Invisible and Uncontrollable

Recently a well-respected engineer and leader of a well-respected engineering organization lashed out at my comments. “My customers do not want to pay $120 for a controller on the roof, they will never pay for [the interfaces you advocate]!” This echoed my conversations the month before with my brother CJ, who has been programming high performance embedded systems in high-risk environments for his entire professional life. I asked him what it would take to engage a wider audience. CJ defined the barrier without hesitation: “It’s because people see these systems as invisible and uncontrollable. “

In defense, the engineer would have talked of the enterprise control systems his company offers. He would have pointed out that they had been leaders in developing products offering web services. These just add another trait to CJ’s apt description: inscrutable.

Have you ever sat on the edge of a conversation between two experts in a jargon-filled field not our own? You recognize that the conversation is in English. You do not recognize all of the words. Some of the words sound familiar but seem to have non-standard meanings. Unless you are really motivated, you soon stop paying attention.

That is where building systems are today. LON, BACnet, KNX, and others might as well be in Mandarin as far as Enterprise IT is concerned. When Building System providers produce Web Services, it is as if they switched to English, but highly technical English, laced with jargon, and demanding deep domain knowledge to understand. Controls companies say “We tried, and it failed.” It would be more accurate to say that they did the quickest, dirtiest translation they could.

None of these companies would dream of using on on-line internet language translator for their marketing brochures. Yet that is all they have done with their web services. These systems need to go beyond translating their low voltage protocols to XML—they need to translate their engineering processes into business services.

My friend Keith Gipson has all the retro-commissioning business he can handle right now, driven Energy Companies in Southern California. He will launch into descriptions of the last generation “Enterprise Systems” that are both chilling and hilarious. Somewhere in the narrative there is always a paragraph similar to: “So we found the three year old control system in a locked closet on the third floor, running Windows 98…we think it had been frozen up for months”

I cannot imagine ever considering a computer running Windows 98 as being enterprise ready. I don’t think even Microsoft ever marketed Windows 98 as an enterprise operating system. The controls companies that used Windows 98 until recently did so because it was the most recent operating system they could find with no standards for security or system protection that might change the way that they had always written programs. And as Windows 98 was always un-securable, it owners had no choice but to isolate it from the network and lock it in the closet.

Today’s Building Systems use web services are like they used Windows 98. They have made some sort of pro-forma nod toward mainstream systems. It is neither effective nor useful. Without security, the Windows 98 PC could not safely be connected to any network with other systems. Without service oriented abstraction and the useful security models they enable the new web services cannot interact effectively with enterprise systems.

Despite all, they remain invisible and uncontrollable because inscrutable. No one wants to pay for that.

What if you owned an intelligent building?

What if your building could respond to you and your tenants? What if your building could respond to normal business processes, so that a simple invitation to reserve a room on Saturday set the operating rules for the air conditioning and security systems? What if your tenants did not have to hunt down staff to interact with the building? What if a single system could reduce your costs, while offering your tenants higher amenities? What would that be worth to you?

What if you could tell how well your building was operating, without expensive on-site expertise? What if you could eliminate unnecessary maintenance? What if your building could tell you when it needed a filter change, so you never replaced one unnecessarily? What if building system problems were fixed before your tenants knew about them. What would that be worth to you?

What if you could share system operating information with off-site experts who would tell you what to fix before it breaks? What if you could find air conditioning problems in the spring instead of waiting until a hot day in summer? What if by accessing the live energy prices your building saw, every repair recommendation included the energy cost in dollars per week of not making the repair. What if you could always schedule repairs to never have down-time and never inconvenience your tenants. What if your properties became known for this level of service? What would that be worth to you?

What if you could tell your building when the repair contractor is coming? What if your security system could let him in, using his company badge, to just the rooms he needs for the repair? What if your building logged his movements, and the time he arrived and left, for you? What if that log were linked to the original service order? What would that save you, in time, in billings, and in staff?

What if your building could protect itself, and your expensive equipment from the power quality electricity we get from the power company? What if you never had to replace motors in pumps, and in compressors, and elsewhere because they were damaged by the brown-out six months before? What would you save if all your equipment lasted as long as it was designed to last? What would that be worth to you?

What if your building could negotiate with the power company, buying electricity when it was cheapest, and storing it for when it was expensive? What if you could use power storage to ensure that your tenants never had a brown-out, never a black-out? What if you could sell your tenants power that would not damage their computers, not damage their equipment. What if your properties became known for this level of protection? What would that be worth to you?

What if your energy costs could be predictable? What if you could use your ability to store power to disconnect from the grid when conditions were right? What if you could use this ability to sell energy options back to the power company, and get new revenue from your building? What would that be worth to you?

What if you had an intelligent buildng? What would that be worth to you?

The Big Picture on Energy and Carbon

Demand Limiting. Load Control. These approaches to saving energy have been around in some form for a while. The problem is, the applications to-date have been centrally controlled. Sign up for this program months in advance, and then the Power Company controls your [water heater]. But what if I live in Marin County and feel that my hot tub / water heater is mission critical from Friday noon through Sunday? Too bad. Consumers do not want loss of control. This limits participation.

Recently, a professionally Green university administrator confessed to me that he “used to do that, but didn’t anymore.” What was the problem? For the few weeks a year that his kids came home from college, he could never get adequate hot water. There was no easy way for him to bow out of the program on short notice. It took phone calls, forms, lead times…so now he does not do it at all.

New initiatives are getting closer to changing this. There are now a couple web services protocols for building controls: oBIX and BACnet-WS. The newest Windows now is able to discover such services automatically using WS-Device. Soon there will be software to let your PC discover and operate building systems much as they discover printers today. It is not hard to imagine an agent talking to the power spot market, talking down to the systems, reading the electric meter live…

Some of the so-called “Zero Energy” initiatives envision each building supported by multiple on-site energy collection and generation systems. Based upon the building’s operating posture, and the mix of energy sources available, such a building would pull 35% or less of its total energy budget from the grid. If the facility includes local buffering and storage of electrical energy, whether this buffering is souped-up traditional batteries or new-fangled hydrogen storage, this becomes viable. On-site DC power generation can be stored in those batteries without the losses you would expect converting AC to DC first. If the building negotiates with the grid for spot pricing to influence the internal decisions, then it is also part of GridWise.

If future houses support DC distribution and internal use, then the batteries can become the primary source for the house. This increases the life of the batteries with no new storage technology, as it does away with the losses from converting back to AC. Most devices in modern houses are DC anyway, with very inefficient brick transformers that may convert a third of the power coming into your house to heat. The Galvin Electricity Initiative (www.galvinpower.org) is a good source for the engineering behind this. With appropriate local buffering, an awful lot of power consumption can be shifted to off hours without loss of occupant autonomy.

GridWise envisions a future power grid broken down into separate clearing markets for Generation, Transmission, Distribution, and Customer Face. Customers would be able to negotiate directly for green power at a premium price if they so desired. Others would be able to negotiate for the cheapest solution. Neighborhoods could opt for their own intelligent distributions systems, with higher reliability profiles than the grid provides. Customer Faces would aggregate customers with similar profiles, based on price sensitivity or reliability or social consciousness, for billing and for operation of home control systems.

The market oriented approach of GridWise is rare among energy initiatives because it anticipates driving efficiencies through heterogeneity consumer choice and thereby driving market innovations.

As the grid becomes “the thing that charges your batteries”, it becomes cheaper to put alternative energies on the grid. The grid does not need to be so concerned with frequency regulation and other arcana. This means “unreliable” sources such as solar and wind can increase their proportion of the energy load without taking down the grid.

All these innovative strategies are driven by more efficient clearing of actual instantaneous energy pricing, and making it less onerous for the consumer, whether home or business, to participate. The effect on power with today’s technologies and market structures, as some have said above, is limited. Hourly, or better minute-by-minute, energy pricing is a necessary precursor to developing the markets that make these strategies worth pursuing.

Still Waiting. . .(part 3)

 So if the control companies are now using XML, why am I still waiting?

All of the current web services standard offered by the mainline controls companies are REST, meaning they let me push a point in using XML, and they let me read a point using XML. To some extent, they let me get many points using XML, as I can request a log, or a trend, or a history, and get back many time-stamped values.

But none of them is abstract. Which means none of them feel like a printer driver. If you want, you can find a networked printer. Whatever kind of printer you find, you can usually print to it without further thought. Some of them are in color. Some of them allow double sided printing. Some of them have more than one bin. You can find out by inspecting it from afar. In any case, if what you want to do is print, you can just print.

You do not have to know how a printer works. You do not have to know how a fuser works. You do not have to know how to operate the ink jets. All those internal relays, they mean nothing to you. You can just print.

Contrast this to our general experience with engineered systems. Generally, you will not know what it is. Is it a thumb-drive, is it a camera, or is it a printer. Is it an air conditioning system, a power system, or an intrusion detection system? The system won’t tell you.

You will not know where it is. You cannot link it to Google earth. You cannot link it to your administrative space assignment. You probably can’t even map it to the CAD plans that were delivered to you with the building two years ago. You are expected to know.

Until these systems know what they are, you can’t really perform the most basic interactions with them. I would like to invite the A/C to the meeting, just as I invite other people. But what am I inviting? Is it the air handler above the ceiling? Is it the thermostat? Is it the outside air temperature outside that I cannot set at all? Until systems can describe what they are, I can’t use them. The enterprise can’t use them.

Until the systems know what they are, I can have no security. Well, I can have one security: keep away! I cannot say that all administrative assistants at the departmental level have the right to set the thermostat. I cannot say that maintenance personnel get to see deep details until the system can tell the difference between the deep details and the superficial. Without nuance, there is no security.

I have no way to integrate building systems into long running processes. They do not know what services they provide; they only have settings, and measurements. With REST, they do not understand work flow languages like BPEL (Business Process Execution Language). I cannot integrate them into management frameworks like WSDM (WS – Distributed Management) or like WS-Man (WS – Management).

Two weeks ago, I listened as a major building systems company asked the Data Center group at IBM what they wanted revealed. The answer “We do not want raw data. We want the best information that you can provide with your deep domain knowledge to present to us actionable information. We do not want to become electrical engineers.”

Well, that’s what I want, too. And I am still waiting.