Working with the Wind in Chicago

Chicago has long been known as the windy city, for its promises of its politicians and the quantity of its conventions and conferences. Next week, there will be a lot of wind surrounding the AHR Expo, the largest conference anywhere dedicated to the efficient movement of air, and thereby the biggest energy-related conference of the year. Numerous engineering and energy related conferences and meetings will be in town to take advantage of the more than 50,000 attendees. I, too, will be blowing into town, giving some talks, participating in some meetings, and planning still others. This may be the last time I am in Chicago until March, so drop me a line to schedule a meeting if you want to discuss plans or alignment while I am there.

The GridWise Architectural Council (GWAC) has put together several sessions as part of an AHR conference track explaining the mission of the GridWise Alliance and opportunities created by the smart grid. On Monday, I will speak on academic energy initiatives, their problems, and their promise. Many academic leaders have signed the American College and University President’s Climate Initiative, committing their institutions to change how their schools are operated in ways that are verifiable and repeatable. Unfortunately, these efforts often are characterized more by proper feelings than by proper actions, and the results are often poor. Examples abound of efforts such as the Oberlin College Lewis Center, designed to be a net zero building, yet actually producing poor performance for years before retrofits finally delivered on its promise. Other green initiatives, including some at the University of North Carolina, have made performance worse. Efforts that address only new buildings using new standards without providing for cost effective inclusion existing buildings will have little effect.

This session will provide an overview of the initiative and its participants. I will discuss existing and developing standards for making building operations and energy use visible beyond the confines of the traditional campus maintenance and operations organization. I will describe efforts to make building operations responsive to the academic and research activities, and how these actions interact with growing campus concerns over security and emergency awareness. A clear understanding of these issues is needed for any college and university to meet these goals. A clear understanding of the problems and developing standards will help the energy professional compete and perform better in this market. These same knowledge and skills apply to the challenges of new national energy initiatives and will help the professional respond to anticipated Obama federal infrastructure programs.

On Tuesday, also at the AHR show, I will be teaming up with Ken Sinclair, editor of the Automated Buildings e-zine, to aim a little farther out. We will discuss the vision of interactive buildings as full participants in the smart grid. Building-to-Grid (B2G) interactions will create whole new business models outside buildings. Developing communication standards between building and grid will make the economic consequences of each operating decision visible. These communications will be critical to the development of Net Zero Energy (NZE) buildings. Economic service interactions will create new markets for building-based equipment and new models for building system integration. Come to this session to learn what these new markets will look like, and how today’s system designs are changing to prepare for them.

On Wednesday and Thursday, I will join a couple of Department of Energy (DOE) summits on the new standards. Wednesday afternoon, the B2G Summit will bring together an impressive group of thought leaders in technology and policy to brief the HVAC and BAS industry on the business opportunities from the smart grid. The conversations between and after sessions at the Summit are always as informative and useful as the sessions. On Thursday, the DOE Commercial Building Energy Alliances have announced their own summit for HVAC, Refrigeration, and Controls Suppliers. The summit will focus on retrofitting existing buildings. The summit will address all products related to energy efficiency in buildings, except for lighting. Drop me a line if you want to catch up with me at either of these events or to schedule a discussion on how these standards might work into your plants.

The activity I am personally most excited by, however, is meetings to plan GridEcon. GridEcon will explore the economic and market requirements of the smart grid. None of the smart technologies I write about will be adopted without a firm basis in economics and markets. The primary benefit of informational interoperability in building systems and in smart energy systems will be the creation of dynamic markets, markets that reduce technological friction and reward innovation. GridEcon will take advantage of the great Chicago-based markets in commodities and weather, and of the technologists behind their trading systems, to help create the market rules we will need. Watch for future announcements of this conference which will be in Chicago in mid-March.

See you in the Windy City!

Natural Gas and Perfect Power

We are misusing natural gas in our power plants. Guided by strong emotions and the search for the quick fix, we are reducing the long term reliability and sustainability of our energy infrastructure. When well meant but bad decisions reduce the common good, we call it the tragedy of the commons. Technology and modern public interest groups let us recreate the tragedy of the commons on a larger scale.

Perfect Power is what Kurt Yeager and the Galvin Electricity Initiative call their version of the smart grid. Perfect Power assumes that the national power grid will not and cannot be made reliable enough for the digital world. Attempts to make the grid reliable cost a lot of money and waste a lot of power. Attempts to make the grid reliable interfere with the grid being the most efficient market place of energy possible, and able to accept innovation, diversity, and change. Perfect power reliability starts in the home and building, which must be responsible for their own reliability and quality. Groups of homes and buildings can band together in microgrids to enhance that reliability and provide each other with robustness. These microgrids can then buy from the grid when their needs and desires warrant, and when the prices are good. The grid, freed from the mandate to do what it cannot, will become easier and less expensive to operate.

Net Zero Energy and Distributed Generation are different perspectives on the perfect power vision. Buildings that are able to store, generate, recycle, and convert energy, can buy when they want, can sell when they can, and are reliable whatever the grid provides. Microgrids expand the options for energy storage, recycling and re-use even we add distributed generation. Distributed generation can get us past the restrictions of the regulated “natural monopoly” of power.

I have written before that I wanted my home heating system to see gas as well as electrical prices. Regular readers know that I recently installed a hybrid system that switches from heat pump to gas furnace based upon outdoor air temperature. This automatic cut-over is based on computed heat-pump efficiency. The cut-over should be based upon the current price of each energy source, factored by each system’s internal performance diagnostics.

At my annual Caroling Party, conversations naturally turned to the new purchase, who installed it, and was I satisfied. One party-goer was concerned that the high efficiency furnace was still producing greenhouse gases. I mused that even if the power company was better than the 95% condensing furnace, the local fuel did not suffer from the inefficiencies of converting heat to electricity, and of then transmitting it for many miles, and then converting it back to heat. Local efficiency numbers, from local energy use, are simpler and easier to understand.

Another guest, a long time gas company engineer, pointed out that natural gas has its own Demand-Response system. Demand-Response refers to the approaches and technology used by the electrical providers to manage peak capacity by seasonal, daily, and emergency communications with its customers. During periods of peak use, the pressure in the natural gas distribution system can drop to low levels. If it drops too far, pressure valves automatically shut off in homes and businesses. These brown-outs are much more expensive to recover from than electrical black-outs. Utility employees must turn off each gas meter before a local loop can be restored lest appliances with pilot lights become explosion hazards. Gas companies handles these low pressure incidents by calling large industrial customers and negotiating reduced use.

All of the same AMI/AMR conversations of the power grid apply naturally to natural gas distribution. The costs savings and efficiencies of automated cut-off of service can offer even greater benefits, when needed, to the gas company than they do to the electrical company. Gas distribution can benefit from dynamic pricing for capacity management just as does electrical distribution. If I had dynamic pricing, then I could factor it automatically, along with electrical pricing, into my home heating operations.

All of the concepts above apply to generation as well. Perfect power and E-tech will include conventional generation as well as exotic technologies such as gas-based fuel cells. Natural Gas will need many of the same service interfaces as electricity.

Stability and robustness in ecosystems comes from diversity of species. Stability and robustness of energy in the home and office will come best from diversity of energy sources, including those from outside the building as well as those generated internally. There are few sources of energy that are easy to transmit to each site of final use. We should not waste them all in central generation plants. We should use them to expand the robustness and diversity of energy in each building and in each microgrid.

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.

A pricing Service for Electricity

What price structures are necessary to enable fully symmetric negotiations over power purchase and sale? Over at the NIST TWIKI, Marty Burns, Bill Cox, and I ironed out the requirements for a pricing service for electricity. Comments are welcome.

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What are the requirements for communicating price across the smart grid? What pricing structures are in use or under development now? How do we move to a common information element, common whatever else needed for prices?

Note: It is important to emphasize that these are requirements for a solution set for pricing services. Therefore all the following requirements are not necessarily simultaneously applied to any particular single service based on the ensuing model.

Due to potentially [rapidly] changing roles, we use the terms supplier and consumer rather than utility and customer. With aggregators, these terms are still more general.

This page was created and modified by Marty Burns, Toby Considine, and William Cox, for discussion among the DEWGs.

Pricing Requirements

Dynamic pricing enables dynamic power management and includes both:

1) the realtime response of automation systems to "realtime" grid pricing and

2) the managed response of consumer management and planning systems to supplier/grid price forecasts.

1.1 Regulatory/Policy

• 1.1.1 Metering, Billing, and Collections are separate processes / services from power delivery.
• 1.1.2 Aggregation and Delegation should be explicitly permitted for all operations.
• 1.1.3 The pricing model is not explicitly tied to any particular regulatory environment.
• 1.1.4 Barriers to symmetric operations should be eliminated.
  • 1.1.4.1 Suppliers and consumers may exchange roles at frequent intervals.
• 1.1.5 Businesses willl handle traditional business processes as they do now.

1.2 Business Objectives

• 1.2.1 Suppliers are able to provide automated dynamic pricing information to consumers.
• 1.2.2 Pricing is able to support active power management and optimization.
  • 1.2.2.1 Price adjustments can be made in time in up near real time manner.
  • 1.2.2.2 Prices may include commitment enforcement in support of a variety of scenarios, including both minimum and maximum commitments.
• 1.2.3 Pricing should be available for a variety of deliverables.
  • 1.2.3.1 Power Consumption.
  • 1.2.3.2 Peak Availability.
  • 1.2.3.3 Relinquishment of prior right (Differential Behavior vs Absolute Consumption).
  • 1.2.3.4 Power Quality.
  • 1.2.3.5 Carbon Offsets.
  • 1.2.3.6 Transmission and Congestion.
• 1.2.4 Pricing should support the decommoditization of power.
  • 1.2.4.1 Wind, Distance, Carbon, Triple Bottom Line, and other attributes.
• 1.2.5 Pricing should be time sensitive.
  • 1.2.5.1 Time offer made.
  • 1.2.5.2 Window for offer.
  • 1.2.5.3 Time of acceptance.
  • 1.2.5.4 Scheduled Time of consumption.
  • 1.2.5.5 Actual Time of Aggregation.

1.3 Business Procedures

• 1.3.1 A set of core processes and transactions will be defined.
• 1.3.2 A service to support each core process will be defined.
• 1.3.3 A common service framework will be defined to support all services.
• 1.3.4 Market operations should support unidirectional price announcements.
• 1.3.5 Market operations should support bidirectional bidding.

1.4 Business Context

• 1.4.1 Legacy pricing models need not be supported by the new interfaces.
• 1.4.2 Legacy business processes need not flow through new interfaces.
• 1.4.3 Requirements to continue traditional business processes may be met outside of the new interface.

1.5 Semantic Understanding

• 1.5.1 Must accommodate wide range of Pricing Models.
• 1.5.2 All Pricing Models should contain a common set of properties.
• 1.5.3 Many Pricing Models may be in effect concurrently.
• 1.5.4 Pricing Models will change over time and must be discoverable.

1.6 Interaction Model.

• 1.6.1 All intereactions will be messaging based.
  • 1.6.1.1 synchronous request-response pull.
  • 1.6.1.2 asynchronous publish-subscribe push.
• 1.6.2 Symmetry should be supported at all interfaces.
• 1.6.3 Best Efforts message delivery shall be supported.
• 1.6.4 Security and Privacy must be designed into the model.
  • 1.6.4.1 Authentication is often required.
  • 1.6.4.2 Guaranteed message delivery shall be supported.
  • 1.6.4.3 Non-repudiated message delivery shall be supported.
  • 1.6.4.4 Private message delivery shall be supported.
• 1.6.5 Delegation of message handling shall be supported.