The price of energy

It was a busy week at the smart grid SDO conference. I was working with three of what the smart grid roadmap (www.nist.gov/smartgrid) calls Priority Action Plans (PAPs). These action plans are schedule, price, and messages for Demand Response (DR) and Distributed Energy Resources (DER). The technology of the grid is harder, and riskier, but these standards are what will give them a path to market. These standards will define the competition to make products in the end nodes of the grid. By the middle of next year, we will have three key standards out of this process.

Two of these standards are components. These standards will live inside other communications. Because these components will be common to many domains, meaning they will be inside business and buildings as well as in the grid, they will be much more useful than if they were built as one standard. These components are schedule and price.

Readers of this blog know that I have long wanted a WS-Calendar. WS-Calendar will be the web service form of ICalendar. ICalendar is used to exchange schedule information with others. When you go to a travel web site book and click on “Add this to my Calendar”, you are using ICalendar. When I invite you to a meeting and you click on the attachment to add it to your calendar, you have used ICalendar.

Schedules coordinate behavior between people. Web services schedules can coordinate behavior between business processes. Smart energy coordinates activities between energy supply and energy demand, including building systems and business processes. A web service for schedules can flow across domains, and be understood by each. The Calendar Consortium (www.calconnect.org) has committed to delivering an ICalendar for web services by year’s end.

You cannot understand price unless you understand the product you are buying. You can have commerce with any product, but standards make markets. For electricity, a product may have other characteristics such as source (wind or coal) and regulatory burden (carbon offsets). Mike Oldak of the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) calls these attributes terms and conditions, because they define the power contract. Schedule is also a part of the electrical product; power delivered at 2:00 am is worth much less than power delivered at 2:00 pm. Price and product must go together.

Product definitions need to be machine readable to really change the way we interact with the grid. Nearly everyone who has anything to do with electricity delivery, from policy to substation has agreed to work together to define the product. The North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB), is taking the lead on defining the requirements. NAESB will work with the utility stakeholders to define the characteristics that are relevant to markets.

OASIS will take the product from NAESB and create an open standard for communicating price information in the Energy Market Information Exchange (EMIX) Technical Committee (EMIX). The EMIX TC will also incorporate the WS-Calendar specification from CalConnect when it becomes available. It is our goal to define a message that can be used throughout the grid, from the generator to the home. OASIS will then work with NAESB to bring the standard back into the business process and regulations of the grid. The EMIX TC is now in formation, and you can read the proposed charter at the link below. Contact me if you would like to join.

Some of you know the Energy Interoperability TC, already underway. The Energy Interoperability TC builds upon the work of the OpenADR (Automated Demand Response) specification. The Energy Interoperability TC blurs the distinction between DR and DER by communicating information about prices now, and anticipated prices in the future. To the grid, at some level, it is all the same whether I turn off the lights, run off a battery, and fire up a generator when I get a message to reduce demand. The Energy Interoperation TC will deliver market information (price, product, and schedule) to the end nodes (Industry, commercial buildings, and homes) of the grid. The Energy Interoperability TC has been meeting for a month, but you can still join it, too. A link to its charter is below. When it’s work is done, it, too, will be submitted to NAESB and the IEC.

Drop me a line to learn more or need help to join one of these committees.

Monday Morning at the Smart Grid SDO Workshop

Seven pre-meetings and a plenary into this workshop, it already feels like I have been here for a week. It has come a long way; everyone from the president’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) to the state-side National Association or Regulatory and Utility Commissioners (NARUC) is on the same message. Smart grid interoperability standards must provide a platform for innovation. We must support more players and new entrants into energy markets. We must not make decisions in one domain that constrain the other domains.

Even before the conference started, I was talking to new people bringing their skills and knowledge to the problems of energy. Last night, I spoke for a long time with Greg Schwartz of CalConnect on the problems of coordinating activities across our daily lives, whether class schedules or energy prices, whether building systems or industrial operations. He identified his biggest problem as one of institutional awareness. CalConnect has key technical members in Oracle, Microsoft and Apple. Increased awareness is needed so that their calendar standards people will be given the time to finish the cross-cutting web services of scheduling.

The FIX Protocol consortium is here in force. FIX, a standard for financial information, provides the underpinning for the world’s major trading operations, from stock exchanges to commodities. The support and cooperation of FIX can help us get to transactional energy much faster.

Even at breakfast, I was talking to someone from the ASE, the automotive standards group. While she is here (Carolyn? - I wish I was better with names) to discuss the issues associated with electric vehicles. As the conversation continued with themes of competitiveness and knowledge drain, we turned to integration strategies. Cars have been under incredible cost and integration pressure, and have used service oriented integration of control systems to improve integration while reducing complexity. Detroit may be the place to hire engineers experienced in service oriented control integration.

George Arnold is emceeing the morning; anyone who has been following the smart grid process knows where he stands: informational interoperability, cooperation among the SDOs, and above all, speed of standards development.

Aneesh Chopra, the federal CTO described the goals of the administration and how they tied to this effort. He named key overall goals of enabling technical innovation, improving global competiveness, and open government. The meme he rode the longest was "verbs not nouns". Too often new systems and new standards are nouns. "Now we have a system". "Now we have a standard." He wants us to focus on effective use of standards. How many people can use each interface. What new uses or approaches to energy use these standards?

Now I may always here the same thing, but I heard "light, loose service oriented standards" in every bit of his talk.

Well that was the first half of the morning. More later.

Plumbing and the Man about the Net Zero House

Maybe the ongoing attempt to over-domesticate males is a barrier to sustainable energy. Maybe Swedish feminists are simply insensitive to carbon issues. Maybe Gaia just needs a man about the house. Maybe the essential appliance needed for the net zero energy (NZE) house is a urinal.

A report last week from Ohio University describes a catalyst capable of extracting hydrogen from urine. More efficient generation of hydrogen would be a great step to more effective energy storage, one without the major shortcomings of today’s batteries. Hydrogen storage would not wear out through regular re-charging the way today’s chemical batteries do. Hydrogen storage combined with transfer technologies such as micro-beads might solve the fast re-charge problem for vehicles that do not use carbon-based fuels.

More efficient multi-purpose energy storage is the most important single issue for the smart grid. Want to shift load to reduce the requirement for new generation? Want to manage peak transmission? Storage is essential. Current social and political decisions mandate the use of more unreliable power sources in the grid. Providing instant remediation of gaps in power generation at the grid-level is difficult and expensive; there are reports that efforts to use fast starting gas generation to backstop wind have used more natural gas than if the wind had never been hooked up. Efficient storage, especially distributed storage in homes and buildings, would be offer a profound benefit to grid operation.

Efficient local storage would also make site-based generation more sensible. Selling electricity back to the grid rarely makes economic sense. Expensive grid upgrades can be needed to improve monitoring and guarantee power quality; these costs are usually foisted onto other rate payers. Because the grid cannot rely on the local storage when it needs it, utilities may still need to build the generation to support peak capacity.

With efficient local storage, site based generation would be placed in storage rather than sold back to the grid. Solar generation would go into storage all afternoon. Wind generated electricity, no matter what speed the wind is blowing would simply go into storage. Expensive-to-fix issues in power quality and availability could be simply eliminated.

So what if urine is part of the answer? The problem, of course, is that we typically dilute urine into a lot of water before flushing it away. If the approach in the report pans out, perhaps each home should have urinals to enable the storage system.

Our society’s on-going war against nature has been trying to re-write the old riddle "What does a man do on two legs, a woman do sitting down, and a dog do on three legs?" Man’s ability to stand while micturating has been declared aggressive, oppressive, and unsanitary. Sitting and standing, and whether a teenager preferred the former was recently a critical issue in a custody battle. Legal discussions of this case have been surprisingly impassioned. Maybe they have not been impassioned enough.

Maybe we should be planning for urinals in homes. Water-free urinals are an effective if controversial means to reduce water consumption. Up to 40,000 gallons per year in water savings are claimed for each public urinal that goes waterless. Home urinals could be the foundation for home-based hydrogen generation and storage.

You should install a home urinal. It’s for the planet, after all.

General Relativity and Control Systems Standards

I suspect most of my readers can just about remember light speed, the 100 foot barn, and the 110 foot log from learning about relativity. The barn had doors at each end, and one set would close the instant the other doors opened. The challenge was to transport the log through the barn. The answer had to do with light speed and collapsing space, so that as one got close enough to light speed, the log shortened, and it could fit through the barn. It was a simple enough calculation as to how fast one could go to make the log shrink how much. When each of us had completed the math, the professor sprang the surprise on us: "OK, what is happening from the perspective of a cockroach on the log?"

I haven’t been writing much recently, because I have been writing all of the time. The national smart grid roadmap is a project being completed in double time. The EPRI team is diverse and whip smart. The workshop participants are opinionated and have hundreds of millions on the line. I would be surprised of the process was not contentious.

The real problem, though, is no one thinks of the cockroach. Each player on the multi-disciplinary team sees the problem set up the way that they want things to work. Power grid engineers see homes and offices as just one more set of slow devices to turn on and off. Homes and offices see the grid as a secretive and not very reliable partner they have to work with. Green and sustainable energy folks seem to see the laws of thermodynamics as as much a social construct as are the tariffs and business procedures of the grid. Utilities executives see distributed generation as an inefficient way for middle class hobbyists to get their obsessions paid for by those less well off.

The cockroach was moving every bit as fast as the log he was sitting on. While an observer saw space, and the length of the log, contracting, the cockroach was sitting on the log and saw it remaining at 110 feet. The cockroach actually saw the barn getting shorter still, and not likely to let the log pass. However, the cockroach also saw was time dilation instead of space dilation. To the cockroach, the two doors no longer open and close simultaneously, giving the log just enough time to slip through.

And that is the problem with the smart grid. The grid operators do not see the problems of the buildings. The building owners do not see the problems of the grid, because they are hidden by the rules and market design. Venture capitalists do not see a path to profitability in funding projects with years of indecision by the utilities built into the sale cycle. “If only those others would learn about how hard my problems are…” None of them will embrace the perspective of the others; they happen to have other jobs.

Today, I have been wrestling with “Architecturally Significant Interfaces”. Grid architects tend to see the world as late 60’s open plan houses, with no proper rooms to divide the houses activities. Open up the kitchen to the dining room and living room. (I wonder how much great rooms are responsible for the tendency to eat take-out in front of the TV.) Open up the master bedroom to the great room as a loft; it is open and honest, and who cares if it scares the kids. Heck, pry the doors of the bathrooms, so everybody can interact, no matter what they are doing.

A good architecture divides the house into rooms, and thereby defines how people live there. It does not determine the furniture or the wall paint. The conceptual model of the smart grid (read it yourself, chapter 3) describes the functions of the grid and the buildings and people who participate in it. The Architecturally Significant Interfaces could define how information is handed between them; if selected correctly they will free up those in reach room to innovate, without concern for those in other rooms. If we end up with an open floor plan, we will have a mess, wherein in the name of openness we will need a family meeting to before we can decide to change anything.

Relativity—it relies on acknowledging different perspectives. Without acknowledging a few architecturally significant interfaces, the smart grid will assume a perspective held by no one. And that will be a prescription for failure.