Coordinating Energy Use and Supply (3a of 3)

This is the third of three posts on the late September conference revisiting the smart grid priority action plans. The first post discussed semantic issues. The next addressed the conflict between the business models for Managed and Collaborative Energy. In this one, I discuss the architecturally significant interfaces of the smart grid, updating my earlier musing on SGIX. There is too much new information to fit into a single standards post...Next live energy usage and ancilary standards planned or required.

Within smart grids, the interfaces at economic boundaries, that is where energy and energy services are bought and sold are the most significant. These interfaces enable negotiations over how and when and why energy is used. The legacy grid is monolithic, without well developed markets and little room for competitive intermediation services. Informational market enabling standards that expand situation awareness between participants, that enable values-based decisions, and that provide an economic basis for technology adoption are the ones that matter.

The smart grid will be transactional, with each decision to buy or sell power a separate transaction at a separate price. The price of these transactions will vary dynamically, as a live energy market determines the clearing price at each moment for each sale or purchase. The smart grid will be open and transparent, wherein consumers can choose what kind of power to buy, and providers can prove that they are selling the kind of power they promise.

What follows is a updated snapshot of Smart Grid Information Exchange (SGIX). SGIX, the suite of informational and economic protocols that will charge markets and unleash innovation. These interfaces will use Common Information Models (CIMs) of the domains they connect, especially but not exclusively the IEC TC57 CIM for Power Management. The interfaces will apply the e-commerce disciplines of symmetry, transparency, and composition.

I call this approach collaborative energy, as it uses economic signals to induce the end nodes of the grid, homes, commercial buildings, and industrial sites, to participate in energy use management, storage, and production. There is a parallel effort to support Managed Energy. Managed energy uses direct control signals to interact with some very small, very inexpensive systems without minimal integration. While there is some blurring in the middle, managed energy and collaborative energy are quite different approaches and use different technologies.

SG-Energy Interoperation

OpenADR, the tested specification for automated demand response, was contributed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the California Energy Commission to the OASIS Energy Interoperation Technical Committee (TC). This committee is well underway. Collaborative energy embraces enterprise interactions as well as building systems. By ceding control to the building inhabitant, in commercial building, factory, or home, we anticipate being able to induce a larger response and wider participation. The committee will also draw upon European work in transmission, distribution, and cooperative energy use, and will include discussion of security and privacy requirements.

Utilities and other energy market participants are working within the North American Energy Standards Board (NAESB) to define the business use cases and requirement for Demand Response (DR) and Distributed Energy Resources (DER). This work, due next month will be contributed to the Energy Interoperation TC as well as to parallel efforts developing managed energy.

SG-Market Information

The Energy Market Information Exchange (EMIX) TC has begun meeting. EMIX is defining an XML vocabulary for exchanging price and energy characteristics (hydro, hard coal, nuclear, wind, etc, with a place for carbon information). EMIX will facilitate energy markets and device understanding to enable dynamic pricing of energy.

EMIX is being designed to interact easily with financial and commodity market mechanisms. It will adopt market definitions and interactions from financial transaction standards such as ISO20022 and FIX. EMIX also anticipates the development of new energy products that allow energy choice based on environmental issues as well as price.

WS-Calendar

Coordination of energy supply and use is critical to smart grid markets. Time of day market clearing is essential to managing parallel energy markets on the same wires. Just as IEC TC57 defines the Power Management CIM, so the calsify workgroup in the IETFdefines the semantics of schedule, interval, and coordination. CalConnect, the Calendar and Scheduling Consortium, has already updated two of the three calendar IETF standards (ICalendar and TIP). By year end, they will produce a standard XML dictionary for calendaring.

WS-Calendar will build on this work to define light loose schedule components for use in web services and other e-commerce transactions. These components will be used in collaborative energy, and their semantics will be re-used in managed energy. Because the work of the Consortium is used enterprise and personal scheduling, and will soon be adopted by building systems and perhaps finance, WS-Calendar will provide a common understanding of schedule and interval across many domains and for more purposes than energy.

SG Managed Energy

I use this term to encompass the entire range of direct load management and control technologies used to manage very small footprint devices without requiring a premises-based system for customer input. Managed Energy includes ZigBee Energy, SEP, OpenHAN, et al.

A full peer to collaborative energy, Managed Energy will adopt the vocabulary of the Power Management CIM and the business models defined by the NAESB processes mentioned above.

Two Paths to Smart Energy in DC (2 of 3)

This is the second of three planned posts on the outcome of the conference last week in Virginia. The first post dealt with semantic issues. This one addresses business model issues. The third will be my perspective on critical standards, updating my earlier musing on SGIX.

Standards can seem dry and uninteresting, but they find vital expression in the business models they support or prevent. One of the underlying issues in the initially contentious smart grid meeting last week was the conflict of business models. This can be resolved, but only by talking clearly about the purposes and motivations behind each model. A good first start would be to give them good names.

Regular readers know that I favor something looking like pure market interactions. I believe that we all use a standard abstract presentation for scarcity and value, for risk and for reliability. We call this abstraction money. As Stephanie Hamilton opined when she still worked at Southern California Edison (SCE), every brown-out is a pricing failure.

Because I come from the perspective of building integrators, I have great faith in the ability of building automation systems to manage change, They are usually poorly maintained, and poorly understood by their owners, but they keep running. They adjust naturally to the conditions around them, and to their own operations, and are getting better at autonomous action and tuning. I want to give them clear price signals, not only now, but for the future. UI want to give them clearer information about weather and environment. And then I want to leave them alone.

But such systems can cost thousands of dollars to install. In part this is because without standards, they are all custom work. Still, there must be a less expensive solution.

Early smart grid deployments are aimed at the smallest, cheapest systems that can fit easily into appliances and home thermostats. They must not change the price of appliances materially, especially as social equity concerns mandate that low income consumer have access to the benefits of smart energy. Consumers want reliable systems; it is hard to convince them to pay more for systems that can be turned off by someone else.

Utilities often refer to this group as the Residential option, When pressed, they may call it ZigBee, because that trade association is the primary technology used to install these low end systems. They may call it the OpenHAN (Home Area Network) approach, although the information and interactions are indistinguishable from those of ZigBee. Sometimes this approach is used I small commercial buildings as well.

Rather than call them the OASIS or C&I (Commercial & Industrial) approach and the ZigBee or Residential approach, I think we should name them according to their business models. I propose that we call them Collaborative Energy and Managed Energy.

There, without out of the way, I can summarize succinctly the business model agreement from the customer-oriented standards development meeting.

We agreed that we would apply the semantic models coming out of NAESB to parallel processes for Collaborative and Managed energy, and that we would keep the semantics aligned when we could.

Smart Grid Blood on the Floor in DC (1 of 3)

This is the first of three planned posts on the outcome of the conference last week in Virginia. This one deals with semantic issues. The next one deals with business model issues. The third will be my perspective on critical standards, updating my earlier musing on SGIX.

Thirty ornery smart grid partisans gathered outside DC last week for a hastily convened review of the customer oriented standards development plans. To one side, the plans developed at the August Standards Development Organization (SDO) was putting critical ongoing deployments of billions of dollars infrastructure upgrades at risk, and throwing long term plans into disarray (Team A). The other side saw keeping the August plans intact necessary to enable new investment and new participation in distributed energy, and to break the iron grip of dinosaur twentieth century processes and organizations that impede new energy (Team B). There was little common ground.

The NIST smart grid process identified a number of Priority Action Plans (PAPs). Four of these defined the border between energy supplier and buyer in the smart grid. These communications occur between utility and end node, whether that node is house, or commercial building or industry. These standards are for Price and Product communication (PAP03), Calendar and Schedule communication (PAP04), Energy Usage information (PAP10), and communications for Demand Response and Distributed Energy Resources (PAP09).

The first morning passed with quiet platitudes, until Dr. David Wolman, technical lead for NIST on its smart grid project, called for "blood on the floor" during the afternoon session. The participants complied with enthusiasm, and the conversations became more interesting and more revealing.

Power system engineering standards are developed in the IEC TC 57, the overarching technical committee (TC) defining standards for power management. TC 57 has defined a common information model (CIM); and utilities are striving to rationalize their world by using only elements defined in “The CIM.” Some of the suspicion with which building systems technologists regard the CIM is due to a historic tendency to fit all building operations into the TC 57 CIM

Representatives from the end nodes, particularly commercial buildings and the business enterprise, do not see their world as an extension of the power grid. These areas have their own information models and find the phrase “The CIM” mysterious and unhelpful. Financial services use a CIM defined by ISO 20022. Building systems have information models defined within the divers building control system communities. Enterprise operations beginning to define their interactions using information models from defined by EBXML (electronic business XML) or UBL (Universal Business Language).

The first key agreement of the two days of meetings was to respect the multiple information models on these inter-domain interfaces. For elements and communications that are purely power management related, everyone agreed to use to use the TC 57 CIM. When the communication element involved business transactions, or schedules, or some other area, the communication would use the informational models from that domain.

A common understanding on semantic models, including when to use such models from outside the domain of power management, was important to bringing the divers interests together.

How should green builders prepare for smart grids?

Brian Duggan from West Coast Green asked me at GridWeek what green builders and sustainable construction companies should do to prepare themselves for the smart grid. What new construction methods should they use? What new smart-grid aware control systems would they need to install. My answer—nothing.

My answer was that before a building can collaborate with a smart grid, it must know what it has and know what it can do. Knowing what you have begins with information technology (IT), and knowing what you are building, and that begins with design.

Sustainable builders should embrace the use of building models and of building information models (BIM). BIM produces designs that more effectively engage the owner, earlier in the process. This leads to fewer retrofits, fewer changes, and less waste. I cannot imagine how anyone can claim to be committed to sustainable construction if they do not use BIM.

Energy models, an important part of LEEDS and other sustainable business practices, often have little to do with the actual design. Even when they do, they are only rarely updated to reflect design changes or value engineering. An energy model can be created directly from a BIM. As the design is updated, the energy model can be regenerated. Instead of being a separate and largely irrelevant check off, with BIM, the energy model becomes a recursive method to commission the design.

BIM-based construction shares information with the design to do a better job. BIM-bidding uses reduces uncertainty and risk—and thereby cost. Because the collisions are resolved in advance in the three dimensional model, subsystems and components are built off-site in controlled conditions. Casework, fire control systems, plumbing, duct, really any component can be cut, fit, and assembled off-site to achieve higher quality with less waste in less time.

Duct for example, can be pre-assembled, sealed, and insulated in shop conditions rather than in the field, perhaps the street, as is often the case in traditional construction. Higher quality ductwork is quieter and saves energy throughout the life of the system. The resulting components are installed faster and with minimal interference with other trades.

BIM today has little to say about the critical control systems that manage and monitor energy using systems in the building. I think BIM-based designers should specify performance goals, Healthfulness, comfort, and performance should be specified. Subcontractor bids should warrant results not methods; this maximizes the incentive for innovation. These performance goals, along with the intrinsic energy model described above, become the platform for commissioning.

Too often, commissioning falls back to the old standard—no sparks. BuildingSmart, the consortia that promotes best practices in BIM, has defined the Common Operations Building Information Exchange (COBIE). COBIE defines the handover of information from the BIM to operations at the end of construction. COBIE catalogues building systems and formalizes commissioning records. When combined with the performance specification for each system as described above, COBIE will raise commissioning to a higher level.

Building owners and operates must understand how their buildings actually operate before they can understand how to collaborate with the smart grid. Such knowledge increases the value received from site-based generation and storage even before smart grid interactions are considered. A tenant who can see the services provided by his building, and understands how changes affect quality of service changes, rather than how systems operation changes, knows enough to negotiate with the grid.

It starts with knowing what is in the building, what services are provided by the building, and how changes affect quality of service. In new construction, that should begin with BIM.