Whither Grid Standards

On last Friday’s phone call about advancing the OpenADR specification to a national and perhaps international standard, we agreed to continue the discussion in an open forum at the OASIS site (www.OASIS-Open.org). OASIS, or the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, has long been the home for the underpinnings of e-commerce, for web security, and for service oriented architecture. OASIS is also home to a number of domain-specific standards, such as LegalXML, Open Office, and OpenDocs as well as the foundational web services registry UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration).

OpenADR (Automated Demand Response) is a California developed specification developed for the regulated electricity providers in that state. Demand-Response (DR) refers to live negotiations between the grid and its end nodes (buildings) to reduce demand before a shortfall causes problems. DR is a very important first step on the road to transacted energy, and solves some big problems in the short term.

One effect pulling OpenADR to OASIS is a perception that it is largely an economic transaction. The end nodes of the power grid contain far too diverse a mix of systems for grid operators to control well. As Gale Horst, who works in the Whirlpool Corporation Research & Engineering Center, has observed, a washing machine cannot respond to a grid request to shed [electrical] load unless it determines that the grid unless it has determined that there is no bleach in its current load of laundry. Every system in a home or business has similar rules that matter within its own domain. For all but the smallest response, DR will require an economic incentive and decisions from the agents running all the systems.

Even before OpenADR began discussions within the OASIS framework, a number of standards potentially useful to the new intelligent grid were underway. oBIX created a specification normalizing the operations and reporting of control systems as web services. The WS-DD and WS-DP committee, standardizing web services for device discovery and device profiles, includes members not just from software and printer makers, but from a maker of electrical switch gear as well.

There may be several of what I call micro-specifications that come out of this. As far as I know, there is still no standard way to exchange scheduling via web services as there is ICALENDAR in email. Such a specification would be useful not only for transmitting schedules from OpenADR to building systems managed by oBIX, but also would be useful in forward pricing of power generally. It would also be useful in a number of other standards, such as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language).

Emergency signaling is an important area or work within OASIS. One critical area is standardization of location. These standards include addresses, geographic points, and geographic territories bounded within a closed polygon. DR specifically, and utilities in general need the same information. When a DR aggregator reports the commitments he has received up to the System Operator, the operator would like the information aggregated by territory. New standards for emergency communications anticipate buildings submitting alarms directly into 911 queues. Components of the power grid could do the same, notifying police to increase patrols in blackout areas and to send officers to direct traffic. It would be very useful for the power grid and for emergency response to use the same standards.

New business models will encourage a move from hierarchical command and control operations to symmetrical peer to peer negotiations on the power grid. Renewable energy sources will decrease reliability. Distributed generation will create more power sources not under the control of traditional utilities. Zero Net Energy buildings will make each end node both a buyer and seller of power. OASIS standards such as WSDM (Web Services Distributed Management) may find a place in the new grid.

The panoply of WS-Security standards, including federated identity management, would require more room than I have here – but OASIS is their home.

There is no replacement for the IEEE and IEC standards at the core of deep control; increasingly, we will have interactions that are more arms length and economic than that.

To join the smartgrid-discuss@lists.oasis-open.org list, send email to smartgrid-discuss-subscribe@lists.oasis-open.org. The list is open to all, and there is no commitment to join OASIS or participate in a technical committee implied. For a general discussion of applying e-commerce standards to new energy, you may be interested in reading http://www.oasis-open.org/resources/white-papers/blue/

We have the PAN where’s the PAG?

One of the edgier concepts in computing has been the Personal Area Network, the network that surrounds a person. Seemingly way out there, the PAN is already surprisingly pervasive. What we need is the Personal Area micro Grid to go with it.

I first saw a PAN in an IBM proof of concept in the mid 1980’s, in which a small computer hidden in the heel of a shoe used body conductivity and perhaps sweat, for all I remember, to transmit information, Wearers of the shoe were able to exchange contact information by means of a simple hand-shake. This demonstration was half creepy, and have Maxwell Smart.

Today’s PANs are less exotic. Point to point networking between Bluetooth headsets and personal devices, whether they be phones, PDAs, or music players, make up the bulk of systems. The occasional user has even figured out how to share contacts phone-to-phone, or PDA to PDA.

Niche applications are creeping in to expand the PAN. When my son Josh worked in the Cleveland Clinics spine center, he described wired interfaces enabling people limited remote control of their own paralyzed bodies. With paternal sensibilities raised, I noticed engineering grads building open source responsive homes for the handicapped, using Bluetooth receivers cannibalized from old headsets.

Many people carry a surprising number of electronic devices with them every day. Charging them up requires a rats nest of different chargers. These chargers are as cheap as they can be made, and often draw nearly as much whether the device is plugged in or not. Keeping these devices charged throughout the day would keep them unplugged at night, as well as keeping them ready to use.

Meanwhile, personal power generations has slowly been creeping into society. My daughter spent the money from one of her summer jobs for a solar backpack when she was in high school, demonstrating her cred as a math and computer aficionado. Scott eVest markets a solar jacket to go along with the wiring harnesses in their TEC PAN.

But solar is not enough.

Recent reports talk of systems to generate power from kinetic energy. Science reports normal body movement. One system is reported to generate 13 Watts while reducing the effort of walking. Looking like a garden variety knew brace, the system harvests energy while reducing effort. At the end of a stride, a person must exert energy to slow his moving leg. The brace's generator helps slow the leg for the wearer, capturing energy in much the same way that a hybrid car harvests power from braking.

Others are working on bra-based generators. One lab is capturing swing and oscillation in a complex fabric-based generator. Another effort is focusing on piston-like energy capture from the brassiere straps. The [female] engineer note that different women have different power generation potential; I observe that there may be advantages to keeping that iPod set for dance tunes….

Microgrids use local energy production and storage to be self sufficient. The best reliability comes from a mix of technologies, with different performance characteristics. We have just begun to explore that the Personal Area Micro-grid might look like.

Electric Cars will not be useful for Demand-Response

If a performing electric car were to arrive today, with adequate batteries at reasonable cost, it could well push today’s non-transactive energy infrastructure over the edge. Usually I write about intelligent building agents; when I write about the power grid, it is to discuss transacted energy purchases between those agents and an intelligent transaction grid. Today, I am going for those transactions on that grid, but leaving out the building. But first, a little on the building with cars.

There a lot of hopeful scenarios in which peak shaving is enabled by commuter cars plugged into office buildings. Peak shaving, initiated by what are called Demand-Response (DR) signals from the grid, is when buildings lessen their electrical demands to avoid peak periods of energy use. The story goes that we will go to work, and plug in our cars. When the DR event arrives, the building will run off the combined car batteries, reducing demand on the grid.

DR is very important for today’s grid, because the power supplied at the peak is the most expensive and usually the dirtiest to generate. I have seen numbers suggesting that as much as 17% of the grid’s capacity is used for less than 120 hours per year. If we manage peak electrical use, we have effectively grown the power grid for free.

Cars and their batteries, however, will never be an effective peak shaving tool for office buildings. Leave aside for the moment all HR-related issues associated with employers paying for commuting costs, and look at the people. Peak load occurs in the afternoon, and extends into the early dinner hour.

If I live some distance from my employer, will I be willing to end each day with a low charge on my car? Only until the first day I run out on the way home, perhaps because of an unanticipated need to attend a school event for my children, or to attend to a medical issue for my parents, or even to pick up some supplies for a social event. In any case, the first time it happens, I will resolve to park away from the building thereafter.

If I live close to work, I will arrive with my car already charged up. DR participation, always in the afternoon, will leave me always wondering whether I am subsidizing the company. The first time I am turned down for a raise, this thought will begin festering into a general resentment of my employer. Sub-vocal mutterings with phrases such as “blood-sucking leeches” come to mind.

Whether I live far away or whether I live close in, sooner or later I will leave early to head off for a summer (most DR events are during warm weather) weekend at the beach and find that despite my plans, my employer and its building have drained my car.

No, we cannot turn to electric cars to solve the DR needs of our office buildings. Not if actual people are involved. Perhaps if we make sure that our grid is intelligent and two-way transactional we can see a way past this.

I will try to write soon on what intelligence is needed, in grid and car, for more realistic use of more than a few electric cars.

Biodiesel Algae for the Building

I was corresponding with someone from the algal biodiesel group the other day. Genetically modified algae is one of the more intriguing fuel strategies in the mid-term. The short version is to add some oil-production genes from some other plant to fast-growing algae, scoop out algal mats and process into fuel.

Traditionally, algae has been seen as something to grow in plants about the size and distribution of this year’s boondoggle, the corn ethanol plant. Instead of large parking areas for constant transportation of corn, large shallow vats of algae would soak up the sun. Eliminating the need to transport the raw material to the processing plant would be yet another advantage to this process.

Some have suggested that the proper place to build the facility is by a coal plant. Algae grows faster in a high CO2 environment. The CO2 would get sequestered into new biomass, and then converted to biodiesel. The CO2 would make it into the atmosphere eventually, but not until it had done double duty for electricity and transportation.

But I thought, why stop there?

All kinds of moderately complex processes are now being built into small microprocessor controlled autonomous systems. If one could automate the production of Biodiesel on the rooftop, then local diesel generators could run on site generated fuel.

I do not imagine that this process would ever provide all power for, say, a commercial office building. It could, however have a place in zero net energy buildings and in local self-reliant microgrids.

Many organizations, from the AIA to ASHRAE, from the US department of Energy to the UN Environmental program, are chasing after the Zero Net Energy Building (ZEB). The ZEB uses a variety of strategies centering around local generation, storage, and conversion of energy to limit its purchases from the power grid to when the prices are right. The ZEB will likely make use of internal DC to eliminate DA/AC/DC conversion penalties on each source of energy. The ZEB building may well have PV, ST, Wind, and generators, mixing and matching as needed.

The problem with most of these local renewable energy sources is that they are unpredictable. As has been well demonstrated by the German Kombikraftwerk effort (search the archives), you can build a reliable grid almost entirely of unreliable sources as long as they are unreliable in different ways at different times.

Why not BioDiesel generators in the building? Why not algae vats and automated fuel production in the building? I do not see such a system being able to carry the building on its own, but if called on occasionally, as diesel generators are now, perhaps the tank could be filled in the interval.

So, why not Algal Biodiesel in the Building?