Standards for energy engagement and autonomous response (3b of 3)

The fourth of three planned posts on revisiting the smart grid priority action plans ran over long. The first post discussed semantic issues. The next addressed the conflict between the business models for Managed and Collaborative Energy. In this one, I discuss the architecturally significant interfaces of the smart grid, updating my earlier musing on SGIX. The third (3A) discussed the 4 key standards for coordinating energy use and supply. This one discusses standards for feedback and planning on the customer side.

SG Energy Usage

Energy use has traditionally been summed over a month and then received by the client weeks later, far too late to affect behavior. Recent high profile efforts by Google Energy and Microsoft Hohm have demonstrated the power of granting consumers access to near real time dynamic data about energy usage. Makers of building automation systems (BAS), particularly makers of heating and cooling systems, have long wanted direct access to current meter information. Two quite different standards efforts from two quite different trade associations are taking one standards for sharing energy usage information.

OpenADE

The UCA International user’s group (UCAIug) is developing OpenADE (Automated Data Exchange) to more readily share information through existing utility infrastructure. It begins with sharing day old interval data with customers and third parties, and will then strive to become more current. OpenADE leverages the standards of Managed Energy (described in my previous post). Although the long term plan is cloudy, surely the utilities are well poised to include demand response (DR) and other grid and market events with usage information.

EISA

The Energy Information Standards Alliance (EISA) is a new consortium considering energy usage from the perspective of the end node. EISA foresees much more frequent and timely information not only from the meter, but also from each intelligent system and appliance throughout the building. Each system will provide a type of energy metadata on systems that consume power. Think of the Google Energy demonstrations, think again of certain contributors to the energy profile able to report and to identify their own use.

One part of the EISA vision that appeals to me is the idea that autonomous building systems would compare energy profiles and smooth the overall load profiles; no two systems would produce energy spikes at the same time. Autonomous load shaping is important not only for the short term grid, but is also an important enabler of site-based energy, and even net zero strategies. Some members of EISA see it as a suite of standard oBIX contracts.

Standards Ancillary to Energy but useful to Smart Grids

Many of the benefits of smart grids come from improved situation awareness. The standards used within the grid itself, which I do not concern myself with, are largely to improve awareness of grid operations. Where I do concern myself, with the end nodes of the grid, those situations and that awareness reach beyond the grid itself.

UnitsML and SensorML

There are many things to be measured and sensed in industrial facilities and commercial buildings. Sensors may be part of systems or isolated. (I have some use cases that demand incorporating ancillary sensors into central energy management.) It would be good to use standards that describe the measurements unambiguously in ways that can be shared by multiple systems.

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. UnitsML is an existing OASIS technical committee with NIST backing which will need wider participation to complete.

SensorML is a standard from the Open Geospatial Consortium that can describe the geometric, dynamic, and observational characteristics of sensors and sensor systems. There are many different sensor types, from simple visual thermometers to complex electron microscopes and earth observing satellites. SensorML can describe them all.

Digital Weather Markup Language (DWML)

Knowledge of the future is important to all markets; knowledge of future weather is important to energy markets. All weather is local. Local weather awareness includes not only weather predictions, but also knowledge about the actual weather at my location following previous predictions.

DWML is an existing specification developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). NOAA offers access to their National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) using DWML. DWML is a little quirky, and a little hard to use. Smart energy would benefit from its further development. 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.

WS-DD and WS-DP

Device discovery and device profiles have been used in computer networking for some time. These specifications for the web services implementation are going to a standards vote in May. A major manufacturer of electrical equipment has already announced that they will include WS-DD and WS DP for all the equipment it sells. There are open source implementations for small devices (https://forge.soa4d.org/). I think they will have a big role in the future world of distributed generation and Net Zero Energy facilities.

SG CyberSecurity

Cyber security is drawing more attention and concern every day. Today’s grid cybersecurity is concerned primarily with defending the isolated system with relatively static interactions. Tomorrow’s cybersecurity will apply to systems interacting with others owned by many different people, of uncertain skill and diligence in securing their own systems. Security issues need to be integrated within every smart grid standard from the beginning. We need a separate security toolkit/framework, perhaps a profile from current fine-grained security standards, key management, and related areas. Broader integration of physical security, fine-grained networking and commercial security, and situation awareness technologies need to be part of the mix.

Schedules for Things and Markets

Yesterday, I sat in on the final day of the Calendaring and Scheduling Consortium's semiannual conference (www.CalConnect.org). CalConnect is a consortium that promotes interoperability between dissimilar calendaring and scheduling systems. I was there to scout out their just unveiled xml serialization of ICalendar. I think we will use it a lot in buildings and on the smart grid.

I have written before that we need a simple way to exchange information about events. This is a quite different task than time synchronization. Events have duration and may evolve multiple participants. In the old Mission Impossible shows I watched while growing up, they would plan a series of events, often events that require close cooperation between several actors, whether they were good guys or bad guys. Then they would synchronize their watches and the drama would begin. CalConnect does not worry about synchronizing the watches, but about all the planning for activities that need to happen together.

In the enterprise-responsive building, rooms and access control should respond to normal business events in the building. Schedule a meeting for 9 people in Conference Room 2 on the third floor? Catering a wedding for 200 in ballrooms A and B? The building system should prepare that room to be comfortable by then, and plan for adequate ventilation to keep that many people alert. Enterprise responsive buildings can move beyond efficiency to doing the right thing at the right time.

On the smart grid, we will be constantly comparing events. Next Tuesday at 10:00 power will be expensive. The factory is able to sell excess cogeneration back to the grid during the lunch break, 12:15 to 1:00 five days a week. The office building can shut down early in response to the grid because almost everyone is at the sales meeting. The primary benefits of the smart grid are from aligning supply and demand, and thereby being able to rely on intermittent energy while avoiding expensive or "dirty” energy".

As people, we share schedules and meetings every day using ICalendar. Surprisingly, there has been no accepted standard for writing ICalendar in XML.

On Thursday, Steve Lees (Microsoft), Cyrus Daboo (Apple), and Mike Douglas (RPI) posted a draft of an XML serialization of ICalendar to the IETF (Links below). It will be assigned an RFC "real soon now"™. Steve also created a web based converter into which you can paste your own ICalendar object and get a translation.

I have some quibbles with the draft:

I would like to see the location (latitude and longitude) component of the specification use standards from the Open Geospatial Consortium. For now, they should use KML; you used KML the last time you pinned something to Google Earth. (Imagine all the concert listings in your town automatically pinning themselves to a map). I would like them to consider allowing other OGC defined objects—such as a polygon, tracing out the area affected by the event. I would even like to make this field multi-valued, allowing multiple points to be affected by the event.

The standards also includes the Uniform Resource Indicator (URI) as does the ICalendar object. You may be familiar with the more specific form of the URI, the Uniform Resource Locator (URL)—you typed the URL into the browser to get to this page. The word URI is the more general case and includes more options, including all URLs. I would like to be able to add a list or URIs to an event.

I would like to see the description be typed and multi-valued as well. When you are using a calendar, the description is the part of the message that may show up as the conference call #, the agenda, etc. In the standard this shows up as:

      <description>
         <text>
            Looking forward to a good discussion, 1-800-888-1234
         </text>
      </description>

I would like this the be multi-valued, and able to support more object types than text.

Of course, each of these multi-value issues (location, reference, description) would break backward compatibility. As they are not defined in iCalendar, they could not be converted back into iCalendar. These are not complaints; as I said above, that’s why people put drafts up in public.

I am very glad to see this one up in public...and I hope to incorporate their work into oBIX soon.

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...

SaaS and Power and Service Oriented Energy

A recent editorial in Baseline used today’s electrical grid as the model for future computing. The article suggested because of the rise of Software as a Service (SaaS), local computing would disappear just as local generation did. Just as the rise of AC allowed generation to move a long way away, the article claimed that SaaS will push all computing off site. Models for computing and generating are converging, but the mode of that confluence is considerably more interesting.

Computing is actually become local. Microwaves and DVD players are not leaving the building. Service oriented computing is moving computing power into building systems and cell phones as well as into the remote data center. Service oriented computing also means that we can now choose the data center that hosts our services, by price, or by reliability, or by security, or even by social conscience as we please.

Today’s electrical grid is more akin to mainframe computing. End users have little choice as to hosting or to distribution, and local options are limited, often by government policy. (DEC originally named their devices programmable data processors, [PDP], to get around federal grant restrictions on buying computers). In the same way. On-site generation is crippled, poor economic information blocks the development of storage technologies, and in so many way, await the “internet revolution” in power.

Ameliorating this, energy is finally about to take advantage of pervasive computing. Electrical power is just beginning to go through the most radical transformation since is became a regulated natural monopoly 100 years ago. Back then, there was no way to measure power usage except by aggregate use between meter readings. All communication was one way by mail (Here is your bill – pay it!). Autonomous systems that can manage power, that can track consumption, that can manage generation are just arriving in the home and office. Today, groups are just sketching out how to use SOA to re-invent the grid; AMI is starting to provide the most critical first service.

Building systems are becoming safely accessible by enterprise programmers using oBIX and other WS-[building systems] variants. The service oriented building is just beginning to be sketched out with telecommuting, hotelling, and carpooling interacting with access control, building ventilation, and tenant QOS agreements. Building access control services feed carpooling recommendations. Worker hotelling reservations inform heating and ventilation strategies. Policy-based security using SCA is extending from IT to building security.

At the same time, the unregulated power providers are starting to define the service oriented grid. Two way communication centered around the new digital meters make time of day pricing and billing possible. Peak shaving standards such as California’s OpenADR (Automated Demand Response) are teaching the regulated electricity providers to exchange web services with the buildings.

On the table are direct purchases from your power provider of choice over the grid. SOA negotiations for pricing and delivery let enterprises opt for power that is cheap, or reliable, or green. Green will be whatever attributes the buyer wants, creating a “Whole Foods” market in generated power.

Service Oriented buildings will be able to remain provably green rather than ostensibly green on the day of delivery. Self commissioning buildings will become perpetual commissioning systems run by autonomous agents, for participants in and scheduled by enterprise operations. SensusMI uses web services to perform remote diagnostics and building analytics to let the building owner understand his costs and control his maintenance decisions. Componentized access control and intrusion detection are being cast through SCA into policy-based physical security, part of the IT security infrastructure. New markets in Service Oriented Buildings are arriving.

TheGreenGrid.org puts the data center in the middle of this transition. Power cost and reliability are factored through web services into the WSDM-based operations console. Building cooling and capacity and electrical distribution capacity are brought in the same way. SaaS combined with prices enable sun-downing, wherein virtual computing follows cheap time of day power prices around the world. Demand/Response, wherein pre-brownout price signals request load shedding, will soon automate the same type of load shifting.

SOA is freeing up power markets to unleash what Fred Krupp has described as “the mother of all venture markets”. SOB meets SOG in a free-for-all of innovation and high-tech investment. It’s all small today, but watch for it to get big soon. Real big. Real soon.