Smart Buildings & Smart Energy: the Integration Challenge

Last week, twenty of us gathered in DC for a two-day charrette on the standards needed to apply BIM to the problems of dynamic energy management. The work-shop, entitled “Smart Buildings, Smart Energy”, was put on by the Corps of Engineers Research Lab (CERL) at the National Institute for Building Science (NIBS). The meeting was a fascinating, and occasionally heated conversation that brought together academic and government researchers, building system practitioners from industry leading companies, and participants in standards committees from ASHRAE to OASIS. It was a fascinating meeting, filled with bright, deeply focused individuals who as a group had not yet recognized the profound changes in their goals required by smart energy.

The challenge of smart energy to buildings is dynamic change. The goal of smart buildings has always been superior performance—usually defined as energy efficiency. Energy from external sources will all become dynamic and intermittent. Some will be available under rapidly changing prices. The most efficient system may not be the one that is most able to respond to these changing conditions. Perhaps the goal of smart buildings is to defend its occupants from the degraded conditions of the smart grid. The game is changing.

The use of Building Information Models (BIM) is only now becoming common enough to change business processes. BIM lets us design buildings the way we design cars and planes, with full simulation and testing before the contractor turns over the first shovel full of dirt. BIM furthermore provides the contractor with accurate materials requirements and each trade with accurate measurements. With better knowledge and a dramatic reduction in re-work, the cost of construction can come way down while the quality goes up.

Most of the cost of a building is incurred in operations, during the long period between construction and demolition. For the last five years, led by NASA and CERL, there has been a project to define how to hand over information from design and construction for use in operations. The Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBIE) defines how to hand over information from the BIM to maintenance and operations.

The information in COBIE seems almost trivial—unless you don’t have it. COBIE defines a standard exchange for equipment information including spare parts lists and preventive maintenance schedules. COBIE exchanges are defined as a series of simple spreadsheets, which can be generated from BIM or filled in by hand. A growing number of maintenance management systems are now able to import COBIE directly into their databases. Whether or not a building was built using BIM, whether a building is old or new, the owner can request COBIE formatted information for handover from the builder, commissioning agent, or seller.

Francois Grobler gathered us together to discuss how to extend COBIE to reduce the cost of building system integration. Building systems are classically islands of automation, communicating only with a single proprietary console. The cost and time required for integration is a barrier both to better integration, and to system upgrades. Occult system tags and poor documentation prevent the timely value-based upgrades that drive innovation in the IT world.

This last point is critical of we are ever to get to a highly innovative green-tech. Cost-based upgrades look to historical cost and to growing maintenance problems to decide when to upgrade. Systems are not replaced until they fail or have been completely depreciated. As IT merged with telecommunications, we moved to value-based upgrades. Lap-tops and PDAs are upgraded when they give the sales force a competitive edge. Work-stations are upgraded to increase engineering productivity. This dynamic has driven these worlds to innovate to drive shorter sales and replacement cycles. The difference is the one between the old black hand-set we used to lease from the phone company, often for decades, and the new market of cell-phones and the latest functions.

A key component of this new COBIE will be control system tags and metadata. Today, a retro-commissioning agent spends the first days or even on site in low-value discovery of this information from blue prints and the current control system. Only after this work is complete, can the more high-value and useful work begin. When a project such as completed, those working notes are thrown away, or stored where they see no further use. A standard for the exchange of this information would reduce the costs of each commissioning and perhaps stimulate a market for third party discovery tools.

Space is the most important class of metadata. People in buildings inhabit and interact with spaces. Building systems affect those spaces, and secure those spaces, but the relation between systems and space is often occult. BIM can provide the mapping, but we don’t need all the BIM for that. We need something small and lightweight, describes the three dimensional space, but leaves out the details that add complexity.

The most significant use of BIM will be in buildings that built without using BIM. Most buildings next year are not new; most new buildings next year will be built without using BIM. Even if we were to imagine that in five years, all buildings will be built using BIM, most buildings still would not have a full BIM, with an intelligent structure, for a very long time. Fortunately, we do not need a full BIM to describe the space in buildings, and to provide a light framework integrating system information with that space.

Retro-BIM is the work for taking one of today’s buildings and creating a BIM for a portion, usually during a renovation. These BIMs tend to be descriptive, and lack the full engineering detail that would come with design through BIM. There is a growing set of tools and practices to cost effectively create a three-dimensional BIM during a renovation. Retro-BIM can provide as good a foundation for a light integration framework as can a full design BIM.

Green Building XML (GBXML) was designed to provide a “good enough” description of building space and building systems to support energy models that are “good enough”. GBXML is based on the IFC data models that underlie design BIM. Because GBXML already includes information on space and systems in a light-weight model, GBXML would need only a little extension to map system tags and related system metadata to space. Retro-BIM datasets, design to map to the IFCs, should be able to expose information as GBXML with little trouble.

The new challenge of smart energy is dynamic decision-making. Volatile energy availability and energy prices will make the grid  an unpredictable supplier. The availability of on-site energy sources, both generation and storage, enable self-reliance. Smart energy will require energy use decisions on a minute by minute basis. Buildings must be able to accept the complexity of new systems and new technologies without bearing the additional cost of complex integrations. GBXML might be the shim between systems, space, and the people that occupy that space that lets us put it all together.

What is an internet of energy?

In the political world, we often speak as if the smart grid will create and internet of energy. This sounds sexy, but it can be hard to noodle out what it means. I’m pretty sure that it does not mean that we will use smart meters to deliver porn. To find the internet of energy, we must acknowledge straight up the problems with our energy plans.

The internet was built around assumptions, scarcity of bandwidth and fragility of infrastructure, that clearly apply to today’s grid. Long distance transmission was expensive; email used to hop across the country on late-night phone connections to the next state. Every engineering decision was based on occasional connections, local management, and the knowledge that it was risky to rely on anything that was not controlled in-house.

Because we knew so little about what would happen next, we solved little problems. We did not make assumptions about how the next segment would handle our messages, or how reliable they would be. This allowed constant technological churn. Once we had TCP, IP began to drive out local protocols such as IPX and NetBIOS, and quickly supplanted top-down engineered protocols such as GOSIP and SNA.

On the infrastructure side, the churn was just as fast. I remember when X.25 was the future, and supported the first North American installation to supplement the banks of modems at CityNet. I remember when we signed up the Boston Choral Society, and gained users with perfect pitch, who bedeviled tech support by describing modem squawks by note. For ears, I telecommuted via dual ISDN lines back-fed out of Siler City, but tariffed as local connections. Each change of infrastructure was a minor blip for home and office communications.

Even the applications changed, always moving toward the simpler and less architected. Single purpose bulletin boards were replaced by Gopher servers and WAIS. Walled gardens such as AOL and Compuserve began to open up to the wider choices of today’s internet. Waves of push technologies failed and peer-to-peer regularly raised its transgressive disruptive hand against the top-down passive order.

Somehow, by planning for infinite scarcity, in every cell of networking, and in every switch and gateway, we found ourselves with unimaginable surplus, in which computers in our pockets are now network connected with greater bandwidth than used to connect supercomputing centers.

The key decisions of the smart energy are to reduce operating margins, to not build enough transmission and distribution, and to use intermittent power sources such as wind, sun, and tides. We are planning for the grid to provide lower quality service than it has in a hundred years. We have now forced ourselves into the corner in which network communications found themselves in the 70’s. We can only gain the same success by committing to the same principles.

The future of the grid will be based upon intermittently available energy distributed over inadequate and expensive wires. It will be too expensive, both in energy losses and in capacity management, to get our power from far away. We will have to make our energy decisions assuming occasional connections, local management of use, and the certain knowledge that it is risky to rely on anything that we do not manage in-house.

For a while, we will try to solve these problems with central decision-making and a hierarchical organization. Utility-based management of home and business use will make sense to traditional power engineers, just as SNA was briefly the networking strategy natural for mainframe users. This will fail under its own internal contradictions. The DOE envisions homes and businesses able regularly to operate off-grid for a week; it is unlikely that such remote energy management will work when the grid is down.

Each time we plan for unreliability, we can gain another level of reliability, accept another level of innovation. Homes that are indifferent to grid reliability can accept the local installation of self-contained, self maintain pocket power plants. Pocket power plants may be subject to longer outages through poor management, but their customers won’t care. Novel strategies of congestion pricing and load management may provide inconstant power to the neighborhood distribution, but the neighborhood will be relatively insensitive.

At each level, planning for scarcity and unpredictability will add resilience. Resilient systems will be better able to accept diversity; acceptance of diversity is a requirement for allowing innovation. As system that accepts innovation, in ways today’s static grid never will, will accept the creative destruction, the quick success or failure that draws venture capital and engineering ideas together.

The future quality of the grid is lousy; that’s the plan. Embrace its failures and unreliability, because that’s where markets will follow. That is how we will find an internet of energy.

Doing things at the right time

I have been writing too much elsewhere to write as much as I’d like here recently. WS-Calendar, EMIX, and EnergyInterop all have drafts out for comments this week. Standards specifications require a lot of coordination to get into publication.

Last Sunday, the WS-Calendar Technical Committee released a draft for comments. This is a small component among standards, but one that can help integrate building systems into the businesses that inhabit them. Already there are early attempts to integrate this specification into energy, into the enterprise, as well as into building operations.

I couldn’t make it through a week without using the IETF standards iCalendar and its supporting communications tools iMIP, iTIP, and calDAV. I am thankful for the many hours they save me every week. I think you may feel the same way, too.

What, you say? You don’t think about these standards? Well, that’s because they are ubiquitous, they work, and are therefore invisible. You use them to schedule meetings, and webinars, to remember plane travel and hotels reservations. They are everywhere, they work, and so we don’t talk about them.

WS-Calendar builds upon these specifications to bring schedules and synchronization to web services and inter-process communications. We created WS-Calendar to create, share, invoke, adjust, and track coordinated response between domains and organizations. By domains, I mean different groups that speak different languages. WS-Calendar will see use in financial instruments and building systems, in energy markets and in enterprise systems, in PDAs and electric cars.

Of most interest to automated buildings readers is how it affects building systems, and what new opportunities it opens up there. Years ago, when became chair of the oBIX TC (Technical Committee), I observed that the BAS needed to know the schedule of the conference room. My corporate calendar already knows when meetings begin each day, when they end each day, and how many people are in each meeting.

There is already a rough draft to incorporate WS-Calendar into oBIX, the OASIS web services standard for communicating with building systems. I have discussed use of WS-Calendar with many members of the BACnet community. It is likely that both communities will soon be able to use this specification to communicate with their respective building systems.

We can expect that enterprise systems will soon support this information sharing. Apple, Microsoft, and Oracle all participated in the WS-Calendar process. I have heard of a trial use of WS-Calendar directly from a Microsoft Exchange server. The makers of registrar’s office software, used to schedule college classes, are looking to communicate class schedules, and the number of students in each class, directly with the building systems.

Smart grids and demand response are everywhere in the news today. Smart grids communicate energy shortages and surpluses to the end nodes of the grid: buildings, homes, and industries. New standards for energy market communications include WS-Calendar. Through WS-Calendar, Energy, Enterprise, and Buildings communicate in a common language to discuss when and how to perform.

WS-Calendar is based on a suite of documents, all currently seeking comments. xCal defines a standard way to render iCalendar information in XML. CalWS is a web service standardizing the API for Calendaring & Scheduling functions on any platform supporting calendaring. WS-Calendar is the component for inter-domain communications.

Comments on WS-Calendar can be posted using the comments link at http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/ws-calendar/

Its almost here – and time to start planning how to use it.

Lessening the Integration Barrier to Smart Energy

We do not have a problem of knowing what to do to make buildings participants in smart energy. We do not have a problem that the technology is too expensive. We do have a problem that it takes too long to integrate systems. High integration costs lead to vendor lock-in. High integration costs lead to long sales cycles for replacements and upgrades. High integration costs will continue to slow the adoption of distributed energy resources. High integration costs lead to islands of automation, unable to participate in smart energy and demand response.

In design and in construction, today’s best practice is to use a BIM (Building Information Model) to deliver better buildings on-time and under budget. BIM trades higher design costs for much lower construction costs and reduced risk. We use BIM to generate energy models, essential to green certifications for buildings. Until recently, BIM hasn’t had much to do with the operations of a building, or with systems inside a building. This month, I am writing about how this is starting to change.

In traditional CAD, we have used libraries of templates supplied by product vendors for years. Suppliers of plumbing and lighting equipment have wanted it to be easy to design with their products, and they have wanted their products to look good in design renderings. Specifiers Property information exchange (SPie) is a project that encourages this approach applied to the more detailed requirements of BIM. SPie objects are cross-referenced with Omniclass and can include hookup and connection information. The National Electrical Manufacturing Association (NEMA) and is one of the associations participating. SPie brings the things we install in buildings into BIM.

Two technologies dominate the generation of building energy models. GBXML has wide support not only in energy modeling, but also in the design of HVAC and control systems. Information built on GBXML has had no path pack into BIM. EnergyPlus is purported to generate more accurate energy models, and has a well-defined model view for re-entry into BIM. ENERGie, (the ie is again for information exchange) is an effort to merge the two to provide a single model coordinating system design with building design and supporting full system detail. It is likely that ENERGie will soon be required for General Service Administration (GSA) and Department of Defense (DOD ) work. GSA and DOD are the two biggest landlords in North America, so their wants can drive the industry.

In information technology, we again and again see the technology we develop for the most advanced systems flowing down through normal business and all the way to the consumer. ISO 15926 is an information framework developed to express the relations between systems and components in the largest chemical processing plants. Today, ISO 15926 being adapted for a variety of tasks, from the esoteric mapping between ontologies to the automated mapping between form and function to operate smaller systems. ELie is a project to hand over the Equipment Layout in buildings to the owner by mapping from BIM to ISO 15926. ELie connects a static design to a runnable model.

Management of live electrical load in buildings is the largest challenge in smart energy. Plug load is almost unknowable in any automatic way. It will be some time before smart energy-communicating systems will outnumber legacy dumb-load equipment. Smart electrical panels that expose energy use per circuit have not found wide use; they follow no standards, and it is unclear what space they support. PLie standardizes the description of Panel Layout and brings it into the BIM of electrical wiring. PLie can provide automate the mapping of building wiring into the spaces and equipment it supports.

The EIS Alliance is developing models to support autonomous load management and shaping in buildings. One of their concepts is that the buildings electrical meter should be an information appliance for the building EMS. New building equipment and appliances could support the same interface to report their own energy use. Web services (WS) aware electrical panels could use the same interface to standardize their load reporting. Combining this interface and PLie brings the buildings dumb load under management with minimal integration.

Everything above is talking about plans and designs. New systems present ongoing integration costs. WS-DD and WS-DP are new standards to enable the automatic discovery of systems. These standards enhance the value of the energy information appliances by describing what each meter is tracking.

This laundry list of energy-related specifications are the answer to high integration costs and provide a path to sustained re-integration of systems. The flow of information through Model Views into smart energy is the key to continued understanding of building performance. These specifications will move the markets in energy management systems into improved interfaces, for users, for enterprises, and for energy marketeers.