Punch and Judy and Energy Usage

The collection and display of energy usage information is a hotly contested area of smart energy standards. This small, seemingly obvious issue has generated more fights than all other issues, and more open political involvement. One model sees the utility collecting energy usage information and sharing that information later the customer or his designees. The other model sees the meter as an information appliance on the premises, just one of a number of real time information sources for demand side management.

For now, visibility is all. Up-to-the-hour energy bills on the web, and on our web-connected smart phones, are the first generation. This is a short-sighted goal. Mere energy charts on-line will not hold the consumer’s attention. Over time, consumer will go back to looking at other thing on the ‘net, or perhaps even occasionally be off line. Long term benefits will come from complete information models that spur completion to automate energy use decisions in response to the wishes of the consumer.

The real contest is over control of the customer interface, and thereby of the customer. Today's Google Energy and Microsoft Hohm pose no threats to the control of the customer by the utility. The utilities still can gate access to the back-end energy markets. Control of energy information prevents both intermediation and disintermediation in the energy market. Utilities also are desperate to justify their AMI investments at a time when many are calling for moratoriums and delays in deployment; AMI is part of a seamless model that includes control of the customer’s home as well as of access to information.

Each side in this debate is beating the other with a privacy stick. The CPUC has received complaints about non-resident (but bill-paying) consumers accessing usage information from the web. (A Berkeley student did not want Mom and Dad to find out that she spent her weekends elsewhere than in the apartment they were paying for.) The way ZigBee systems are usually installed by the utilities often grants access to nothing or everything, and the wireless mesh covers entire townhomes and apartment buildings; utilities argue that direct access could let you view your neighbor’s data.

Energy communication standards surrounding usage need to address four areas:

1. What data is available to consumers? The short term need is usage visibility. Thereafter, the need is to support agents able to optimize the total home or commercial building experience. These agents will also compete to support zero net and off grid energy use, where the grid has minimal, or no effect. The utilities information model is not rich enough to support this.
2. What clear language describes the energy used? Usage semantics begins with the Power and Load Management Common Information Model (IEC TC57 CIM). Consumers need other information including environmental aspects of energy choices, such as pollutants per kWh.
3. Where is the source of the information? The utilities communication infrastructure will always limit the timeliness and frequency of utility-centric communication. Information directly from the meter is more timely and detailed, but lacks historical context. We must accommodate both.
4. How is the information accessed? Historical information stored at the utility requires less operational security, but requires the most attention to consumer privacy. Information delivered from the on-premises meter to drive system decisions can be more complete but may vary from final billing. Data used by service providers to operate buildings requires both privacy standards and integrity guarantees.

The UCAIug has developed an application, OpenADE, that can provide near term access to information using today’s grid infrastructure. OpenADE is good enough to support the first generation systems. OpenADE is neither timely enough to support real-time operations nor an adequate information model for future applications. The standard must acknowledge the limited information models available from OpenADE.

The EIS Alliance had developed a larger information model to support tomorrow’s applications. The Alliance sees the meter as an information appliance for the consumer’s premises. The Alliance has proposed standards to put the consumer in control, while reducing integration costs for premises equipment. Live, well defined information exchange provides a platform for competitive technology markets.

The challenge for today is to ensure both backward compatibility with OpenADE and today’s infrastructure and forward compatibility with the unimagined future. That future will support disruptive business models as well as technologies. And that’s why the fights are so fierce over something that appears so simple.

Microgrids Big and Small

Last summer, we used the call “Every end node is a microgrid” to focus smart energy standards activities. Like the regional grids, a microgrid is responsible for running its own operations, and for supporting its own needs. Like the regional grids, a microgrid uses market operations to acquire what it cannot make itself, and what it can buy more economically than it can make itself. Like the regional grids, a microgrid can contain microgrids that are responsible for their own operations.

Last week, a board member of NAESB asked me to define microgrids. I was invited to speak to NAESB to explain what interest natural gas suppliers might have in smart grid standards. I was surprised that an idea so central to national smart grid efforts needed to be described to one of the most significant energy market and business practices groups. There is so much going on so fast right now, and the pressures to accelerate are so strong, that some of us get used to ideas before we ever have to explain them.

The list of end nodes that might be microgrids starts with homes, commercial buildings, and industrial sites. Within an end node, different subsystems can interact much as they do within the larger grid. Building systems could bid for access to site-based power. Microgrid events can trigger demand response (DR) behaviors from the building systems or building zones. Microgrids can contain and be contained by other microgrids.

Buildings and sites can be participants in local area microgrids. Campuses, and military bases present existing business models for microgrids. Rather than as integrated control systems, these contained building microgrids grids can participate collection of autonomous entities. Each building / microgrid could then bid for and obtain energy supply and reliability from larger microgrid.

The models propagated by the District Energy Association can inform microgrid thinking. The defining characteristic of District Energy is cogeneration, in which a single plant may make electricity, steam, and hot water. Because steam can be used to power cooling, cogeneration systems often produce chilled water was well. Each of these products can find a market within the microgrid. The district energy plant then becomes the market maker, shifting modes of energy delivery to match the bids from the autonomous buildings it contains.

Microgrids can opt to be more intimate, and to communicate more frequently than does the larger grid today. Buildings may choose to negotiate available load shapes, sharing planned energy use and backing-off of planned energy-using processes to maintain overall market conditions within the local microgrid. Microgrids can maintain their own cybersecurity regimes, tighter or looser than those in the wider grid as befits their needs.

These local area microgrids will require regulatory reform to flourish. Industrial parks must avoid these business models today lest they become regulated as a public utility. Commodity home builders are exploring providing turnkey district energy and management, turned over to the turnkey homeowner’s association (HOA) they provide today. When combined with the new package solar thermal systems, shipped in a single container, and installed on-site, neighborhood microgrids may be the future of distributed energy.

Today, in many states, an energy supplier becomes a regulated utility when the energy delivery crosses a public road. In new neighborhoods, the homebuilder finishes a neighborhood and turns the rods over to the city. Green builders are already considering turning title for the roads over to the HOA instead, to avoid such regulation. Future regulatory changes could open up existing neighborhoods to this kind of energy management.

Microgrids can extend down as well. Each tenant in a commercial building could operate its own microgrid, existing within the environment of the buildings microgrid. One could argue that green leases are beginning to move in this direction. I find it fascinating to think of intra-building market opportunities. Can we use intra-building markets to re-use what is today waste energy? Does the data center in the basement defray costs by selling its waste heat to the other tenants? Would some tenants pay a premium for site-generated energy? By hiding the complexity of interoperation behind an economic veneer, can we improve performance and reduce integration costs?

Microgrids, whether virtual or real, are an important organizing concept of smart energy.

Spam & Smart Grid Operations, Privacy & Civil Rights

Spam has changed how we think about email, and automated monitoring and control needs to change how we think about privacy. If you make something very much easier and cheaper, it is no longer what it once was. Smart phones, smart buildings, and smart grids are now at the center of privacy law. Privacy is the ground upon which the battle for the preservation of the 4th amendment will be won or lost.

A serious of court decisions, each looking more to a desired end than to the constitution, are using technology to redefine what “reasonable” means in the 4th amendment to the US Constitution. If we are not careful, smart grids might destroy the last remaining realms of privacy, that is, our privileges to be free from interference in our lives. Soon, the 4th amendment and its protections may mean nothing at all.

English common law declared the home inviolate even from the King and the King’s men at least as early as 1300. In 1760, William Pitt famously stated the right: "The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail, its roof may shake, the wind may blow through it. The rain may enter. The storms may enter. But the king of England may not enter. All his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement."

The fourth amendment has its roots in a growing violation of this right using the general warrant as a tool. A general warrant is an arrest warrant that does not name or describe the person to be arrested, or a search warrant that does not specify the premises to be searched or the property sought. Such warrants were outlawed in England in the middle ages. In the 18th century, their use was revived with through the writ of assistance. Then as now, the regulation of commerce was used to erode liberty, and writs were issued to in the form of general warrants to assist in enforcing trade and navigation laws. These writs authorized customhouse officers to search any house for smuggled goods without specifying either the house or the goods.

The resentment bred by these writs of assistance contributed strongly to revolutionary fervor. Still feeling the sting, the memory of these writs led to the adoption of the 4th Amendment to the US Constitution two decades later:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The language is clearly written; its meaning is clear to anyone whose understanding of English has not been clouded by the study of the law. No means No.

Technology and Commerce are the hammer and tongs on the privacy of the home. A walled garden or a large property are secure from prying eyes. Regulation of commerce says we must manage Cannabis. Planes change the definition of public view. Technology erodes the concept of privacy and chips away at the 4th amendment.

Ten years ago, a police department, suspicious about indoor plantations, scanned houses with an infrared scanner. They discovered a hot spot, and used it to get a warrant, and found grow lights in the attic. The owner, Kyllo, fought his conviction, fought it all the way to the Supreme Court, and won. The 4th amendment held against advancing technology. Unfortunately, that ruling held the seeds of the complete destruction of privacy and the 4th amendment. The ruling held that “when . . . the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a “search” and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant.” Unraveling all the negatives, the ruling states that no warrant is required to authorize government use of any technology in general public use.

Today, such scanners are in common use. Many utilities offer to subsidize scans of your home. It appears that today, there would be no requirement of a specific warrant before scanning your home—or before scanning every home in your neighborhood.

The fourth amendment never protected against observation by government agents of public activity. There was always a practical limit on such monitoring because it had a real cost. It took as long to listen to a wire tap as it took to have the original conversation. Sending a squad car to tail a suspect cost the use of a squad car and the salary of a policeman for an entire day. Only an unashamedly corrupt society would assign the resources of a Stasi to watch all citizens.

Email has eliminated all cost barriers to sending unsolicited communications, and so created spam, hated for its use by legitimate and illegitimate organizations alike. Auto-dialers reduced the human time required to make unsolicited phone calls, creating a desire to regulate the free use of the phone system. In a similar way, automated monitoring and analysis has eliminated the practical barriers to pervasive monitoring of all citizens at all times. Just as spam storms required us to build policies to control unwanted messages, so the automation of monitoring requires us to expand our notions of privacy just to maintain the fourth amendment as it was.

Current case law and judicial rulings are pushing in the opposite direction, toward the negation of the 4th amendment.

Law enforcement in the US is arguing that there is no privacy protection for any information routinely collected. This is particularly troubling as with the other hand, government is mandating that information be routinely tracked. Some years ago, government mandates (“to support E911”) required that all cell phones be trackable with high precision, higher than the cell companies required for their own business. Last week, the Justice department argued that as this information was routinely gathered, there was no expectation of privacy surrounding such information. This month, our government has argued that it should be able to track the whereabouts of any and all of us today and for the previous 120 days, without warrant, without explanation, and without judicial review.

Smart grids demand that smart buildings respond to changes in the availability of electricity in the grid. The largest utilities, particularly the California utilities, are advocating business models of direct load control, tracking the use of all devices in a home. A decade ago, engineers found they could track the use of all systems in a house from the meter; they could even distinguish from the signature of the heater whether a waterbed was occupied or unoccupied, or whether the occupants of that bed were active or sleeping. Complete access to building operational data is a loss of privacy more profound than a search, because it continues over time.

One of the key deliverables named in the UCAIug’s OpenADE requirements for tracking energy usage is the “Law Enforcement Interface.” The only good thing I can say about that is they decided to leave it out of version 1.

This last election cycle saw state employees abusing their authority to harass and discredit a private citizen who discomfited their favored candidate. One political team claimed that the previous administration can and would do anything, abuse any right to have its way. The other team has expressed horror at a rank intimidation of political discourse found in the current administration collecting emails of dissenters. How can those on either side honestly accept the 4th amendment suffering a death of a thousand cuts through the acceptance that technology erodes privacy?

The complete loss of privacy *is* the complete negation of the 4th amendment. Exposing operational data to the power of data mining *is* the complete loss of privacy.

The founders were literate, and they would have read Milton, who in Paradise Lost wrote:

And with necessity,
The tyrant's, plea, excus'd his devilish deeds.

As C.S. Lewis updated the formulation, "'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'." There is nothing so useful or necessary that we allow untrammeled collection of such information by smart grids. There are business and technical models that avoid such collection. We should choose them.

Smart Operations are a necessary part of Smart Energy. Maybe GBXML is, too.

It is easy to think we are playing the end game, but we are really working on the early stages of smart energy.

Smart grids may end at the edges of the grid, they may know no bounds, i.e., ZigBee and SEP, or they may end at the meter. Beyond the meter may be a collection of dumb systems, a minimal collection of defined systems with defined responses, or a micro-grid with its own economy, and own dynamics. I think that every node a microgrid is the future.

I was pulled back to thinking about buildings as I prepared to speak at the AHR show in Orlando next week, and by an announcement about an upcoming seminar on GBXML (GB = Green Building). GBXML is a format designed for the exchange of engineering information, particularly that related to energy use and energy efficiency, during the design process. GBXML may be the key to understanding microgrids in buildings.

The challenge when we treat the end nodes as micro-grids is categorizing and measuring the services they provide. These may be relatively clear in the data center, but even there, understanding HVAC support services is relatively obscure to the IT operator. Going a step further and treating the data center as the district energy center for thermal distribution is hard to understand, harder to account for, and therefore difficult for most enterprises to work with. What are the services in the end nodes?

So, after a building has been partially renovated a few times, and has three EMS (energy management systems), each managing a dozen zones, what effect is there on which part of the business when load is shed in a particular way? Which departments, or tenants, are even affected? Do tenants have QOS agreements, and if so, how are they affected.

Full-fledged BIM (Building Information Model), as defined in NBIMS and BuildingSmart, is too fat, too heavy to use in everyday operations. GBXML is a light-weight one-off of the IFCs in BuildingSmart. It was developed to model energy use, and to exchange energy models within buildings. GBXML includes formal definitions of geometries and spaces, and common models for the components of the energy using systems in buildings. It might just be the map between the design, the operations, and the services. GBXML might just be BIM-Light.

Somewhere between the intriguing, but not yet all that useful Microsoft Hohm and Google Energy, there needs to be a path for buildings as service providers. Understanding services in buildings requires understanding tenants, and their purposes. Perhaps Building Service Profiles link to the spaces in the light-weight BIM (GBXML) and therefore to the tenant services.

Energy profiles linked to the Building Service Profiles, then, become the links between Demand Response and graphical, tenant aware interfaces for building operations.

Last week, I received an announcement of a GBXML seminar in building design (http://www.gbxml.org/events.php). So far, efforts such as LEEDS have not yet delivered on the vision of sustainable energy-efficient high-performance buildings. The unhappy truth today is that most "green" buildings are poor energy performers within a couple years of delivery. Commissioning is a one-time act with no visible links to ongoing operations. Maybe using GBXML to both define the services of buildings and to operate/visualize their operations will not only enable stronger DR, but will lead to better every-day operations.

I am convinced that long term models for distributed energy, and for rapid innovations in energy use, come in this area. All the early incentives of DR, and the early visualizations of Google Energy and Hohm, are merely the tip of wedge for DER and smart energy in the end nodes. We need an interface between design, construction, operations, and smart energy. GBXML may be the most important enabler of net zero, near grid, and off-grid facilities. It may be what we need to apply the facilities capability management approaches pioneered by the Coast Guard to the policy-based net zero security and survivability of the NZ Army base.

I recommend that you check out the seminar on GBXML if you are interested in the real potential of smart energy.

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