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.

Energy Privacy

Energy Privacy was the hottest topic of Grid-Interop in Denver. Perhaps it was the Google Energy demos, which show people discussing each little recurring burst of energy use, whether refrigerator or Jacuzzi, that alerted the public to the issues. Perhaps it was when people read the UCAIug plan for OpenADE, which lists a "Law Enforcement Interface" for energy use as a higher priority than sharing information with the building occupants. Perhaps it was a late-night comedian commenting slyly that at least battery-operated devices could not be tracked, yet. Perhaps it was heightened awareness flowing over from health care debate. However it happened, privacy issues and privacy concerns became front and center at the Grid-Interop and the SGIP.

Without clear standards, and with little sense of architectural boundaries, utilities have been slowly extending control directly into the home. ZigBee Smart Energy, OpenHAN, and SEP all are premised on treating the home as an extension of the substation, another asset to serve the operational needs of the central utility. This model does more than infer energy use, as does the Google Energy model; it includes direct registration and recording of the use of each system in the home.

The NIST Smart Grid Interoperability Report reported that "distributed energy resources and smart meters will reveal information about residential consumers and activities within the house." The panel went on to cite "a lack of formal privacy policies, standards or procedures about information gathered and collected by entities involved in the smart grid." Today, there are no consistent definitions of personally identifiable information in the utility industry. In the week before Grid-Interop, there were numerous privacy meetings, expanding the conversation to include the large internet privacy advocates and public policy think tanks.

During the same week, some of the bloom went off the rose of AMI (Automated Metering Infrastructure). AMI infrastructure, or automated meter reading plus, has been touted as critical to smart grid efforts. In an effort to justify the expense of AMI deployment plans to regulators, utilities have packed more and more functions into AMI, including those described above. This has, in turn, increased the expense of the systems and opened the door to potential security holes.

The message that the public heard about AMI was that “smart meters will reduce your bill”. The message they should have heard was “smart meters will reduce your bill if you take advantage of their information and respond to dynamic prices.” Pacific Gas & Electric meters came under fire by customers whose bills went up dramatically. As far as I know, the meters were accurate, but the public is now paying closer attention—and asking questions. Some of those questions are about direct management of home systems using AMI.

The controversy went mainstream on Tuesday when a report jointly released by the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner and the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF). According to the report, “information may be gleaned from ongoing monitoring of electricity consumption such as the approximate number of occupants, when they are present, as well as when they are awake or asleep.”

My daughter summed it up; "if they can see all that stuff, it is time to tell them to take the equipment out." At Grid-Interop, several expressed a contrary view, that they needed to know more. PGE representatives believe that sharing information with the occupants is a privacy issue. If the utilities don’t understand privacy soon in a way that makes sense to their customers, they will find that instead of more control, they will get less.

And drop me a line if you want to get involved in privacy standards for new energy.

A Microgrid of One

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 legacy 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.

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.

Diversity is the source of resilience in the economy and ecosystem. Monocultures fail badly in either. The diversity of systems in a microgrid is a source of stability. This is as true of the microgrid spans a campus or spans a high-rise. One source of diversity is diversity of response, which is tied to diversity of business service provided. A unitary system all too often has too few response options. Without expensive and non-standard integration, these simple systems are unable to expose nuanced and diverse services for manipulation by the humans, and human processes, they serve.

Diversity within kind (read Darwin for a definition) in building systems can come from multiple technologies (hard to maintain), or from multiple systems programmed quite differently (expensive to integrate) or from identical systems responding to different users. Diverse systems can be much more agile, just as individuals can be more agile than a committee. I posit that a collection agile systems is better able to respond to heterogeneity of environment, including unpredictability of power supply, than is a single committee of systems.

Diversity of services can provide new assets to the commercial building owner. Green leases seek to tie technology, capital, and performance together to please the tenant. Green leases require separate metering and operations for each tenant to be credible. Green leases in a high rise might work best with a number of identical systems, one for each tenant, rather than a monolithic system that responds only to all. Diversity is an amenity that enhances tenant service and leas ability.

How do we distinguish a microgrid from a grid? The external interface should be the same. Inside, microgrids are more intimate, they are the safe neighborhood the kids can go out and play in. Alternately, they may be more dangerous, the prison society in which no inmate must reveal anything. A microgrid defines a security context and a security posture. Intimacy and sharing and collaboration are all a part of some contexts—and not of others.

To me, the most interesting question of the week is what information do the systems within a microgrid need to share as they support their divers purposes and work within their mutual constraints. I know it starts energy usage, and predictions of energy usage, because that is the common resource they share within their environment, the basis of their economy and their ecosystem. I suspect they need currency, to negotiate their access to resources within the constraints of the microgrid—although I am not sure that currency is always expressed in legal tender. Some systems may only be able to buy at certain stores, or sell to certain buyers.

I’m not sure what else they share.

Small standards for small things

We were discussing standards upon which to build standards today. Before systems can communicate, there is a lot of work building the platform they communicate from. So much of the small work that will be needed for the internet of things is based upon constrained communications between resource-constrained devices. I found myself spitting out acronyms right and left – a veritable techno-glossolalia

There is a whole set of standards needed by the utilities to share billing information with a third party, such as Google Energy or Microsoft Hohm. The utilities are constrained by their mandate to make all services universally available. This means they are trying to accomplish the goals they call OpenADE (Automated Data Exchange) using only the equipment they already have in homes.

http://www.smartgridipedia.org/index.php/OpenADE_Charter

oBIX is a low level (the the extent REST or SOAP is ever low level) protocol for talking to control systems. oBIX was designed as an object-oriented model from which higher level objects could be created (a process that oBIX call defining contracts). Today, all contracts are proprietary, but the work plan has always anticipated standard contracts…standard contracts currently anticipated include include WS-Calendar scheduling, Energy Interoperation, and energy profiles. Non-energy related plans include binding for RSS and ATOM.

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=obix

There is a suite of low-level pre-standards efforts to develop applications extremely constrained in resources and communications. They all seem to have names that are one-offs of 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low power Wireless Area Networks). Note: ZigBee pre-dates 6LoWPAN and is not entirely compatible with IPv6.

There is the compressed HTTP over PANs (CHOWPAN) recently submitted to the IETF.

http://ftp2.kr.vim.org/internet-drafts/draft-frank-6lowpan-chopan-00.txt

There is the Applications for 6LoWPAN work in the IETF, submitted by the Utilities

http://zachshelby.org/2009/07/07/6lowapp-embedded-application-protocols/

There is the new Service Discovery for 6LowApp submitted to the IETF by PGE.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-sturek-6lowapp-servicediscovery-00

There is also considerable work done on discovery and profiles this summer in the OASIS Web Services Discovery and Web Services Devices Profile (WS-DD) TC. This work is subtitled “Enabling secure Web service messaging, discovery, description, and eventing on resource-constrained endpoints” Note: while WS-DP defines how to communicate a profile, it does not actually define any particular profiles—for example, an energy profile could be communicated if we knew what an energy profile looked like.

http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=ws-dd

One of the interesting aspects of this committee which had the major OS companies, the major enterprise management software companies, and the major printer companies represented, was that Schneider Electric was on board. Schneider representatives have stated that all of their switch-gear will support WS-DD and WS-DP eventually. Schneider contracted with a 3rd party to develop WS-DD and WS-DP for very small devices as an open source project. They used this project to assert (as all OASIS TC’s must) that they had successfully implemented WS-DD and WS-DP. This site can be found at the address below and downloaded under the BSD license.

https://forge.soa4d.org/

Hope this helps everyone keep caught up!