Lord of the HAN: One Agent to Rule them All

The National Institute for Standards and Technology has divided the users of the power grid into workgroups for each different area. Industry to grid (I2G), Commercial Building to grid (B2G), Home 2 grid (H2G) and even Vehicle to grid (V2G). Clearly there is a lot of overlap. The large home may have more sophisticated responses than the small office. When we are all done, I hope we have one common set of interfaces for all of them.

Each have their strengths. I2G hosts the most advanced conversations relevant for distributed generation (DG), with its long experience of local steam plants and of cogeneration. B2G, sometime called Business to grid by its members, has the most advanced expectations of the arms-length negotiations with the power grid. V2G presents the clearest models for distributed identity and lifestyle interactions. But I think that H2G has the most advanced system architecture, driven by the diversity of technology and personal preference in the home market.

The model adopted by the H2G seems the closest to a service oriented architecture relying on loose choreography. Homes have appliances and entertainment systems as well as environmental controls. Homes are values driven, and so are early adopters of generation technology that may not yet make economic sense. Homes are personal, encompassing all the different life styles, sleeping patterns, and everything else that makes each household different.

This model relies on the autonomous agents plugged into the HAN, each defending its mission, each interacting with prices from the grid. When I say agent and mission, I’m thinking of Gail Horst’s (head of grid responsiveness for appliance maker Whirlpool) that a washing machine cannot respond to the grid unless it knows there is no bleach in the current load. There is also the concept of the home agent, coordinating the responses and programs of each.

This master agent (“Your personal Energy Day Trader Friend!”) might run on your PC or MAC, use WS-DD (Device Discovery) to feel what’s on the HAN, WS-DP (Device Profile) to understand their capabilities, and instruct them as to the homeowner’s wishes. This model maps well to the findings of the Olympic Peninsula Project as well on to developing visions for the NZE (Net Zero Energy) home.

Lynne Kiesling described the inside the building energy market as the most efficient clearing mechanism with the lowest technology bar to integration at the B2G summit sponsored by NIST in Chicago last week. This makes for some extremely interesting home generation distributed generation, agent-by-agent prioritization concepts. (What if the dishwasher can never outbid the grid for the solar panel energy?)

Is HAN leading the way for B2G with this vision? The master agent for the commercial building would have to be enterprise aware, or perhaps tenant aware, depending upon model. Is HAN leading the way for I2G in this model? The master agent for I2G would need to be aware of manufacturing schedules and other enterprise functions, perhaps even labor contracts.

Do these other entities need what is architecturally already part of the HAN?

Demand and Emergency Responses

Smart responses demand smart buildings. In energy, we have Demand-Response (DR). DR is the utility-centric term for making sure that buildings do not demand more power than the electric utility is able to give. DR started out as dumb control. DR is becoming live energy markets and live energy bidding. Emergency response is the fire/police/medical/hazmat personnel who come during an emergency. What can these areas have in common?

New models for DR anticipate that buildings become full intelligent partners in energy negotiations. DR rewards for each event offer too few dollars to engage the building full time attention of the occupants. DR events today (prior to significant renewable energy generation) occur too rarely to require full attention. Future DR will shun control interactions and therefore require intelligent buildings that are able to respond on behalf of their occupants.

Six cities have already rolled out Next Generation 911 (NG911) as early adopters prior to the 2010 larger scale roll-out. NG911 was designed so that security companies and even buildings can submit calls without waiting for an operator to verify information. Of course, this means that the intelligent building must know its own address and geo-location to place the call, as well as the operational information that causes it to initiate the call.

In energy markets, Demand Response Aggregators are critical in negotiating the agreements to find power when needed. This power that the aggregators buy back for the grid is sometimes called Nega-Watts (as in “Nega-watts are always cheaper than megawatts”). Capacity events that require energy use cut-back are often tied to particular parts of the physical grid. DR aggregators do not like to share their detailed customer information with their suppliers because theirs is a knowledge game, based upon understanding their customers better than the larger grid operators do.

Smaller areas of the grid are supported by distinct infrastructure. The service area for this distinct infrastructure can be drawn on a map as what the GIS (Geographic Information Systems, the digital map makers) makers call polygons. It makes sense for DR promises by DR aggregators to be reported up to their suppliers by polygon.

The techniques for identifying which polygon surrounds a geo-location are well known. If each building knew its geo-location, it would be simple to sum DR promises by polygon as long as standard definitions are used. The open geospatial consortium (OGC) has developed standards for expressing both point locations and polygons in XML, the language of the web. Anyone who has ever “pinned something to Google earth” has used the point location XML standard from the OGC.

If a building needs to know its location for interacting with NG911, and needs to know its location to participate in DR, it makes sense for the same standard to be used in Energy and in Emergency Response. Using the geo-location standard routinely for energy operations will mean that the location is well known when it is needed for emergency response.

There is another scenario that would reward convergence. Power grid failures have implications to the emergency responder at both the point and the polygon level. If a substation bursts into flames, or if a truck hits a transmission line, then a neighborhood defined by a polygon goes into darkness. If a building can initiate a 911 call, then a substation should be able to, as well. If this report includes a polygon, then the polygon may encircle point identified signal lights, and a traffic cop may need to be dispatched to each to direct traffic. Police may also wish to increase patrols in the neighborhood without lights. Emergency dispatchers may wish to correlate incoming calls with power outages.

Simple parsimony suggests that the more elegant solution has both these domains, Energy and Emergency Response, sharing the same geo-location standards from the OGC.

Nuclear Zombies and the Smart Grid

Today I’m thinking about the unconventional security problems of the smart grid. This means that I am considering the special issues of widely dispersed intelligent devices. I am also becoming the 1,142^nd blogger to write about the newly recognized zombie menace in Texas.

Widely distributed assets cannot be entirely protected against direct physical access. If responsibility for the distributed assets is distributed as well, as they would be in Distributed Generation (DG) and Net Zero Energy (NZE) scenarios, then it is foolish to act as if one can. (DG refers having dedicated power plants spread across the grid. DG as associated with alternative energy, wherein assets should be arrayed “wherever the wind blows”. DG facilities are also much more likely to be owned and operated by people who do not work for traditional power companies. NZE puts DG into each and every building. NZE buildings generate when they can, store as they are able, sell to the grid when the price is right, and buy from the grid when they must.)Zombies come to Texas

This week there was a widely reported hack of a distributed asset—a traffic sign in Texas. Such systems have minimal security, and may be deployed into the field with the default password still in place. If you have access to the sign, it is usually no more than a few minutes work to perform a hard reset and restore the default password. This is usually true for any system; if I have unfettered physical access, the system is sooner or later mine. In Texas this week, a highway sign was hacked to warn of “Zombies Ahead”.

In circumstances like this, it is more essential to be able to determine if the configuration has changed, than it is to make the system un-assailable. Should mutual authentication, and mutual trust include mutual configuration checking?

An entirely different aspect of smart grid security, or perhaps survivability is also on my mind this week.

There are many concerns that at least one US city will be subjected to an EMF pulse in the years ahead. EMF (electromagnetic force) pulse refers to the large power that follows a nuclear blast. Enhanced EMF weapons funnel more energy into EMF than into blast. Enhanced EMF is generally considered an electronics killer. AN EMF pulse could destroy navigation and communications and data centers and home computers. An EMF pulse could take out the internet. When we have a smart grid, then an EMF pulse can take out the substations and metering infrastructure.

Security includes survivability. Most definitions of security describe graceful degradation rather than catastrophic failure. After an EMF pulse, systems would have to fail to some sort of default configuration that still worked, even if minimally. This default configuration, though, might break the trust described above.

How will the smart grid handle nuclear zombies?

Smart Buildings, Smart Energy, and the Road Ahead

I arrived in Chicago for the AHR show with the early Sunday morning budget flight crowd. I was not surprised that most of the van worked with HVAC. I was gratified to be recognized by Terry Reynolds of Control Technology. Terry told me that he was using oBIX in his jobs. “We are just starting to crack things open” he observed. We compared notes on projects ranging from the UNC EBMS (Enterprise Building Management System) to the New York City public school energy management system.

He went on to ask me of  what is going to drive adoption faster. I think there are five elements of smart energy that are now on the horizon.  Each of them will accelerate the deployment of open systems for energy-using and supplying systems. Each will also expand the use of oBIX.

WS-DD and WS-DP are going to bring automatic discovery and configuration to embedded energy systems. Most people use these technologies already. Their use in building and energy systems is new. When you have plugged your computer into a network and found the printers, you have performed device discovery (DD). When you further found that the printer supports duplex printing, but not color, you have used a device profile. The WS stands for Web Services and these protocols are being developed into standards at OASIS.

The fascinating part about WS-DD and WS-DP is that one of the world’s largest makers of electrical switch gear and building systems, Schneider Electric, is part of the standards committee. Sooner or later, we will have profiles for building systems just as we do for printers and digital cameras. Just as they do now for cameras, these profiles will describe functionality and use, rather than sensors and actuators. Perhaps these profiles will delineate predefined oBIX contracts for performance. If so, this will at last make it safe for business applications to interact with building systems.

WS-Calendar is an effort to formalize and standardize schedule elements for web services. Interactions with business functions always begin with agreeing on a schedule. Business interactions with the smart grid will always begin with a price and a schedule. Schedules will award the developer of autonomous systems; just as the use of ICalendar schedules the interactions of autonomous people. When I invite someone to a meeting using ICalendar, the responsibility to get up in the morning, eat breakfast, drop of the kids at school, etc., is the onus of the other meeting attendees. In the same way, responsibility for preparation of a meeting space, including economic negotiations with the grid for energy, will fall to the building system.

New standards to provide situation awareness to first responders will lead to the WS-ready standardization for techniques to visualize building system operations. 911 operators and first responders will be able to query building systems. There will be an open source SVG-based framework to tie floor plans to sensor data, and to provide a source of meaning to the underlying sensor data. (SVG is a standard displaying scalable graphics in a way that can use standard interactive web techniques such as AJAX. SVG is available on Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and many cell phones; Google is even making an SVG plug in for Internet Explorer.) Once we have a code requirement to visualize building operations in an open standards-based way, it will be natural to use the same interface for maintenance and operations.

OpenLynx is an open source oBIX server, available on SourceForge. Peter Michaelic has defined it with a pluggable architecture; any underlying protocol can be plugged to the inside and exposed as oBIX on the outside. OpenLynx reduces the barriers to providing standards-based web services to any underlying system.

OpenADR is a developing standard for Automatic Demand Response. Demand Response is what utilities call the interactions to manage demand by sending messages, including price signals, to their customers. Utilities have a growing interest in what they call fulfillment, i.e., they care not only that processes are followed, but that contracted energy goals are met. This means that building systems, and their operations, are about to be linked directly to corporate revenues.

When I was in high school, I learned to swim out and wait for the big wave. They always came in sets, and the first wave of the set was not the biggest. So I would tread water, and count the swells. Each of these efforts is currently underway. Together they will remove the barriers to standards-based middleware for building systems. I’m counting energy swells and waiting for the big one.