Interfaces for the Power Grid

This week has been crazy busy, but I managed to submit the following to the B2G interoperability group at NIST

Each interface around each process of the grid should allow bi-directional buying and selling. The interface should support discoverable diversity, allowing the standard to grow over time. Ideally, the interface would be the same for different forms of energy, allowing the same economic interface to be used for buying standard power from the grid, solar energy from the neighbor, or thermal energy from the data center in the basement. I should be able to set my heat pump with gas pack to switch not only on peak efficiency, but on the price for each fuel.

The interfaces should be non-hierarchical and composite. Remote power generation, the local sub-station, and the campus micro-grid should have full peer interfaces; my decision to buy from a remote plant or a local storage facility should be through the same interface.

So, what are the characteristics of this interface?

E-Business Interfaces
Offer and Acceptance

Price is clearly the first component; price is how we indicate value and scarcity. Short of a surprise malfunction, every brown-out is a failure of pricing. As pricing may occur in the context of an auction or negotiation, prices must go two ways, as an offer, as a bid, as a request for quotation.

Price Scenarios

Note: in the scenarios, day (or tomorrow) can be replaced by week, month, year or any other period one wants to contract

• Your current power costs is this much
• Power costs this much tomorrow.
• The price curve for tomorrow is…
• The price for up to so much power (perhaps as a per cent of yesterday) is x, for over that amount y, for an arbitrary number of levels,
• One-time urgent offer with no bid.
• One-time offer to be bid until market clears
• Demand Response is either a new auction or it is a RFQ for power buy-back already negotiated.

Transaction Scenarios

• Your instantaneous use is…
• I want to purchase this amount of energy tomorrow.
• If the price curve for tomorrow looks like this, my purchase will look like…
• We accept your offer as above and wish to enforce it.
• Short term request to relinquish previously agreed to power.
• Short term request for additional power bids
• Long term request for significant give-back, say a summer furlough
• Failure to perform will result in power costs of…
• Other Transaction Details
• Penalty for underperformance [as producer] is…
• Penalty for underperformance [as consumer] is…
• Contract is enforceable, and consumer use will be throttled to meet agreement.
• Contract was authorized by …
• The following power qualities are critical to this contract….
• This security token / ID / account overrides normal billing process (especially for electric cars)
• Qualities of Power Delivered

Other qualities of power must be transmitted along with price. In some circumstances, these other characteristics might trump all other considerations, as projected reliability might concern a data center as much as price. It may be a condition of contract that the supplier notify the buyer of changes (or predicted changes) in a “critical quality” (see Other Transaction Details) as quickly as they would of a DR or other rapid response scenario.

More may be discovered in the future, but an initial list might include:

Quality of Power

• Predicted Reliability of Power during time of contract (perhaps derived from EERP).
• Additional capacity in critical bottlenecks. This attribute may be a quality of a substation, or it may, stripped of price and transaction, be a quality of an internal UPS or electrical panel.
• Remaining power at current or predicted burn rate. This may describe diesel generator, or fuel cell, or …
• Remaining Time / capacity to fully recharge storage.
• AC or DC
• Carbon accounting of supply
• Environmental accounting (wildlife, habitat, renewable, etc) of supply
• Geo-location of supply (allowing Buy Local and NIMBY to each affect markets with their dollars)

Should power stored in a battery report its effectively higher carbon load when it is sold or consumed?

Other Market Issues

All interfaces should support many-to-many interactions. A customer should be able to select from any of several aggregators if available. A customer should be able to buy from specific generators beyond the local T&D if desired. There must be a way for the buyer to discover power sources that meet the characteristics he desires and to negotiate with them. There may be times when local transmission conditions want to find emergency load use rather than emergency shedding.

Market Fables

These are use cases, but they have been selected to push away from traditional scenarios. Traditional use cases have already been well handles by others. What follows are edge cases, designed to test the limits. If we do our work well, what Fred Krupp calls the “winners of the race to re-invent energy” will be able to innovate in ways I cannot anticipate.

The Electric Car

In the evening, the electric cars come 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.

The above require a wealth of power signals. Some of them (capacity of current storage) can be transmitted back using the same interfaces as we have for capacity of a house battery. Not all interactions will be with the home base of the car.

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 Transacted Household

Zero Net Energy Buildings will be built around local energy generation, storage, conversion, and recycling. These diverse systems will be too complex to manage as control systems, and will have to be interact as agents exposing services. In this model, we will leave them to negotiate power usage among themselves. These devices should use the same economic interfaces rather than detailed control interfaces.

I could ask my dishwasher to run itself, and manage its own budget for the month. I could also set service standards that the dishes always be clean before dinner the next day. This leads to a relatively simple and consistent user interface.

I could tell my solar panel to sell to the grid whenever the price is above a certain amount, and to store any excess energy. The grid might consistently outbid the dishwasher—and that’s OK. If so, the dishwasher would still run only at night.

I could tell my whole-house storage system to buy power at any price until it has four hours on hand. Thereafter it might buy whenever energy is below a target price. I could even let it take bids from the household systems and devices, or from the neighbor. This system would need to charge an appropriate mark-up based upon its inefficiency of storage.

The right sort of abstract business interface between the power grid and our buildings can also be used between buildings, or within buildings.

Third Parties

There must be ways to delegate authority and rights cleanly between parties. Intelligent buildings will move toward knowledge-based maintenance based upon building system analytics. This service will be supplied by remote specialists. These specialists will need access to live use rates and pricing to supply business-ready information (Change the filters on the 3^rd floor; at your energy prices, it will costs you $146 per month until you do). Today, it is difficult to assign rights to such “privacy” sensitive information.

Conclusion

My chief concern is that we do not over-integrate and thereby stifle future innovation. The Grid’s interfaces needs to be lightweight, composable, extensible, and able easily to interoperate with the service, security, and e-commerce standards of business and the internet.

B2B2B2B

Several precise correspondents disagreed with my characterization of the ideal interface on every energy widget as a single Business to Business B2B economic interface. Some argued for Business 2 Machine (B2M) and some argued for Machine to Machine (M2M). A few argued for P2B (Person to Business). I think they all make it too complex, and limit the opportunity for new business models. B2B is meant to liberate new markets, new market entrants, new trading models.

Starting with today’s Automated Demand-Response (ADR) interfaces, we get more benefits as we move them from M2M to B2B. People want to be in charge of their own property, so a Business inside the building puts the occupant in control. A business inside the building can only express their willingness to participate with an offer or bid. As not all bids are winning bids, the energy supplier outside the building must select a group of offers that clears the market and inform the winning and losing bids. To my eye, that is a B both inside and outside the building.

Remember, the biggest Demand Response on record is when ALCOA furloughed an entire plant for the summer to sell power at high prices to California. Business response always has more options than M2M.

The homeowner, or the homeowner’s agent needs the same opportunities to bid as does the business. The homeowner’s bid may be subsumed into a larger bid, say, a bid by the green neighborhood homeowner’s association. For the utility, a single home, a row of townhouses, or a neighborhood should all have the same external interface. Clearly the neighborhood and the business should have all the same options. This means that the homeowner’s agent, no matter how small, has a business interface on its outside.

Homes may sell power to other homes in the neighborhood. This may be generator power after the storm, or solar power in the afternoon. There may be competition between my neighbor and the big utility for my business. Homes need the same selling interfaces as the larger grid.

I may even have an economic competition inside my home. If I have told my washer not to run, or my car not to charge, until the price is less than a target, that might be a simpler market interface. One source of power for the car or washer may be in-home generation. Perhaps I can charge from that whenever I wish. Or perhaps I am able to sell my local generation back to the grid for higher than the target price, so the washer sits idle.

Perhaps my car batteries and my home batteries have their own rules. Each wants a little bit of storage, say for a 20 mile drive, or to run off-grid for 1 day. Each of them also could charge up for longer. Perhaps the car and the house will bid the price higher when they are below these minima. Perhaps the house will sell stored energy to the car, but only at a premium.

Variable pricing makes economic sense out of local storage. Local storage markets grow naturally. Local storage removes Grid reliability arbitrage tax on unreliable sources. This transfers larger portion of dollars (less fee for T&D) to the unreliable producer...Local storage will grow, but only when it is priced properly.

Eco was in economics before eco was in ecology. We can have a vibrant market ecology at every level of the grid, from the largest scale to the neighborhood microgrid, to inside the house.

Business Exchanges on the Grid

Notes on SmartGrid Domain Experts Workgroup, NIST, August 5, 2008
NIST (National Institute for Standards and Technology) started by making a strong claim for ownership in this area, citing Title XIII, 1305 of EISA 2007. NIST set out an aggressive agenda including a preliminary report at GridWeek on 9/24 and a NIST workshop on developing standards at Grid Interop in Atlanta November 11-13.

NIST wants to have in place tight working relationships with the target SDO’s (Standards Development Organizations) in place before 2009. NIST and the GridWise Architectural Council are working together to direct the standards direction toward e-commerce and interactions with building operations and with the building occupants. Some of these standards will be e-commerce focused, some will be looking to the Building Information Models, and to the energy models they support. I am excited that this might push these design approaches into continuing use during operations.

B2G Breakout (Building to Grid)

We quickly agreed that goal of the SmartGrid standardization efforts is to design the information exchange and informational interoperability to enable healthy markets to emerge around energy use in buildings. Success was defined as enabling buildings to trade their energy.

The group was in violent agreement that we needed to work on business to business interactions, and not on machine to machine interactions. Services inside the building would be coordinated by the business processes of the occupants. Grid messages would go to the business agent of the occupants. Interactions, including pricing and bidding, would be between the grid agents and the building agents.

But market development for what? The problems that need solving quickly include real time pricing and automated demand response. The solutions should encourage the development of distributed generation and local energy storage. The Pricing Models and Buying Models for Energy should also work inside microgrids such as the building or neighborhood.

We spent a considerable time defining the characteristics of live pricing. There was intense interest in moving beyond static prices to curves, i.e., if the prices move like this tomorrow, I will commit to energy consumption in a curve that looks like that. Automated contract execution and on-line exchange of tariffs are both desired.

One thing that everyone agreed is that automated metering infrastructure would never meet its potential unless full live real-time access to all meter information is made available from *both* sides of the meter should be the standard. Parties could then collect the data in accord with the schedule that made sense to them.

This has been about the business exchange – soon I will write about the attributes of these transactions and product differentiation on the grid.

Home Automation: Bad choices and poor experiences

My hydronic system failed this summer. Spare parts for the boiler, still more efficient than most on the market, are no longer available. It supported a hot water heater and two zones in my house. I am splitting out the water heater, moving to a tankless system. While the best boilers haven’t gotten any better, the price for an equivalent efficiency boiler has gone way down; the incentive to put everything on one boiler is gone.

I would like to add one or more zones to the house. The upstairs of this old house, with bedrooms and bathrooms, has never been conditioned. With the kids away, half of the bedrooms are only rarely occupied. I like keeping the rooms for a few more years, as long as kids show up for various holidays and vacations.

There are two frustrations with this process.

The first is the contractors. They arrive, already knowing which product they will install, based upon manufacturer incentives. The manufacturers seem to be responding to energy prices by offering dealers incentives on big systems, much as auto dealers are offering incentives on SUVs and Hummers. I tell them what I want over the phone, and warn them what the criteria will be; even so, they waste my time and their own. They decide the best fit based on incentives before they look at the space, they push the incentives, and they wonder why they leave without a contract. I cannot even imagine why they think I will accept fewer zones in twice as much space. Until the installers move beyond this attitude, home building system performance will remain abysmal. The worst part is that this must work, as these jokers stay in business.

The second issue is how little intelligence the control systems have. The home market appears to be dominated by systems that pretend to have taken the digital age into account. The thermostat is a nice flat screen. The time of day functions are easy to access. The actual control sequences are not as sophisticated as my last installation, which was constructed out of a complex nest of relays to squeeze extra energy out of each cycle. If this is what the American control companies are offering through their dealers, they deserve to lose to the Chinese.

The third issue is flexibility. I have been offered many controllers, but no flexibility in any of them. Single purpose systems are offered with different controllers than hybrid systems. Adding a third energy source is yet another decision. Each representative who comes by seems surprised when I ask for flexibility, and explain that it would be far too expensive. Based upon what their dealers, the home comfort system companies have not learned the essential lesson of the digital age, that simple product lines with large production runs are cheaper, and therefore multi-purpose re-programmable controllers will be cheaper. Every brand (and I have seen them all) is done a disservice by its local distribution.

So what do I think a standard, flexible controller would offer?

A home system should support hybrid systems, with enough abstraction so that multiple fuel sources are supported. A standard controller would balance the price and availability of each energy source installed to provide heating and cooling. It is common for systems to support an outside set-point to change from, for example, a heat pump to a gas pack. A proper system would tune itself, and be able to suggest what that outside set-point should be.

It should also be able to accept prices. For now, there is no live energy pricing in my area; I should be able to enter the price from my last electric bill, and the price from my last gas bill, and let it suggest another cutover point. If I add a thermal store, I should be able to include that in the same algorithm. It should not matter if the thermal store is driven by time of day prices and pre-heating (or cooling) or by a solar thermal unit. If I add photovoltaics, the system should be able to understand the availability and pricing of that as well. The system should be live pricing ready, ready to receive live price signals for any of the energy sources when they become available in my area. Clearly there should be a means to upgrade the system to support ADR (automated demand response signals) when they come to my area.

There is no reason for this to be more expensive. The controllers they are selling already have enough muscle power. The interface and system logic, while more extensive than today, would be less extensive than the multiple product lines I am being offered each evening.

Until the control vendors and home automation vendors offer products like this, than it is a sham they provide any sort of sustainability or energy control. If they are offering products like I want, than they should support hot lines to report the local dealers who besmirch their names with poor proposals. Like GM, sitting fat and happy on the no competitors assumption of generations ago, they will slow lose their customers and their companies.

And if you think the products are available, here in central Carolina, let me know. I will write that up later….