What if you had choice? (Homeowner version)

What if you had choices as to how you use and buy power for your businesses and home? What would you choose?

What do homeowners choose? Not economy very often, or for very long. Not virtue, very often, or for very long. We choose autonomy. We choose things that reinforce our self image. We choose status; we choose Cool.

We do not buy complex. Or actually, we do, and then we return it to the store when we can’t figure it out. Control systems are detailed and specific. They need to know every detail that goes on. This means that we don’t want to know all about them. They must be wrapped up, packaged, and all that exquisite and mundane detail hidden. The interface to control systems must be simple and elegant. But what if our building systems had simple elegant interfaces you home computer could discover and talk to, as it talks to printers.

Why are there so many printers at Best Buy? It’s because you can plug them in and you computer will recognize them. Computer peripherals have abstract discoverable interfaces that support heterogeneity. Do you have a color two-sided printer? You find that out when you connect. You do not need to know how it works. If you don’t like your printer, you get a new one, so a lot of printers are sold. What if you could choose building systems like you can choose printers?

What if you had a choice as to when and at what price you buy power? Would you buy it all the time, or buy it when it was expensive? What if instead of giving control to the power company, you were in control? What if instead of avoiding charges, you got a check. Like a rebate. People like rebates.

What if you could get money for storing energy? Energy storage can be anything from the water tank 40 feet in the air storing wind power on the ranch I grew up on, to over-air conditioning early in the day, to hydrogen systems. What if you could use the cash you got to store energy? What if storing energy made you not care about how lousy the power you get is? What if storing energy gave you more flexibility so you could earn still more cash from the power company? Would you choose buy more energy storage?

What if you could choose who would operate your home’s systems? What if it was easy to orchestrate each system, Air Conditioning or Pool, Hot Tub or Storage, and how they respond to energy prices? Would you want software to run them yourself? Can we make home systems as discoverable as the home printer? Would you run it as a service on Microsoft Home Server? Would you outsource it to someone who already has an internet connection in your house? Would it be the cable company, the phone company, or the home security company? What if you could choose between setting and forgetting, or personal control? What if you could maximize comfort when you have guests, or maximize economy when your in-laws are visiting? What if you could be in control?

What if home and business owners could feel good about their power? What if you could choose to buy green power, or green power safe for birds, or the cheapest power out there. What if you could chose every day, or set and forget, whatever you choose.

We all want to be in charge of our own lives and homes, and to feel good about ourselves. We do not want to relinquish control to anyone.

But what if you could choose?

BIM, COBIE, and Facilities Best Practices

Best practices in building construction have moved from contractors working with simple sketches and schematics, even if prepared with computerized drafting tools, to a data-intensive approach wherein at each stage of design and, the deliverables are produced in a format such that the outputs from one stage can be used as inputs to the next. As information about each of these processes becomes machine-readable, each step in the process can be modeled and the model compared to the goals.

During design/construction phase, this has required considerable standardization to enable interoperability of tools. The fullest expression of these standards is the Industry Foundation Classes, of IFC, ( http://www.iai-na.org/technical/faqs.php ), an ISO standard that has long been required for public buildings in Europe. The General Services Agency (GSA), the largest landlord in the world, has accepted only IFC-compliant submittals. In construction-speak, a submittal is anything for which the submitter would like to be paid. Because of this requirement, nearly ever large design and construction firm is able to handle the IFC requirement today.

In the last decade, there has been considerable focus on modeling building systems to understand their performance in advance of construction. Numerous initiatives such as DOE-2, LEED, and Green Buildings require building system modeling for full qualification. As more and more governments, agencies, and corporations mandate adherence to these standards (for example, http://www.greenbuildingpages.com/links/weblinks_LEED.html ) this requirement is no longer exotic to architecture, engineering, and design firms.

More recently, the National Building Information Model Standard (NBIMS or more familiarly BIM) has arisen as a more tightly specified off-shoot o f IFC with a focus on simultaneous support of life cycle data analysis, performance modeling, and easier compliance certification. In particular, a recent National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) study that found identifiable costs of more that 18 Billion a year in the US due to inadequate interoperability between systems ( http://www.bfrl.nist.gov/oae/publications/gcrs/04867.pdf ) has spurred a lot of attention. BIM is a tightly specified off-shoot of IFC optimized for the design-construction life-cycle using the emerging data exchange standard of XML.

To achieve full value of the BIM, it must extend past acquisition into the operations of the building. The NIBS Facilities Maintenance and Operations Committee (FMOC) has is developing a framework that extend the BIM to include commissioning and operations, the Construction Operations Building Information Exchange (COBIE). NASA, the point-agency in the FMOC for COBIE, has extended an invitation to UNC to be the primary University participant in COBIE. FIATECH, a construction industry consortium, has described the benefits of an integrated life-cycle data management for each facility in its paper on the Intelligent Self-maintaining and Repairing Operational Facility (http://www.fiatech.org/tech-roadmap/strategic-elements/operations-a-maintenance)

Diversity is the Key

Last week as I drank my morning coffee in the warm Carolina sun, I listened surreptitiously as an earnest reporter interviewed a local Green politician. Usually I find little common ground with the politician – but today, I enjoyed the nuances of his vision in contrast to the reporter’s requests for simple answers.

The reporter wanted to know what he solution he proposed. He sketched out multiple initiatives. “But which one is the answer” seemed her refrain. For example, she asked about biodiesel. He said who was making it, in this county and in the next. She asked “So we should all use Biodiesel?”

No, he replied. She asked “So Biodiesel doesn’t work?” He described the restaurateurs who no longer had to pay for grease removal. He discussed one local producer composting by-products. He discussed a whole ecology around bio-diesel.

“So will all run on biodiesel in the future?” she asked. He pointed out that none of us could survive eating enough French fries to power all the cars on the road with waste oil.

“Should we convert croplands to soybeans instead of corn?” Finally, she began to try even this experienced politician’s patience. He explained that converting new croplands to produce expensive oil made no sense, and would be as wrong as subsidizing to much ethanol.

I left for work at that point. But part of me was musing how similar these conversations were to some that I have about control systems and protocols. There are many fine low level protocols. They each have their place, and will fight it out at that low level. There are fewer enterprise protocols, and they are judged for their ability to interact at the service level.

Real difference-making solutions come from breaking the monolithic distribution model we currently have, with vertical integration from Generation, to Transmission, to Distribution, to Customer Face. This model is premised upon 1930’s theories of natural monopoly that, with today’s technology, are no longer necessarily true.

If we can break up these markets, allow micro-grids and local production storage, then the task of managing stable Transmission gets easier, as the challenges of managing the big grid for stable frequency under the stress of instant availability get less. This will remove the effective tax of near-line capacity on alternate sources of local power, whether predictable or not, and overnight make local generation economic.

We can complete the task by cracking off customer face and generation from the two ends of the grid. This will allow effective consumer choice as to energy type in honestly clearing markets. Freed from the near-line requirements mentioned above, all sorts of alternative generation strategies become potentially viable.

The most important thing to remember is that there is not one smart guy out there; there are a lot of smart guys out there. Today’s market structures for power allow only the largest, most well capitalized players to come to the field. You can see this playing out in the Hog Gas negotiations going on right now. The goal of proper market reorientation should be to break the regulatory and monopoly gridlock and enable a *lot* of innovators.

Of course, having a lot of innovators means that the focus on the one true answer will be less. And that will be good.

What Kind Of Power do you have?

I am writing this in the evening of a day that hit 94, with humidity to match. I live in a 150 year old house that cannot be kept controlled to modern standards. In fact, we have no heating or cooling on the second floor, where the bedrooms are. Ahh, life in the double 90’s

I ran no Air Conditioning today, or even yet this year. Even so, I arrived home to a house that was 20 degrees cooler than the outside, which had already cooled off since the afternoon. I manage temperature the old fashioned way, as befits the house. I run a fan in the attic, where hottest air builds up, to reduce the heat load on the house. I open windows at night after the heat breaks, and close them, and the curtains, before I go to work. After driving home though traffic, the interior of the house felt plenty cool at 71 degrees.

This means I am using energy storage. I do not have to wait for new fangled hydrogen batteries to come along. I am managing energy without fancy photovoltaics. My house has almost no footprint on the grid during peak hours in the afternoon.

What do I get for this? I do not get any price advantages, except those from not using power at all. I am not using the grid overnight to over-chill the house, taking advantage of cheaper pricing that I do not get.

What I get for this is 12:00 flashing on every device in the house. What I get is the right to re-program all modern electronic systems in the house tonight. What I get is the certain knowledge that that my daughter’s laptop, left on but sleeping during the day was probably damaged. What I get is the knowledge that the television probably has a shorter life.

Why do I have to put up with this? I live halfway between a major research university and a huge nuclear power plant. My house is about 150 yards from a 4 lane highway. Many people have worse power than I. The power company tells each of us that we have good power.

I want to have power that is defined by the quality of the power arriving at my house, not by the percentage of minutes that an incandescent bulb would actually turn on. I want power that will not lead to an early failure of the systems in the house. I want something that protects me from the quality of the power that is actually provided me.

I want to be able to automate the procedures I follow to reduce my demand. I want a house that understands hot days and saves me a half hour as I leave in the morning by making the adjustments for me. I want to be able to store more kinds of energy, so I do not have to reprogram everything in the house when the power company fails me. Again. I want to see how much money I saved when I come home at night.

They say the first thing you must do to recover, is acknowledge you have a problem. Well, my name is Toby, and I have bad power. My friends at CP&L tell me I have good power, but I am beginning to suspect that they do not have my best interests at heart.

I admit I have no control over my power. I need help.