Transactive Energy and Little White Lies

As I head off to the second smart grid interim roadmap workshop (whew – that’s a lot of pairs) I think back to one of the participants in the Business and Policy track that I led with Lynne Kiesling. Several members, bunched together in the participants, were from the Edison Electric Institute, the association of share holder owned utilities. They peppered us with detailed questions and countered transactive smart grid scenarios with valid objections. It was on the second day, however, that I recognized the thought behind many of their concerns. They feel that they are asked to subsidize pretend transactions. When I say “buy power from your neighbor’s solar cell”, they hear “so we’ll put in $1,000 of equipment so you can buy $100 of power; the cost of which will be subsidized by all the other customers.”

Well, they’re right.

One reason that there is so much inefficiency in electricity is because utilities are asked to be providers of all sorts of social services. No cut-off of electricity in winter in the north. Subsidize rates to the poor. Smooth rates throughout the year. None of these ideas are bad; it is bad that we have no idea what they cost.

Now we add in feel-good electricity generation: Subsidize new energy. Provide reliability to back up the intermittent energy sources. We do need to plan for tomorrow, but do these investments make sense? How large are they? Are we increasing the base rate for electricity which we will then subsidize down for the poor to pay for the hobby power affected by the well-to-do?

These are legitimate questions. Murky accounting that hides the costs—costs to utilities, costs to customers, and costs to society—is always a bad policy. Transparency is good. Occulting is bad.

Transactive energy on the smart grid actually supports the concerns of the Institute. They wish to know what things actually cost. Transactive energy will reveal those costs. As a society, we may decide that we want to subsidize particular energy sources. We may wish to prime the pump for new energy. We may wish to impose carbon taxes on other energy.

Whatever we decide, we should do it in the light of day. In a free country, we should not hide public policy behind a cloak of murky accounting. Let’s make our decisions in the light of day. Transactive energy lets the sun shine in.

We need a BIM Lite

Every week I encounter another project which would be simpler if we had a light-weight three dimensional BIM standard. BIM (Building Information Model) is a family of data standard models that fit together to describe every aspect of the design and construction of buildings. The sexiest member of this family is the Building Model, the 3D representation of the space itself. Today, BIM does little for the operation of a building or for providing tenant services. For this we are going to need a BIM Light.

Today the internet of things is becoming salient; the intelligent objects and intelligent systems that run so much of our world are getting interfaces. The agents that run them our learning to respond to our financial systems and with our lives. In return, these systems are starting to share information with us. This interaction is at the heart of new energy, of e-tech. This information is central to new models for emergency response. These changes will be critical to offering each of us improved amenities even as the agents work aggressively and autonomously to reduce our energy footprints.

Direct control of these systems means we will limit their responsiveness to the minimum. Direct access to these systems will ensure that we share as little information as we can get away with. We will not allow these systems to do much unless we, as the owners and occupants of the buildings can understand what we are allowing them to do, and how their responses will affect us. As we have protean businesses and dynamic lives, these interactions and their effects on us our ever changing.

In the IT world, we coordinate loose collections of services by policy-based assertions. Policy frameworks are used to coordinate services that may be similar, but not necessarily known, or operated by the same people. We know what policies refer to if we are describing financial services, or contractor interactions, or customer relations. It is not clear how to apply policy to things, especially things that are run by agents that have their own internal logic and business rules.

We do know one thing about these objects and systems; each is grounded in space. If one of these systems is supporting a customer service, that customer is grounded in space, and the business relationship with that customer, perhaps a lease, is grounded in space. In an industrial building, each division or work unit is assigned space. The natural basis for asserting policy on these services is to tie them to the space that they support. The natural framework to understand the information these services report is through the lens of space, and through mapping that space to the customers and business services supported by that space.

Today’s BIM is too large to use as a vehicle to transfer information. It is filled with detailed structural and performance information that makes it too unwieldy to use as the basis for a service framework. Even retro-BIM, the information collected long after construction, often to support renovation, is too detailed. We need something small and light, the size of a Google Sketch-Up drawing, and expressed in XML, that we can use to visualize and understand services.  Perhaps it can be based on GBXML (Green Building XML), already based on BIM and used for exchanging information used for energy modeling.

Ideally, the new dimensional BIM-light would support easy perspective-based translation to Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). SVG is an internet standard based on XML for defining graphics. SVG graphics are already supported by many cell phones, and by all browsers except Microsoft’s (and Google is working on a solution for that). Because it is vector based, zooming in or zooming out is based on simple math operations  and produces clean sharp lines at any scale. SVG supports the full Document Object Model (DOM). DOM is the basis for interactive web pages, so scripting languages such as JAVA and interactive approaches such as AJAX are fully supported.

A simple light way to exchange three dimensional building models would improve owner and occupant understanding of building performance. A better understanding would reduce the perceived risk of fully participating in collaborative energy activities, including demand response. A shareable framework for visualizing information from building services would improve both the safety any occupants inside a building during an emergency and that of emergency responders.

Smoke Signals from the Energy Architecture workshop

I am not at the smart grid high level architecture workshop this week as Southern California Edison. Its members may be sworn to secrecy, or exhausted from long work, but are letting nothing out. The mere fact they are meeting, though, has caused numerous others to discuss the interface between the building/home/industry and grid, what we are starting to call X2G.

Three of the most prominent pre-standard specifications are OpenADR (Automated Demand Response), OpenAMI (Automated Metering Infrastructure), and OpenHAN (Home Area Network). In discussions around the formation of the OASIS Entergy Interoperability, someone asked “does OpenHAN define a gateway to OpenADR?”

The key architectural principles of symmetry, composition, and discoverability make this an unhelpful question. Every interface is a gateway, from one realm to another. That realm my include security changes, ownership changes, technology changes, and protocol changes. There may be significant operating requirement changes as well. For example, the definition of Real Time Response changes markedly as one moves from core transmission (very fast) to distribution, to home and building (relatively slow).

It is not the within the functions of the interface to define processes past the interface. This is why BACnet and LON and other building protocols proprietary and public have no place in the smart grid standards. This is why the industrial control protocols OPC has no place in the smart grid standards. OpenHAN is a special case, as it is a an in-building protocol created to meet the needs of the smart grid, but it, too, is not part of the smart grid interfaces.

I imagine two Service Entry Points for each [facility]. One offers time-sensitive two-way metering and also acts as a SCADA end point to improve customer service and diagnostics. The other offers a suite of services that I am calling the Energy Management Service (EMS). The EMS can be collocated on “the meter” or use a separate appliance and data path. This possible separation frees up today’s AMI installations to continue.

The EMS offers up multiple services to the smart grid. It provides an OpenADR endpoint to the grid operators. It manages market negotiations for energy purchases, generation, and storage. It relays curtailment signals, by which I mean the fast emergency load shedding signals.

The customer side of the EMS supports a more diverse set of tasks.

If the customer side of an EMS is above a private distribution network, it relays the OpenADR request on and aggregates the response into its own OpenADR response to the grid. Examples of private distribution networks include college campuses, corporate campuses, and military bases. Future distribution networks could encompass building floors in an office environment or even include the green neighborhood microgrid in a new subdivision.

A more common profile of the EMS might have some sort of building services network below, which would include the HAN. The customer side of the EMS could then be on the HAN, and the EMS would be a gateway. At a minimum, such an EMS would need to be able to poll the devices on the HAN. Some visions have an agent living on the EMS/HAN gateway, able to coordinate response from the agent-based devices below. Other business models see the EMS registering devices up to the utility and thereafter relaying direct control messages. In either case, the devices on the HAN see the message and coordination coming to them from the EMS.

Update on 2009-05-07 21:35 by Toby Considine

As you can see in the comments, Steve has suggested that I share this diagram that, as I understand it,  arrived during a flight from China.

One detail to note is that the space outside the building is "Agregator Domain" - a term carefully chosen to avoid presupposing any existing business entities. For another take on this, see the comment left on my Cyborg Beetle article.

The Smart Grid is Not Faster RTUs

There is a growing awareness of cybersecurity for SCADA systems, one that has not, as of yet, brought anything like real security to SCADA in the power grid. SCADA (System Control And Data Acquisition) refers to the processes used for central control and operation of our biggest process systems. Process systems in this case include the distribution systems used for the electric grid and for water distribution systems: large not-very intelligent systems. I say not very intelligent because the often use a model in which each node is dumb as a thumb tack, and nearly as secure.

New business processes are demanding entrance. The utilities need DR (Demand-Response) to deal with their most pressing needs, but do not wish (for the most part) to share live metering data (“we think you should be happy with 15 minute intervals.”). We have a system architected so badly that “RTU interoperability” is considered some sort of holy grail. Perhaps this would be legitimate if RTU communications were some sort of high-performance wonder, but they are not.

New business models will break the old design philosophies. Distributed generation will mean that the substation operations you are monitoring will be controlled by someone else. Perhaps that someone else will include everyone with a zero net energy building. Perhaps that substation will be run by the Green HOA (Home Owners Association) set up by the large commodity builder complete with its own neighborhood generation.

This means you will have to assume that the substation is owned by someone else. This means that if you do have “one RTU incompatibility might take down the system” problems, then your system will be down. Failure to acknowledge this is just whistling past the graveyard.

The current power engineers run hierarchical end-to-end control systems than anyone. The question is, will this be like being one of the folks who understands SNA best, claiming to the end that only structured hierarchical controls can keep things afloat, while folks like NERC acknowledge greater instability every week.

Things will change. That change will involve embracing multi-party communications at the substation and at the end node. Thos multi-party communications will require something better than sealed end-to-end channels.

This is the way the tides are going. The choice is to promote the desirability of holding back the tide, or to acknowledge the rising damp.

Federated security. Multi-party communications. New market models.

Embrace them or become obsolete. The smart grid is more than just upping the speed of communications with your RTU.