demands to avoid peak periods of energy use. The story goes that we will go to work, and plug in our cars. When the DR event arrives, the building will run off the combined car batteries, reducing demand on the grid.

DR is very important for today’s grid, because the power supplied at the peak is the most expensive and usually the dirtiest to generate. I have seen numbers suggesting that as much as 17% of the grid’s capacity is used for less than 120 hours per year. If we manage peak electrical use, we have effectively grown the power grid for free.

Cars and their batteries, however, will never be an effective peak shaving tool for office buildings. Leave aside for the moment all HR-related issues associated with employers paying for commuting costs, and look at the people. Peak load occurs in the afternoon, and extends into the early dinner hour.

If I live some distance from my employer, will I be willing to end each day with a low charge on my car? Only until the first day I run out on the way home, perhaps because of an unanticipated need to attend a school event for my children, or to attend to a medical issue for my parents, or even to pick up some supplies for a social event. In any case, the first time it happens, I will resolve to park away from the building thereafter.

If I live close to work, I will arrive with my car already charged up. DR participation, always in the afternoon, will leave me always wondering whether I am subsidizing the company. The first time I am turned down for a raise, this thought will begin festering into a general resentment of my employer. Sub-vocal mutterings with phrases such as “blood-sucking leeches” come to mind.

Whether I live far away or whether I live close in, sooner or later I will leave early to head off for a summer (most DR events are during warm weather) weekend at the beach and find that despite my plans, my employer and its building have drained my car.

No, we cannot turn to electric cars to solve the DR needs of our office buildings. Not if actual people are involved. Perhaps if we make sure that our grid is intelligent and two-way transactional we can see a way past this.

I will try to write soon on what intelligence is needed, in grid and car, for more realistic use of more than a few electric cars.

Kombikraftwerk - energy reliability through diversity

At the University of Kassel in Germany, researchers are assembling a reliable power grid from a number of unreliable components. Kombikraftwerk (Combined Power Plant) is a grid assembled from 36 biogas, wind, solar and hydropower plants in a distributed network. The project was designed as a demonstration project to prove that it is possible for the German power grid to be reliable even if based entirely on non-traditional power sources.

This is a demonstration (again) of the old principle that you can gain additional reliability and availability from multiple technologies then you can from any single technology. While it is certainly possible that with additional research, development, any one (or two) of the technologies could be made ever so much more reliable, such efforts soon run into the age-old 90% problem. (This is usually expressed as “After you've done 90% of the project, you have the other 90% to do.”) Achieving each additional increment of reliability from an existing technology usually requires large amounts of additional effort.

A problem in scaling Kombikraftwerk will be the fallacy of large scale control. As the size of community to be orchestrated increases, the complexity of orchestration increases. Sooner or later, the Kombikraftwerk will fail due to the deep integration and direct control  of power production that appear to be embedded in its model.

The other apparent problem in Kombikraftwerk is the fine tuning of energy production to meet actual rather than anticipated needs. This requires additional spin reserve (Plants that are operating but not supplying the grid) to handle surprises. Some spin will always be required, but it is easy to imagine scenarios requiring much less than we require today.

These issues are just the sort that the abstract interoperability and intelligent end nodes envisioned by the GridWise Architectural Council (GWAC) will solve easily. GWAC is working toward abstract e-commerce style interfaces between each component of the grid, including generation, transmission, distribution, and end customer face. Both sides of each interface are assumed to be intelligent peers, able to defend their internal missions.

The GWAC smart grid is the simultaneous optimization of the diversity problem (which combines a number of unreliable technologies to produce a reliable cloud) and the complexity problem (it is difficult to control a mix of systems with different operating characteristics into a single large-scale control system) and the money problem (how do we fund this in such a way that each innovation can be rewarded).

Generating systems can signal their operating postures and capabilities using abstract messages. These interfaces hide the underlying diversity to prevent the overall grid management from becoming too complex. New technologies for storage and generation can come to market faster, and make money faster, because they need only interface to the simpler abstract interface rather than undergo deep integration.

The GWAC customer face addresses coordination of the demand side. Local agents representing smart buildings become participants in the smart grid. Initiatives like the Zero Energy Building foresee hybrid nodes, usually consumers of energy, but occasionally selling back site-stored or site-generated energy.

Kombikraftwerk and GWAC are compatible approaches that can easily build off one another. Because the defined interfaces of the GWAC are abstract and standard, new generating technologies can join the mix without extensive review. Easy recombination enables innovation by shortening time to market. More innovation enhances reliability by adding additional sources of diversity.

Money is the best, and most universally accepted, abstract interface for communicating scarcity and value. When we add money to each interface request, the natural target for the building-side of the interface is the enterprise and the tenant, not the systems. It may be that the best demand/response decision, when incentivised with pricing, is to shut down the office building, declare a telecommuting day, and run the building generators (whatever they may be) flat out. Such decisions would only further enhance Kombikraftwerk.

Looks like Kombikraftwerk and the GridWise Architectural Council could work well together…

References:

• Kombikraftwerk  - http://www.kombikraftwerk.de/index.php?id=27
• GridWise Architectural Council (http://www.gridwiseac.org/)
• Demand Response Automated Server (DRAS) http://www.akuacom.com/solutions/index.html

Grid-Interop was great!

It was a solid group of attendees, in tracks ranging from Building/Grid interactions, Enterprise/Grid Interactions, Architectures, Security, and probably several more.

This effort has really come a long way in the two years since the GridWise Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The effort has move from agreement on principles (then) to broad agreement on approaches, deep discussion of approaches. It was encouraging to have Matt Smith, Director of Duke Power’s Utility of the Future. All that good work that Cinergy was doing just keeps bubbling to the top. You might remember Cinergy as the Utility that did NOT melt down in central Ohio, stopping the blackout of 2003 from heading South and West as well as North and East.

One big change was that Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is on every sketch and PowerPoint. Web services are being driven deep into every aspect of the architecture. While it would be too much to expect that those who have control of the largest robot ever built (the power grid) would abandon process entirely, there is a real and concerted effort to define service interactions that are free from underlying process. And as one speaker observed, “Everything gets architecture, not just software.

In a meeting pre-conference, someone stated what has to be the catch phrase of the conference: “Remember your system is someone else’s component”. A speaker from Cisco acknowledged the tension between real-time interrupt architecture. He introduced the term SOA 2.0, defined as the combination of SOA and EDA (Event Driven Architecture).

One new focus this time was Agents. No longer was everyone talking about distributed agents. Now they were talking about interactions with independent agents. One speaker observed “Agents are Objects that can say no.” Even the appliances group, in the person of Whirlpool’s Gale Horst, said “If we have a load of bleach in the washer, we won’t shut down until the clothes are rinsed.” Agents will be everywhere. Regular readers know that I wish we had been able to push more agent behavior into the building nodes of UNC’s Enterprise Building Management System (EBMS).

With agents come behaviors, and with many agents, come emergent behaviors. The award for best technical paper at the conference went to Apperson Johnson for his paper on agent-based systems. Apperson's talk included discussions of emergent behaviors, a particular interest of mine. One of his references was to a paper entitled “Implementation of a Belief-Desire-Joint-Intention Architecture” – I will have to track it down.

I left with two items on my plate. First, I was asked to come up with a list of major groups of building owners, and with a plan to engage them with the intelligent grid. I’m thinking NACUBO, APPA, BOMA to start. USGBC, CABA, and maybe even the BiQ (Building intelligence Quotient) project may want a finger on this. Please let me know if you think of others.

The other one is more intriguing because of the powerful short-term opportunity it offers.. There are now multiple competing specifications for Demand/Response XML to the building. Lawrence Labs and the California DOE have DRAS. Constellation Energy is about to roll out a standard to much of the mid-Atlantic. ASHRAE and NIST have proposed a BACnet DR object. Gridpoint is deploying DR systems across multiple utilities. The Green Grid has requested a set of information from the local power system components, as I have written before, that is very much like the DR packages. If we can align these standards early, while they are essentially in early pilot, we can save years on their eventual alignment.