Building Codes for the Smart Grid Ready Home

Companies were looking to put standards into production at the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) Face to Face meeting in St Louis this week. The most interesting new question I heard was “Where are the model home building codes to support smart energy?” I don’t think there are any.

Smart grid-ready homes must go beyond smart thermostats. LEED and other models design for energy efficiency but do not manage actual use. Smart energy demands that homes respond to changing energy prices and changing requirements of their occupants. No existing code plans for new patterns of electrical use, ones that may change the wiring requirements of the home. Today’s codes do not plan for rapid changes of technology in the future.

Energy efficient design means little without monitoring. Tomorrow’s smart homes must monitor their actual energy use; they must know if they are delivering the performance promised. They should measure live or plug energy load just as they measure energy for the installed systems and sections of the house. Without the means to measure and verify energy use, efficient designs are not ready for smart energy.

In the home, the highest energy efficiency may actually hinder some interactions with smart grids. Smart energy supplies will be intermittent, in price if not in availability. Smart grid-ready homes must be able to store energy during abundance for use during scarcity. Storage will never be as efficient as instant use, so smart energy homes will be less than perfectly efficient.

Some energy based services achieve their effect right away; lights come on almost instantly. Some services require time; air conditioning and humidity control may require hours to show their effects. The most efficient systems have run constantly with just enough capacity; they do not have the excess capacity to respond on demand.

Smart grid-ready homes must anticipate their occupants’ needs, even as the price of energy changes over time. Smart energy homes must learn the schedules of their inhabitants and make plans to provide services at the right times while buying energy in response to markets.

Smart energy must support distributed energy generation and storage, both today and tomorrow. Smart grid-ready home designs will have places to site energy generation and storage systems. Home circuit panels must accept multiple energy inputs. These systems must be able to connect and disconnect, enabling the home owner to upgrade as new technologies come on the market. The smart grid ready home must be able to disconnect automatically from the grid, both for safety and to avoid power quality problems to and from the neighborhood distribution.

Distributed energy changes the wiring requirements for the home. Today’s wiring is undersized for its load, designed provide rated power for only a few minutes at a time. Energy storage and electric cars will require full power for hours at a time, causing cables to fail early. Internal wires to support, say, a 50 amp services for such uses must be larger than those for a 50 amp service today. Even the cable supplying the house must be larger to support the stresses of continuous outside, lest it to fail early.

Most energy use in our homes is, or could be, supported by Direct Current (DC). Traditional power coming from the grid is Alternating Current (AC). Batteries and many forms of distributed generation produce DC. Energy is lost when power is converted DC to AC for local distribution just as it is when converting AC to DC for point use. (This is what your wall-warts do.) Internal DC distribution and DC plug standards may be part of building codes for smart-grid ready homes.

Building a new smart grid ready neighborhood of smart grid ready homes requires care, attention, creativity, new technology, and planning for a steady stream of technology changes in the future. It probably starts with BIM-based construction to establish a known baseline building performance and capabilities. It will require standards for energy information exchange that are only now nearing completion. Each home will be filled with sensors to inform the systems of today, openly accessible to share with tomorrow’s systems that today we do not know. Each home must interact with the computers, PDAs, and smart phones that run the lives of its inhabitants. Above all, each home must be designed to allow for constant and regular upgrades.

We don’t have those building codes yet.

Moving beyond Demand Response (DR) – Pricing Services

Utilities and Regulatory commissions are obsessed with demand response (DR). All want to know how to get more of it. I could, with little effort, attend a national conference on DR every week. A large share of the standards priorities of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to support smart grids support DR. And yet, almost everyone recognizes that DR is a short-term solution. Plans are just now underway to move beyond DR.

The most expensive electricity comes from the dirtiest generating facilities used for only a few hours a year. If consumers would use less energy, i.e., reduce demand, in just those few periods, then those expensive dirty plants could be turned off permanently. To do this, electricity suppliers need to anticipate when those moments are coming and take steps to reduce demand. We call this Demand Response.

At its simplest, DR is just turning things off. Rolling black-outs are the simplest form of DR. They make consumers very unhappy. Utilities have worked for years to improve on this model through direct load control. They have been installing remote switches on home heat pumps since the ‘70s. Today, they are developing SEP to control homes device by device using software installed in smart meters. Consumers like it in off-months, when they get a bill reduction and the utilities do nothing. In summer months, when the utilities do something, things get turned off in the home. They make consumers very unhappy.

In the commercial building world, utilities pay per incident. The energy use is greater, the number and complexity of systems on the premises are bigger, and the possible DR per incident is larger. In the most expensive markets, this pays for the custom integrations needed to respond to price signals. This is probably good enough for today’s grid. Tomorrow’s grid will be much less predictable, and the need for more participants will be greater.

Just as there are times when there is a shortage of electricity, there are times when there is a superabundance. Buildings that take responsibility for storing energy in advance are better able to manage demand reductions when asked. If the markets offer fixed prices except for the peaks, then it will be cheaper to ignore storage and DR. Sooner or later Markets must follow availability. The most important feature of smart grids will be to recognize scarcity and abundance faster, and to thereby price better.

In the future, then, a Pricing Service will be the essential load management service that operates the grid. A grid pricing service must be able several questions:

1. What is the price of Electricity now?
2. What will it be in 5 minutes?
3. What was the highest price for electricity in the last day? Month? Year?
4. What was the lowest price for electricity in the last day? Month? Year?
5. What price will electricity have for each hour of the day tomorrow?
6. What was the high price for the day the last time it was this hot?

The answer to each of these questions has another component “How sure are you?” Those prices may be fixed tariffs absolutely locked down. Those prices may be fixed tariffs, “unless a DR event is called.” Those prices may be wild guesses about free markets.

At its core, OpenADR must have price services in the future.

Privacy Mosaic: Tiling over the Fourth Amendment Piece by Piece

Regular readers know that I am concerned that the accumulation of many small legal actions can create a violation of privacy that exceeds the sum of the observations. This week, the DC Circuit Court ruled that prolonged recurring legal acts can become an illegal search, or one that requires a specific warrant. If it stands on appeal, this theory may be one of the most important decisions to protect individuals and restrain the modern state ever.

The ruling defines a new "mosaic" theory of the Fourth Amendment under which individual law enforcement actions that are not searches to become a search when collected together. This is an important new theory. Noted fourth amendment scholar Orin Kerr has written how this throws decades of decisions on their head. Lawyers, though, worry about clear predictability of the law more than about theory and justice and the proper balance between the individual and society.

In the case United States v. Maynard, the court ruled that the long term use of a GPS device to monitor a car required a warrant. The government argued that roads are public, and that it could have had a watched public acts on public roads if it wanted; automating that information gathering was no big deal. According to the court, "[T]hat whole reveals far more than the individual movements it comprises. The difference is not one of degree but of kind, for no single journey reveals the habits and patterns that mark the distinction between a day in the life and a way of life." Exactly.

One purpose of constitutional law is to provide a basis for understanding bodies of law as well as individual laws. Law is made up primarily by decisions accumulated over time, in response to uncomfortable circumstances. A small bad decision supports another slightly worse decision until the law is firmly behind something few would choose. Plessey vs. Ferguson, the famous case that defined separate but equal as the law of the land was uncontroversial when passed, unexamined for 50 years, and supported by precedent and cemented by rulings that followed. It was good that we overturned that body of law.

In a similar way, we have been building a series of decisions about the use of technology and surveillance that must be overturned. The law has been willfully ignorant about technology and change. Perhaps it is because judges are older when appointed, and isolated from wider business. Perhaps it is because judges are discouraged from speculating on their thoughts and motives in public. Perhaps they are simply overly deferential to congress and police.

Judges have ruled that the information on personal computers are neither personal “papers or effects”. The current administration is arguing that searches of cell phones, including modern smart phones with call logging, email, documents, and passwords for accessing personal and business web sites, do not require a warrant. For whatever reason, judges have not given sufficient respect to digital papers and digital effects.

I have written before that accumulating data creates something that is of a different quality than each datum, and that quality is more dangerous as the points accumulate. I have written that there is danger to the citizenry even in gathering data required to operate a business, when it is shared outside the purposes of that business. I now know to call this the mosaic theory.

The government will certainly appeal United States v. Maynard. It may be overturned. If it is not, it creates a legal theory that may be held not only against police actions of the government, but against the misuse and re-sale of information gathered in e-commerce. It establishes a legal theory for discussing the repurposing of operational data.

It might help change to direction of the smart grid. Direct load control of homes and commercial buildings collects millions of data points that create their own mosaic. These mosaics will combine with mosaics from the internet and e-commerce. If every market is the sum of the participants knowledge problems, then not only privacy, bit all markets are changed, as one set of participants accumulates an immense imbalance of knowledge about the other.

Economic signals in smart energy collect less personally identifiable details than do direct load control models. We should all prefer them, rather than contribute more to the mosaic owned by others, and created to achieve advantage over each of us as individuals.

Underpinnings for standardizing Demand Response (DR)

For decades, regulated electricity markets have struggled to deal with volatile energy markets providing to support un-caring customers. Customer’s real-time purchases, called load by the electricity industry, vary throughout the day, and more to the point, co-vary with external events. These issues are not limited to electricity. The “Super-Bowl flush”, which has reached the status of urban legend, names the stresses placed on urban waste water systems as external events synchronize demand.

Public Utilities Commissions defined tariffs to prevent the Super-Bowl flush for decades. Peak use can increase prices for a year. Tiered pricing increases the bill for any amount above a pre-set usage during a month. These approaches pre-date any discussion of smart grid—often they have effects contrary to those desired by the smart grid. The smart grid is smart in that it detects at any time whether there is too little or too much power available, and uses market signals to decrease or increase demand to match supply.

Early efforts at the smart grid focus solely on reduction. When the signal goes out to certain buildings, they reduce their load, or use of electricity, in a pre-defined way. We call this process demand response, and pre-eminent specification for this signal is called Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR).

Demand response must be more than load reduction. The great wind farms of west Texas, the most successful farms in North America, are, I’m told, able to sell less than 40% of the electricity they generate. The wind generates electricity at times when no one is planning to use it. Even the most inefficient energy storage would be preferable to simply wasting the electricity.

The challenge now is to define signals that common across North America and the world, and that that handle energy surplus as well as deficit. This effort is underway in the OASIS Energy Interoperation Technical Committee.

One problem is that energy market operations have been restricted and confined, both by technology limitations and by public policy decisions. We have discussed DR as a one-way interaction, from utilities to customers. We have tied DR to special tariffs and to direct control systems. Each of these restricts the participants and innovation in DR.

On the Committee, we tried to place electricity in a normal market context. We identified four essential market activities, or services:

1. There is an indication of interest (trying to flush out offers), when a market operator is seeking partners for a demand response or energy source.
2. There is an offer of a service whether megawatts or “nega-watts”
3. There is an execution of a contract (agreement to purchase / supply (b))
4. There is a call for performance of the contract (c) at the price agreed upon.

We are defining these services so they can be combined to meet today’s tariffs. For example, one of today’s tariffs for interruptible power may offer a lower price all year in return for the right to shed load automatically up to six times a year. Under the Energy Interoperation model, this would be standing contract with 6 time-limited pre-executed response contracts. Automated Demand Response is merely a call for performance on existing contracts at the agreed upon price.

Another model, coming into use, is Price-based ADR. If we assume the traditional utility-centric model, we would see the utility publishing an indication of interest in buying DR at a given price. Business and buildings willing to respond would simultaneously offer and execute a contract to shed load. The performance could be called at the same time or later as contracted.

Emergency or "Grid Reliability" events could look left out by this approach. Grid Reliability events require mandatory participation in today’s markets. These could be set up as standing pre-executed options. A grid operator then need merely call for performance as in any other demand-limiting event.

In this way, we can build all the tariffs and markets out of a few low-level services.

Sometime soon, I will write about the requirements for a pricing service.