Sharing Energy Information within the End Node

Customers and/or their energy management systems require live energy usage information to help make decisions in response to grid-centric events such as DR, curtailment, and energy market events. Energy sales and purchases are the basic elements of transactional energy; a common shared understanding of each energy use proximate to the operating decisions that influence energy use is essential to collaborative energy on the smart grid.

The target of smart grid communications, particularly in collaborative energy space, should always be the microgrid. Some microgrids may contain a single home, or commercial building, or and industrial site—those are irrelevant details. Microgrids have a number of systems inside them that must work within the economic environment of that microgrid—and I am thinking of old economics, before the distinction of economics and ecosystem arose. Some microgrids may have a single entity inside, say a traditional siloed BAS (Building Automation System), but the unitary microgrid is merely an artifact of the way we have always done it. The energy services interface is the gateway to a microgrid.

Shared responsibility for balancing energy production and consumption requires shared access to information about energy markets and actual use. Shared information on energy use, especially live energy use, is essential to cooperation between the grid and its end nodes. Each end node may have multiple systems. Those systems may have multiple strategies and approaches to managing energy. Each strategy may have unanticipated effects on the other systems. These effects can occur quickly. Unambiguous feedback and continuous monitoring are essential to deliver results while providing services to the building occupants. The official recorder of market transactions is the electrical meter.

Energy use is more than net use for a period. Load shape matters. Multiple systems may each be operating efficiently, but in ways that their aggregate effect requires more energy use than anticipated. Systems within a building should be able to share their energy use, and their anticipated energy us with each other. Load shaping within a building is a critical pre-adaptation for site-based generation and energy storage. Load shaping is necessary for multiple systems to coexist within a minimal fixed energy budgets. The ability to function within a fixed energy budget reduces the risk and thereby increases the value of site based energy sources.

Microgrids contain collections of systems that may not share common technology. Some of these systems are small, self contained, and serve special purposes, such as appliances. Some are large and complex and span significant space, such as HVAC or an industrial line. Some look alike, are built from the same components, but have different missions; the laboratory fume hood and the air conditioning system are run for different purposes and have different constraints. Some may rely on different energy markets to do the same work; heat may come from electricity, gas, or solar thermal in the same building. Some systems may store generate energy used by other systems. All of these coexist in the ecosystem of the microgrid.

Shared energy usage information is essential to interactions between:

• Distribution and the industrial, commercial, and home premise.
• The service provider and the industrial, commercial, and home premise.
• Distributed energy resources and all other domains
• Plug-in electric vehicles and premises and the grid

Any other interactions that will cause, use, or track energy transactions on smart grids.

Building revenue meters and intelligent systems in buildings should share their energy usage information in real time within the end node in a clear, accessible standard.

Plumbing and the Man about the Net Zero House

Maybe the ongoing attempt to over-domesticate males is a barrier to sustainable energy. Maybe Swedish feminists are simply insensitive to carbon issues. Maybe Gaia just needs a man about the house. Maybe the essential appliance needed for the net zero energy (NZE) house is a urinal.

A report last week from Ohio University describes a catalyst capable of extracting hydrogen from urine. More efficient generation of hydrogen would be a great step to more effective energy storage, one without the major shortcomings of today’s batteries. Hydrogen storage would not wear out through regular re-charging the way today’s chemical batteries do. Hydrogen storage combined with transfer technologies such as micro-beads might solve the fast re-charge problem for vehicles that do not use carbon-based fuels.

More efficient multi-purpose energy storage is the most important single issue for the smart grid. Want to shift load to reduce the requirement for new generation? Want to manage peak transmission? Storage is essential. Current social and political decisions mandate the use of more unreliable power sources in the grid. Providing instant remediation of gaps in power generation at the grid-level is difficult and expensive; there are reports that efforts to use fast starting gas generation to backstop wind have used more natural gas than if the wind had never been hooked up. Efficient storage, especially distributed storage in homes and buildings, would be offer a profound benefit to grid operation.

Efficient local storage would also make site-based generation more sensible. Selling electricity back to the grid rarely makes economic sense. Expensive grid upgrades can be needed to improve monitoring and guarantee power quality; these costs are usually foisted onto other rate payers. Because the grid cannot rely on the local storage when it needs it, utilities may still need to build the generation to support peak capacity.

With efficient local storage, site based generation would be placed in storage rather than sold back to the grid. Solar generation would go into storage all afternoon. Wind generated electricity, no matter what speed the wind is blowing would simply go into storage. Expensive-to-fix issues in power quality and availability could be simply eliminated.

So what if urine is part of the answer? The problem, of course, is that we typically dilute urine into a lot of water before flushing it away. If the approach in the report pans out, perhaps each home should have urinals to enable the storage system.

Our society’s on-going war against nature has been trying to re-write the old riddle "What does a man do on two legs, a woman do sitting down, and a dog do on three legs?" Man’s ability to stand while micturating has been declared aggressive, oppressive, and unsanitary. Sitting and standing, and whether a teenager preferred the former was recently a critical issue in a custody battle. Legal discussions of this case have been surprisingly impassioned. Maybe they have not been impassioned enough.

Maybe we should be planning for urinals in homes. Water-free urinals are an effective if controversial means to reduce water consumption. Up to 40,000 gallons per year in water savings are claimed for each public urinal that goes waterless. Home urinals could be the foundation for home-based hydrogen generation and storage.

You should install a home urinal. It’s for the planet, after all.

Why do we need all these smart meters?

Why do we need all these smart meters – so someone asked over at GreenTechMedia. We can run the grid with far fewer, and it will cost less. Why do we need these complicated protocols when we only need a price and a use? This perspective is correct; it is good engineering unencumbered with vision. This perspective is wrong; we cannot build tomorrow by doing what we day just a little bit better. Without pervasive metering, LEEDs and Green Buildings will remain a sham. Smart utility meters are only the first step.

Peter Drucker is still the most important and most visionary of thinkers about business and organizations. Drucker’s work ranged from identifying the long term sources of GM’s problems in 1942 to coining the term knowledge worker in the 1980’s. There are very few writers in this field whose work is more than a fad or a fashion. Few are worth re-reading. Drucker’s work is still relevant – even in the post DotCom world.. (http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Peter+Drucker).

Drucker fans are prone to invoking the pithy statements that sprinkled his work. My favorite Druckerism is "There is nothing quite so meaningless as doing well that which need not be done at all." There are many opportunities to invoke it at a state university where process often trumps any actual goals.

If we are creating a smart grid merely to meet the needs of the existing regulated market structures, much metering is not worthwhile. There are some limited benefits in peak management that accrue to the traditional utilities. There are few incentives for energy users to change, because benefits come to the diligent and free riders equally.  It is not worthwhile to have well-implemented smart meters everywhere if their interfaces are only for the power provider.

The real opportunity of the smart grid is its ability to work with more business models then the current top down reliable far-away power for dumb buildings and homes. The smart grid will support a network of power, with a network of new business opportunities for technology to insert itself into the energy chain.

Alternative Energy changes the grid because it is unreliable. If any significant amount of power on the grid comes from unreliable sources, we will have more peak energy events, when demand exceeds supply, per day than we now have per year. Distributed energy means that the neighborhood wind farm is now a full peer on the grid. Net Zero Energy means your dishwasher might bid against the grid for the output of your solar panel.

The smart grid offers choice. Homes and business will choose what power they buy, and they will want the smart grid to leave audit trails that they actually are getting it. A decade ago, supermarkets laughed at the idea that a significant number of consumers would choose more expensive groceries. Today, Whole Foods has transformed that industry and nearly every chain offers an organic produce section.

Why, you may even buy conventional reliable power to run your business but tell the fountain out front to run only when it can buy wave power. You may agree to pay a slight premium for your neighbors wind power when he is on vacation to keep his system working. We, or our software agents, will be active market participants in the national smart grid, in regional smart grids, in neighborhood smart grids, and even in in-building grids.

More metering, and more functional metering is worthwhile. Minimally functional metering is merely a way to reduce meter reading, not a step to the smart grid. And so, a final Druckerism: “We need to Measure, not Count.”

Watered-Down Energy

I’ve wondered here before how water intersects with energy conversations. As I write this on a plane leaving San Diego, which has been in a drought, I have just read of how a well meaning public agency has once again created perverse incentives on the use of scarce resources. A central tenet of sustainability is that we must consider the full external costs of our activities. It is ironic that incentives that result in perverse outcomes appear again and again in the plans for sustainability.

The developing plan appears to be based upon price-based custom rationing. Each household will receive a per month allocation based on a percentage of its historical use. Households who use more than the target will be charged at five times the normal rate for the additional water. This is rationalized as the "fairest" because it affects all houses based upon their "needs".

Long time conservationists are protesting. If you have been using water wantonly, you will experience a barely annoying reduction to some level of use that is still far above the norm. If you have been sparing in your water use, whether due to philosophy, parsimony, or poverty, you will now be asked to cut beyond inconvenience, or to pay costs far higher than your neighbor who has never conserved.

Some households were interviewed admitting that they were increasing their water use this month so they would have a bigger allocation when the rationing kicks in. Interference in free markets always creates some sort of gaming. In this case, the proposed solution is encouraging people to make the problem worse today. We need to be mindful of this effect as we consider proposals for DR (demand response) and other energy strategies that rely on technocrats trying to outthink the market.

One long-standing feature of water allocation here in the arid west is water rights. Legal recognition of water rights was necessary to quell some of the great battles of the wild west. Water rights are used to allocate shares of water from the Colorado between Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and California. Water rights support long term investments in farms and orchards by establishing long term access to a resource that is indispensable in the deserts of the southwest. If you buy land without the water rights, you may have no right to the water that falls on or flows across your land.

Water rights, or the lack of those rights, has caused great consternation in at least one new bedroom community of Denver on the western slope. The community has been marketed as green, and the homeowners are earnestly saving the planet by installing rain barrels under roof downspouts to support their gardens and landscaping. The problem is that they do not have rights to that water. Hundreds of homes impounding the water from thousands of acres of land will destroy downstream agriculture with longstanding rights to that water. Somehow this seems as a cruel joke to those now moving into the new development. After all, it is rain falling on their land!

Sustainable development activists have long advocated the trading of land rights. To sustain “rural character”, farmers have been urged to sign away the right to develop their land in return for permanent tax breaks on their land. In other areas, land conservancies have bought up those development rights for cash now. It is ironic that this same community now does not understand water rights.

Energy and water are about to become more entwined. In San Diego, there are perennial proposals for a massive desalination plant to remove this dependence on the constrained supply from the Colorado River. San Diego actually had one in the past, one that was ordered transferred to Guantanamo Bay by Kennedy following the Bay of Pigs fiasco. San Diego has debated a replacement, and who will pay for it, ever since.

The desalination plant will require electricity, and a lot of it. Proposals on the table range from a collocated nuclear plant to an untested wave generator. There is predictable high concern over the nuclear option, concern that seems to trump the unknown effects on the fragile coast and marine fauna that the large wave generator might cause. Unremarked in these conversations is that the San Diego power grid frequently receives power from mobile floating nuclear plants; the Navy has long kept their nuclear warships powered up when docked by selling power to the grid.

Water and Electricity just seem to go together.

I sometimes wonder whether energy rights will look more like water rights in the future. Google has demanded primacy of energy rights to nearby hydropower as part of economic development packages that put their data centers in rural areas. Is this right tradable or assignable?

Will regions that dedicate large tracts of land to allow the construction of alternative energy or for the transmission of energy demand energy rights as part of their payment? Do these rights transfer with the land, or are they separate? Should some communities demand or accept energy rights in return for assuming stranded costs and setting the electrical industry free? How will these markets develop?