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.

Scheduling our Things, Scheduling our Lives

The best restaurants are seasonal, and know where ingredients come from. Locavory is dedicated to the proposition that the best food is not only seasonal, but local, served at its absolute freshest. Energy, too has its seasons, and they can be tied to the way we live our lives, and they can bind our things to our pursuits. One of the most intriguing agreements in the standards development organization (SDO) smart grid conference last month, may change how we coordinate our lives and our things.

There is an extra joy to the seasons. The first soft shell crabs Carolina always follow the lunar holiday of Easter, and the first spring moon that triggers the crabs to molt. The first white peaches from the sand hills perfume the kitchen. Even the wistfulness of the last tomatoes before the frost, harvested green and hard, offer their special pleasures when fried.

Energy, and energy use, ebbs and flows each day. Wind farm generation varies with the season as well as with the day. Wave energy varies with the tides, and thereby with the moon. Solar energy, both thermal and electrovoltaic, varies with the season, the day, and the weather. Much of the purpose of civilization has been to insulate our lives from the variability of nature; now, in energy as in food, we are embracing it.

But face it, while we like local energy, none of us wants swelter in the dark. While we like self sufficiency, none of us wants to have no back-up. We, as a people, complain about the lack of cell connectivity when we are wilderness hiking. We want control, we want self sufficiency, and we want backup systems. Scheduling is going to be a big part of that.

I got involved with standards and with oBIX because I wanted to align the provision of building services with the support of the lives and business needs of their occupants. A floor that is air conditioned on a holiday is wasted. A classroom that provides insufficient ventilation for the over-large Tuesday Thursday 11:00 class does not support alert students; those same conditions in the classroom that afternoon unnecessarily increase college expenses. A clinic that has not finished heating by the time patients disrobe is a barrier to preventive health care.

All of the most critical issues in moving to electric vehicles are tied to scheduling. Electric cars must not only schedule charge based on energy availability, but they must support the mobility and variability of our daily lives. But more on this later.

Prospects for solving the scheduling problems, of collaborative energy improved at the conference. The Calendar Consortium (www.calconnect.org) committed to develop a schedule web service component, to be out for public review at year end. We plan to use this component in energy markets for prices and product descriptions. Representatives from financial standards groups (FIX, ISO20022) began conversations with CalConnect at the meeting. oBIX is looking to incorporate this standard into building system communications. CalConnect itself exists to align the personal end the enterprise calendar. We may soon have a shared understanding of schedule spanning, energy, finance, buildings, enterprise, and the individual.

Doing the right thing at the right place right time is at the center of developing notions of living the good life. These notions might soon include our things. And those cars and schedules — and the seasons of energy — they may have to wait until another post.

Collaborative Energy: Smart Grids and Intelligent Buildings together

Intelligent energy use acquires energy at the right time at the right price for the right reason. Intelligent buildings provide customer amenities and customer services at the right time. Collaborative energy works with the smart grid to minimize the incompatibilities of these two problem sets. Systems on the grid and in the building need to do a better job of sharing information to improve the performance of these functions.

Smart operations in transmission and distribution will provide only minimal help in adapting to new energy sources or in coordinating supply and demand. The improved situation awareness they provide can, however, deliver better market information to help smart buildings acquire energy at the right time.

Intelligent buildings need to know what services their occupants expect them to provide, and at what quality of service. Today’s intelligent thermostat makes the occupant think about the building. The occupant should tell the building what his activities are, and what quality of service he expects. The thermostat, then, should optimize service [comfort] delivery as well as economic performance on its own.

To optimize economic performance, buildings need four types of information from a smart grid. (1) A smart grid should provide the building with the price of energy now, and anticipated price in the future. (2) A smart grid should provide risk and reliability information, both now and for the future. (3) A smart grid should provide information on other aspects of electricity that the building occupant may be interested in, such as available carbon credits or green generation source. (4) A smart grid must provide the building with information on current energy usage, information that should be as frequent and as close to real time as practicable. With these information streams, the intelligent building can begin to use energy intelligently.

The plug in electric vehicle is just one more smart component of the intelligent building. The owner should provide a schedule of the services that will be required. This may include distance to work. It may include after-school sports and it may include evening choir practice or even community organizing. Energy use decisions by the car, including rapid charging or overnight waits, becomes merely another aspect of the functions of an intelligent building.

These capabilities are pre-adaptations for distributed energy. In biology, preadaptation refers to features evolved for one purpose that are ready to serve another purpose later. Distributed energy will be more intermittent than current electrical sources, and may be subject to more regulation as the when it may or may not be used. The intelligent building is what enables smart grids to accept distributed energy.

Collaborative energy is how the smart grid will deliver the most benefits to society. Those benefits will be social and environmental as well as economic. The purpose of the smart grid is to better coordinate energy supply and demand, even as the sources of that supply become more distributed and less reliable. But collaboration requires able partners; smart grids require smart buildings able to make intelligent decisions about energy use.

Smart buildings are more important than smart grids

Smart operations in transmission and distribution won’t help us much. An upgrade for utility operations is long overdue, especially if energy distribution gets over its severe case of not-invented-here. This upgrade may be absolutely necessary for the grid to support more dynamic energy markets, ones that will balance electricity supply and demand. The most important smart interactions will come from the grid’s end nodes: industry, commercial buildings and homes. To get the benefits of the smart grid, we must have smart load.

The electric distribution system of North America is falling victim to its own success. It has enabled for us the greatest life style ever invented. It has largely succeeded in creating electricity to cheap to meter…until we bundle the capital costs into the electricity. But that electricity is not reliable enough for sensitive electronics. Wholesale prices for that cheap electricity may leap several orders of magnitude on a hot humid day like today in North Carolina.

Many businesses have unflattering terms to describe their customers. Consumers. Marks. Johns. For utilities, the word is load. But cheap dumb load is becoming too expensive. New cybersecurity concerns may make direct control, and direct control liability, too expensive. Even the much touted benefits of direct control of electric vehicle load become elusive in the mid-term.

Distributed energy resources are a challenge as well as opportunity. Used unwisely, they can increase the difficulty of managing the grid. Some implementation of central supply management to support wind farms show more gas burned in fast-start generators than if no wind was used at all. This is why the lion’s share of priority smart grid standards are for economic interactions rather than for control.

Energy management systems in the end nodes will have to become autonomous systems able to respond to economic signals from the grid, including predictions about future prices. Those economic signals must be great enough to spur investment. Because the risk of adopting new technologies is lower for individual end nodes than it is for any utility, some homes and commercial buildings will be able to adopt new technologies more rapidly than can the grid. The smart grid roadmap points to standards to enable this change, and to create opportunities through dynamic pricing

A mix of purchasers, ranging from early adopters to the risk adverse, will result in more normal markets for energy technology, e.g., the Pemberton innovation diffusion and Rogers technology adoption curves. This will attract more venture capital to distributed energy, particularly to energy storage. It is a simple fact that there are more storage options at the smaller scale of the end node than there are at grid scale. There are a lot of ways to store energy, and the curious might look to IDEA (District Energy) to expand their perspectives.

End nodes may have a mix of energy storage technologies. Thermal. Chemical. Hydrogen. Capacitors. Once they are the, the proper use of excess on-site generation is filling storage rather than selling to the grid. This can arguably result in 20% efficiency gains for each alternative energy without requiring new technology. This is a significant step on the road to net zero energy buildings. And net zero energy buildings are the smartest kind of load, able to responds significantly to each price signal from the grid.

For too long, we have leaned on the utilities to maintain our life styles and our civilization. It is time to give them a hand. It is time for smart load.