Cyborg Beetles, Cyber-security, Smart Buildings, and the Smart Grid

Cyber beetles provide an interesting glimpse into agent based interactions. Smart grids and smart buildings are integrated today using deep, integration, and complete control of the underlying processes. As more and more nodes are added to any system, the overhead of maintaining all interactions at a central point becomes more significant. In grid-scale systems, system designers have managed complexity by limiting diversity; a system may be managing ten thousand substations, but at least they are identical systems. A current DARPA project dramatically demonstrates a better approach.

At a recent IEEE meeting in Italy, Michel Maharbiz of the University of California demonstrated his Cyborg Beetle. His team has implanted electrodes in a giant flower beetle and mounted a wireless receiver on its back. The team is able to cause the beetle to take off, to hover, to turn left and right, and to land. Someday, a system like this may be used for surveillance or to guide rescue operations.

The beauty of the system is its simplicity. It uses an off-the-shelf wireless receiver. The signals sent to the beetle are very simple. The beetle performs all complex acts without requiring direct control. The biggest challenge is placing the electrodes. The interface consists of six electrodes implanted in the basal nodes of the flight muscles and in its optic lobes.

The beetle is arrives able to maintain its equilibrium. It comes able to synchronize its muscles to maintain efficient flight. The system uses the minimum signals needed to make the beetle do so. Like scratching a dog on the side to get that hind leg going, the cyborg beetle gets an itch to fly and takes off. Because the messages are so insignificant, this approach saves battery life as well programming complexity.

The beetle has evolved for efficient flight and balance. A core principle of ecology is that the most intense competition is always intra-niche competition. Beetles compete with other beetles, and compete most intensely with beetles that seek the same food, and live in the same place. This is a good model for the smart grid and for smart building interactions.

We want the most rapid development we can get for each of the nodes of the smart grid, and for each of the technologies of smart energy. To get this rapid development, we must put these technologies in direct intra-niche competition, and not allow competition to be lessened by large product lines or entrenched systems.

We can do this by limiting the control and integration we use between each node on the grid. We must eschew deep integration and direct control of the processes of each substation. Just as the Cyborg Beetle operators leave flying to the evolved processes, we should leave substation operation to the substation, and home device operation to the home devices. We want a rich, diverse ecosystem of energy strategies, an ecosystem with intense competition.

Control of the Beetle is limited to deciding whether to hover or to land, to turn left or to turn right. The beetle knows how to fly, and how to land. A beetle that will not fly can be replaced. That’s how it should be in the smart grid and in the smart building and home. Let the node take care of security. Let the node take care of operations.

You can watch the flight of the Beetle at MIT Technology Review Multimedia (http://www.technologyreview.com/video/?vid=217)

Cyber Security for the Grid

SCADA security, often called cyber-security when talking of the smart grid, is one of the areas where not only the answers are difficult, but often selecting the right questions is difficult. Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) refers to the on-line, computer-based monitoring and control of process from a central site. SCADA, which puts little intelligence into the distributed points, is still the primary model used for utility distribution systems, including the telemetry and operation of today’s dumb grid.

The SCADA model of systems architecture was appropriate when we were building monolithic systems using the very expensive minicomputer and networking was in its infancy. This led to the then obvious decision that the system has exactly one controller. Two systems sharing data was an unacceptable hindrance and bottleneck on process control. Large monolithic systems are expensive to install, expensive to update, impossible to partially upgrade, and do not imagine a need for inter-component security, any more than I imagine security between my arm and my leg. Every integration between two systems was detail oriented and required exposure of every detail, no matter how unimportant.

Distributed inexpensive systems are the rule today. Systems with full security and mutual authentication between every node are still orders of magnitude faster and cheaper than the old systems. Communications are orders of magnitude faster. Almost all of the constraints about how things needed to be done are now no longer true.

For too many control systems, the old models still apply. I spend a lot of time in the somewhat less critical building systems space. Nearly every vendor in that area prices an enterprise controller so that we will buy only one, and that one talks to all. Integrations are excruciatingly slow. The vendor, knowing he will only sell a few of these, prices them accordingly.

Before we built our Enterprise Building Management System (EBMS), we had multiple conversations with BAS vendors about installing multiple enterprise controllers rather than one. The incremental cost of the bits would have cost them nothing. I understand their need to get, say, a quarter million dollars per site. I just wanted my site to consist of 20 peers rather than a single master. They believe that 20 peers should cost 20 times a single system for the site. This was a marketing decision, not a technical decision, and it was a bad one.

We went to a distributed approach for EBMS (just search the archives), something that looks nothing like the approaches of SCADA. I can now upgrade parts of the infrastructure by replacing a single autonomous system agent in a single location. The deep intimacy that old integrations required is gone, and the reliability and resilience of the system is improved. This means it is possible for me to roll out incremental security fixes, or even system agents from a different platform, without spending years and re-training all.

I’ve heard a lot of scary, scary things when discussing SCADA. "Our system is so large and complex you may not comment on it until you have studied it for years" (So your system would fail if key plant engineers got hit by a bus going to a birthday lunch. That is yet another security problem). "Our system is so exceptional that it cannot share account management with the corporate HR systems." (So the business process to turn off remote access to these systems is too convoluted to occur in a timely manner). Recently, I have listened as SCADA engineers have railed against security researchers who expose security holes. "Our system is so unwieldy that we cannot respond to identified security holes in a timely manner." This attitude is dangerous for smart buildings and for the smart grid.

Security is about being able to do the right thing at the right time when requested by the right person. Denying access is just the most trivial part of that. Security is knowing whether to trust inputs received from others. Security is self detection of configuration changes, i.e., awareness of system integrity. Until smart buildings and the smart grid come to this fuller awareness of security, they will be too immature to interact.

Cargo Cult Energy

I spent last week in Chicago and by of Silicon Valley, talking about new energy. In Chicago, we were talking about the smart grid, and how it enables new markets in energy. Out by San Francisco Bay, the conversation was, of course, about ventures and new businesses and high tech. There were exciting conversations in Chicago, ones that may lead getting the underlying structures of smart energy markets right. There were innovative projects in California, ones that are beginning to answer "What would your stuff do, if it knew the price of energy, now.?" In both locations, there was a tendency to fall into a trap that I call Cargo Cult Energy.

The phrase Cargo Cult names a reaction of some isolated islanders in the South Pacific to what they experienced in World War II. Some of these islanders had never seen internal combustion or manufactured goods or any food that they had not themselves pulled from the sea or hewn from the land. One day a stranger would come, or several. These strangers seemed very determined to cut down trees, and to flatten the land. The strangers were so obsessed that the islanders helped them, even going so far as to build a tower at the end of the flat space.

The strangers would go up into the towers and call down huge flying machines. All the supplies necessary for industrialized war would flow through this airstrip on an isolated island. The leavings dropped by the runways, and pilfered from the warehouses were more wealth than the islanders had ever imagined. The war ended, and the strange men left, and the flying machines came no more. On some islands, myths grew. If only the towers were maintained, if only the right rituals were performed at the end of the runway, then the machines, and then wealth would return.

In Chicago, fat too much of the conversation, before the GridEcon started each day, was of incentives. Over breakfast, alas, the conversation was often not of systems, and technology, and business process. Too often, plans were being built around short term incentives. What incentives do they have in New York? When do the tax incentives expire in Illinois?  We are not talking about priming the pump here. The business plans are short. Can we get in and get out when the incentives expire?

The venture capital guys were clear. They were not interested in funding any project whose business plan was based on tax credits, of utility rebates. What government gives, what the public utility commission grants, can just as easily be taken away tomorrow. Venture money wants long term value. Each technology should be sold on its clear and identifiable business value. Once that case was made, credits, and rebates could be a sweetener, a way to accelerate the business cycle.

Around the bay, I saw some many technology plans. I saw novel integrations of existing technology, in which simple things were made smart, particularly in how they used energy. I saw polymath projects, in which technologies and approaches from all over were combined into a novel product that used smart energy. There is a buzz of something ready to happen. Unfortunately I also saw folks tempted to lose their virtue.

Silicon Valley prides itself on a "virtuous culture of innovation", in which good products win, bad products lose, and hard work gets you ahead. I saw some very interesting, and perhaps some very good products. Too often, though, the management team forgets about the building the internet of things around energy, and gets lured by the siren song of third party programs. It’s great – they won’t even have to pay for it! We’ll pay for the installation with DR dollars! The homeowner won’t care because they’ll get a tax credit! We are not talking about priming the pump here. The business plans are short. "Can we get in and get out when the incentives expire?" In other words, these plans were without Silicon Valley virtue.

The energy markets in the US have been poor markets, looking to the regulators rather than to competitors for 100 years. To the extent that the smart grid enables new markets, successful new ventures will chase those new markets. Unless of course they get seduces by unnatural signals coming from the externa of the old markets. Unless they build their business plans around Cargo Cults.

What if the Smart Grid had Reliable Generation

Most of today’s conversations about smart energy have at their core recognition that new energy is inherently unreliable. That unreliability will flow throughout the grid, and those that rely on the grid (homes, buildings, industry, vehicles) will need to consider that unreliability. The requirements reach beyond the operation of transmission and distribution (T&D) to intelligent end-points, able to adjust energy requirements, store energy locally, and even supply energy back to the grid. This requires two-way symmetric communications.

But what if new technology provides us with rock solid reliable power? A couple reports this week have turned my thoughts to the problems of the smart grid given perfect reliability of generation

In the last week, I have read reports of working prototypes for traveling-wave reactors, able to rely on minimally processed fuel, and to consume their own waste, running for a couple hundred years without refueling. I have also read of small package nuclear power plants, completely sealed in stainless steel, to be delivered for local generation. When five years are up, the entire unit would be swapped out, the old unit taken away for maintenance and refueling.

I make no argument here about whether these technologies will be here soon, or are even technically feasible. I make no argument here about waste disposal or transit, although the travelling-wave reactor appears to address many of those issues before they arise. I am instead exploring the requirements of the smart grid with reliable power.

One of the oddest characteristics of energy markets today stems from the most reliable energy sources. Wholesale markets in energy regularly go negative for brief periods. If you have, say, a nuclear plant, you have a fire-hose of energy, one that cannot be scaled up or down easily or quickly. Too much energy on the grid at one time leads to spectacularly bad outcomes (except if you think explosions are pretty). If you operate such a plant, you pay other plants to go off-line during times of low demand.

So I began wondering, what if most of the energy on the grid came from such sources. What if no one was willing to accept an offer to reduce production because they too have difficulty scaling production up or down? How would we want to design the smart grid in those circumstances…

In this new reality, generators and grid operators would want to offer incentives for increasing energy use during off-peak hours. Smart homes and Buildings would want to install storage capabilities to transfer energy uses to these times when power was, at last, “to cheap to meter”. These end nodes would use this stored energy not only for their own use, but perhaps sell it back to meet the peak loads of their neighbors in this future time without expensive dirty peaking generators.

Buildings would choose different energy storage strategies based on storing energy for internal or external use. Thermal storage a can be a good solution for shifting load where heating or cooling is important. Kinetic, potential, or chemical storage might be better if the energy is intended for resale. Industry would want to consider, as it sometimes does now, changing its schedule to use energy when it is plentiful.

These use cases would require market operations to offer incentives for storage and resale to buildings and homes. We would need a model for time-sensitive prices to align use with scarcity and abundance. We would need symmetric negotiations to support returning of power to the grid without hierarchical control.

The smart grid requirements if we assume reliable power are much the same as if we don’t, and they would need participation from all parts of the market. Any node might be sometimes a supplier, sometimes a purchaser.