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.

Collaborative Energy—the Smart Grid and the End Node

A significant goal of the smart grid is to encourage rapid innovation in the end nodes, that is in the commercial buildings, homes, and industrial sites that consume most of the electricity produced. Today’s North American power grid is probably the supreme engineering feat of the twentieth century; it has made possible the greatest life style ever lived. Its reliability, though, is insufficient for the digital world. Every system margin has been pushed too thin. The introduction of any significant portion of intermittent source energy, such as wind and solar, will make things much worse.

It is time to engage the end nodes in supporting system reliability. Today’s buildings have higher requirements for reliability and quality than the grid was ever designed for. Site-based generation and site based storage are part of the solution, but they could make the system even less reliable. It is time to begin the move to collaborative energy.

The Smart Grid Interim Roadmap highlights the Energy Management Service (EMS) as the sole service in the end node (Industry, Commercial Building, and Home) that communicates with the grid for purposes of load shaping and load curtailment. Over time, the load shaping signal will become primarily economic. Load curtailment, the mandatory response to critical issues on the grid, may not ever be adequately handled by economic signals. Load shaping and load curtailment comprise the function referred to by the utilities as Demand Response. The external signals to the EMS are being defined in the OASIS Energy Interoperability TC, building upon the work of OpenADR.

The EMS marshals the energy response from the building. This may range from the simple "shut off, turn on" to a nuanced response to enterprise and occupant driven priorities. While those priorities and their management are left, as they should be, to the market, we need stadata models to free the appliance, building system, and consumer electronics manufacturers to innovate. These standards go under the currently imprecise name "energy profiles".

Energy profiles will define the interaction patterns of the smaller systems. How much energy is it using? Can it respond to a price signal? How much can it respond to a price signal? How long will it take to respond? Will it use more before it uses less? The answers to these questions must be aggregated by the EMS and offered up to respond to OpenADR signals. The EMS should be able to access the meter to verify its own operations.

This model should support multiple levels, as several building systems may present one face to the EMS, or several EMS’s in a campus may present one face to the grid. The model does not include detailed operations of the EMS, nor does it define EMS user interfaces. These areas are best left to the creativity of the market.

A key function of the EMS is to support remote operations. Third parties will use the EMS to offer remote energy management services. Today, many utilities see themselves as the sole provider of these services. Increasingly, companies such as Enernoc and Constellation Energy are challenging that assumption. With proper standards, energy managers will flood the market, driving prices down. Those left standing will compete on higher level services.

There is still time to join the OASIS Energy Interoperability Technical Committee—drop me a line and I will tell you how to join.

Standards Roadmap for the Smart Grid (SGIX) (v2)

Thanks for all those comments on my earlier post. I have updated the work and am re-posting.

The smart grid is more than improved top down control; it is a grid ready for unreliable energy sources (such as wind, waves, and sun), distributed generation, and Net Zero Energy (NZE) buildings. NZE buildings sometimes buy energy, sometimes sell energy, and energy use balances out over the day, season, or year. The NZE building presents particular problems as it may switch from buying energy one minute, and selling energy the next. Plug-in electric vehicles, whether hybrid or not, present the challenges similar to those of NZE buildings, with the added complexity of mobility. The smart grid requires distributed decision making, distributed responsibility for reliability, and easy interoperability to integrate an ever-changing mix of technologies.

The smart grid will be transactional, with each decision to buy or sell power a separate transaction at a separate price. The price of these transactions will vary dynamically, as a live energy market determines the clearing price at each moment for each sale or purchase. The smart grid will be open and transparent, wherein consumers can choose what kind of power to buy, and providers can prove that they are selling the kind of power they promise.

Alex Levinson of Lockheed Martin has named the suite of standards we will need for the smart grid as Smart Grid Information Exchange (SGIX). What follows is a personal view of a dynamic roadmap of the standards that comprise SGIX.

• SG Pricing: Price is more than a number. If I ask you if prices are up or down at the store, the answer is not “7”. It is not “Tomatoes are $3.00.” The price is “$3.57 per pound for the organic vine-ripened greenhouse heritage Cherokee tomatoes.” Each buyer can choose which attributes affect their purchase decision. I may choose to buy the cheapest tomatoes. I may choose to buy only organic. I may grudgingly choose the most expensive because they are the only ones in the store. SG Pricing will flow throughout the system—a model known as Prices to Devices. Under prices to devices, each system within a home or building may make its own decisions based upon budget and priority. I will be able to choose to run the fountain in front of my office only when wind power is available and below a certain price. SG-Pricing will be part of the SG Energy Market Information Exchange TC.
• SG Metering: This is a simple standard of energy flows by time slice. It also includes direction, as power may flow one way for a time, and then the other in a distributed world. To achieve transparent clearing markets, SG-Metering report what amount of what kind of power was purchased at what price at what time. If my neighbor and I buy the same amount of power at the same time, we may pay different prices because we may have made different decisions on how to buy. I may owe to my utility or to my neighbor for that purchase of solar power. SG-Transaction is in effect the accounting journal entry for each purchase or sale of energy.
• SG Energy Market Information Exchange: There is some bidding and exchange of information in advance. In my mind, this looks somewhat like commodity markets for those who want to participate. It includes elements of weather arbitrage. It includes time and reliability. It includes all of the elements of price. SG-EMIE will be developed in the Energy Market Information Exchange TC.
• UnitsML: UnitsML offers an unambiguous way to describe all physical measurements, and an unambiguous ability for a computer to look up the translation of any units of measure to any other units. SG-Pricing, SG-Transaction, and Energy Market Information Exchange will use UnitsML. UnitsML is an existing OASIS committee which will need some assistance and wider participation to complete.
• WS-Calendar: We all use ICALENDAR (IETF RFC 2445, http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt) to unambiguously exchange information about time intervals. You used it the last time you clicked on an email attachment and suddenly had a meeting on your personal calendar. We need the same functionality standardized for web services. We will use it as part of pricing, and weather predictions, building management, and other decisions. WS-Calendar will be developed outside the SG effort as its anticipated uses extend into many business interactions.
• Digital Weather Markup Language (DWML): DWML is an existing specification developed by NOAA. NOAA offers a web service to which one can submit a longitude and latitude and receive in reply a DWML forecast. Most forward forward-looking energy markets are based on assumptions about weather. Most historical analysis of energy use includes recalling the weather environment. The most successful energy middleman base their business on understanding microclimates. We need to define a DWML profile for reporting as well as forecasting, to enable the exchange of actual conditions as well as forecasts. Such a profile would be used when querying local weather stations and even personal weather systems. Such a standard should include UnitsML (for internationalization) as well as time (WS-Calendar). We should encourage NOAA to develop the DWML specification into a standard; DWML also is of interest to the Emergency Response community.
• WS-DD and WS-DP: Device discovery and device profiles have been used in computer networking for some time. Device Discovery lets you find all printers on the network. Device profiles let you decide which printer to use when you want color duplexing. These functions are being standardized for the web. Schneider, one of the largest conglomerates providing systems for the grid and building is looking at providing WS DD and WS DP for all the equipment it sells. I think it will have a big role in the future world of distributed generation and Net Zero Energy facilities.
• SG Energy Interoperability: I envision this as a short, light, exchange of the information we need to plug technologies together without knowing the details. I see it as smaller than, but perhaps derived from, ISO-61850. It includes some basic safety information. It includes estimates of reliability and capacity. It may include some of the “price attributes” (Am I a source of carbon-credit eligible power?). SG Energy Interoperability includes critical Demand Response, i.e., non-market emergency curtailment of energy. A draft of the Energy Interoperability TC Charter is attached.
• SG-Load Control: The OASIS standard oBIX offers an extensible WS framework for communication with building control systems. OBIX defined a concept of Contracts, used to define higher level interactions. The ASHRAE BACnet Load Control Object offers a model for building systems to report on their energy use, to negotiate responsiveness, and to make load shedding agreements. SG-Load Control would build on the BACnet model to define a web service standards for contacts as defined by oBIX
• SG Telemetry: What is going on on the grid, and where is it failing. I recommend that we apply the watches, trends, and messages of oBIX into this critical area.
• SG Remote Operation: This one may be a literal transform from the ISO 61850 standard for substation communications. To the extent that SG Remote Operation moves into web services, it should apply interaction patterns and data models of oBIX.
• SG Curtailment. Sometimes, no matter how you plan, stuff happens. The daily temperature is 5 degrees warmer than expected. The turbine seizes. A truck drives into the transmission tower. Shed load NOW! Prices and markets for curtailment have been evolving rapidly; perhaps this addresses the grid integrity issues more directly. SG-Curtailment is part of the deliverable of the Energy Interoperability TC.
• SG Quality Of Service (SG-QOS): Participants in the smart grid must exchange information about reliability and performance. QOS information must be exchanged both as a promise and as a result. We may be able to adapt the Business Process QOS (BQOS) work from the EERP TC
• SG CyberSecurity: Security issues need to be integrated within every TC from the beginning—and not merely a veneer layered on after the fact. We need a separate security toolkit/framework, perhaps a profile from current fine-grained security standards, key management, and related areas. SG Telemetry may be an area to start defining so the broader integration of physical security, fine-grained networking and commercial security, and situation awareness technologies can be brought to bear.

Keep those comments and suggestions coming...

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.”