Start with a Zombie Fortress

In smart energy, it is easy to get distracted by utility incentives and demand response and other tariffed actions. Utility tariffs are set in stone months or years before an actual set of market conditions arise. Demand Response events miss the supplier’s pain-points while ignoring opportunity for the building owner. “Running a meter backward” is a silly demonstration project that works only so long as very few people do it. All of these are regulatory fantasies that violate the laws of economics and physics. For a smart energy engineer, it is better to start with a more realistic fantasy.

Smart Energy starts with a Zombie Fortress.

Many today who are uneasy about politics and culture and technology dream of a place to get away if things fall apart.  Zombies have no politics, no ideologies. They are mindless, and ugly, and the perfect nightmare for a time when any judgment potentially offends. The coming Zombie Apocalypse is the perfect non-specific eschatology for our time.

The Zombie Fortress is where you go to be safe from the world. Folks can share their desire for a Zombie Fortress without getting into discussion of politics with their friends. The Zombie Fortress names a non-political escape, a bolt-hole to go when everything goes wrong. (Some might claim that the editor of Automated Buildings has retreated to a Zombie Fortress.) Plans for a Zombie Fortress cannot assume that the grid will work, or that the neighbors will be a useful source of supply or resilience.
The challenge of the Zombie Fortress is to live a full life within the site-generated power. System efficiency is critical, certainly, but it is swamped by the power usage efficiency; the operating margin must go as close to zero as doable. This means no power spikes, and no wasted power. Systems must be negotiate so that intermittent systems do not run at the same time. Any extra power, moment to moment, must be pre-consumed or stored.

Above this is a policy layer. If you habitually use power into the night, that is the basis for the power storage goals. Weather reports may set to pre-consumption goals. Systems must decide how important they are and run, or not run, accordingly. Engineers will be in short supply after the Zombie Apocalypse, so the systems in the fortress must integrate themselves.

But maybe the burning times have not yet come. For now, you decide to use the Zombie Fortress as your Party Pad in the in the mountains. Maybe the Fortress cannot produce enough power each day to keep the lights on, the water pumped, and the environment comfortable during sustained use. If the Fortress plans, if it it stores power all week, though, it can support a two day weekend. Maybe a three-day weekend requires two weeks of storage.

But you want to throw a big party. The last party was automatically base-lined by the Fortress. You contact the Fortress from afar, and ask when it will be ready. The Party Pad / Fortress informs you that it will need four weeks to accumulate enough stored energy, five if you send in a cleaning crew during the week in advance. This is the right level of owner interaction.

Transactive energy within the fortress is the simplest integration strategy devised. Traditional integration requires detailed knowledge of all systems, solving what economists call the knowledge problem. Transactors don’t need knowledge of their trading partners, merely common agreements. New systems must merely introduce themselves to the market. Each system, to participate competently in the market, needs to understand its own patterns of use and load shapes.  Operating parameters are created by setting budgets for systems and functions.

Proposed regulations are already making some power producers nervous about next winter. More intermittent power sources are going to make the power grid a less reliable partner. The Galvin Perfect Power Initiative states the reliability comes from within each node, and resilience from a node’s neighbors. The Zombie Fortress is the ideal node to participate in a smart microgrid, whether it encompasses the back-country bolt-holes, or an in-town neighborhood. Zombie fortresses are self-aware, at least so far as energy use, and ready to trade.

Don’t plan for short term inducements and temporary incentive. Design systems the self-integrate with other systems in the facility. Design systems able to negotiate with their peers for predictable load curves, effective pre-consumption, aggressive storage and full use of “excess” energy

We need systems designed for the Zombie Fortress.

Making New Homes ready for Smart Energy

Smart energy names the techniques and technologies needed to manage energy flows and energy supply and demand when energy generation and energy storage are as distributed as energy consumption is today. Grid assets are managed by central control. This only works so long as the assets are central and the assets are centrally owned. Distributed assets should have distributed ownership. We must turn the centralized model on its head. Smart energy manages from the edges, not from the center. Smart energy treats homes and commercial buildings as microgrids responsible for their own power.

The concern of smart energy policy is to remove barriers to enable rapid entry and virtuous markets for new technologies. Policy is implemented by regulations and codes. Today’s post arises because I am wondering when we will have a model building code for the smart energy-ready residence. What should a commodity builder do if he wishes to claim that each home in a neighborhood is “smart energy ready?”

Let’s start with the interconnect. Today’s rules for distributed energy focus, as they should, on safety first. To this end, they mandate anti-islanding, i.e., if the grid goes away, power systems shut off. This prevents a linesman from being electrocuted when the downstream side of a downed line is “hot.” The model smart energy ready building should instead choose safe islanding. Local power systems, generation, batteries, even electric vehicles, should work safely within the home no matter what the local conditions. Software and hardware at the building entrance should support this safe islanding.

Within the home, there should be an emphasis on safety and extensibility. The Electrician working in a house needs to be just as concerned with unexpected power sources as does the linesman outside the house. If there are distributed energy resources, then there will be unexpected power sources in the home. The interconnect in the house is as important as that between the house and grid.

So we need two interconnects.

Rooftop solar requires paths and connections. If added during construction, conduit to the roof to support the eventual installation of PV costs almost nothing. This conduit can be put in while the walls are open and before siding is installed. Designed-in conduit is less likely to leak then after-thought retrofits. Preparing for roof-top PV likely means planning for an inverter closer to the home’s power distribution panels. 

A similar logic suggests that garages should plan for plug-in electric vehicles, even as the standards for them have not gelled. My guess is that this area will come to be dominated by smart charging stations coupled with storage. Whatever the technology, there will need to be wiring able to safely support high power flows over long periods of time. In the smart energy ready home, empty conduit may be enough for now.

The smart energy ready home should plan for power storage. Chemical based storage systems may lose much of their capabilities at extreme temperatures. There should be some space for storage installation that has an adequate and safe path to and from central power distribution. Again, empty conduit may be adequate for now.

To achieve reliability goals, some homeowners will opt for site-based generation. At its simplest, this requires a pad and conduit back to the central power distribution for the house. At its most complex, it requires very complex configuration. Because utilities today must pay above market rates for solar generated home power, they must watch carefully to make sure that the homeowner is not selling them “solar power” sourced from a backyard gasoline generator.

The answer is to get rid of the above market rates, and let the homeowner operate in the market. Distributed energy resources are first and foremost to serve the needs of the distributed site.

When I consider smart, distributed energy, I always call to mind the words of Doug Gwyn, when asked of a feature in UNIX: “UNIX was not designed to stop its users from doing stupid things, as that would also stop them from doing clever things.” We must be careful that we apply the same thinking to distributed energy.

To get more participants in smart energy, we must make it easier. A good start would to be to define the requirements for a smart energy-ready home. We can then see if builders would be willing to build them, and whether the market will bear the trivial costs, or at least trivial if designed in.