Getting Past the Alligators

"Don't solve problems, pursue opportunities.” — Peter Drucker

There are lots of problems associated with bringing transparency to building operations. The EBMS project (see archives for details) I am working on offers me new problems every day. Today a friend and co-worker reminded me to think of why we started this project, and what the real value is.

The EBMS project has to provide a central vendor agnostic means to monitor and operate the energy using systems across the campus. It shows every promise of doing so, despite repeated problems of security, and definition, and great fear from line managers that no one has ever done it before. Of even more concern to many is that it brings transparency to operations that have always been, to the building inhabitant: invisible and unknowable. What if the building tenants want to interact with how things are done?

There are similarities with the oBIX committee. I came to the oBIX committee having spent several years writing, and speaking on the benefits of allowing access to building operating information, of extracting more value from each system, of transforming and expanding the resources available for pedagogy and research. The oBIX committee, alas, is about who shows up from which company. Companies may participate to open new opportunity or, more frequently, to watch for new competition. Everything takes too long and free speaking offends those who have market positions to defend.

As Ronald Reagan said (in the only clean version of a much older quote), “When you are up to you armpits in alligators, it is difficult to remember that your initial objective was to drain the swamp." Today, while talking with this friend, I was reminded why we ventured into this swamp, and why it is important to wrestle or slay these alligators.

Single purpose data is one of the most expensive resources of any organization. Single purpose data is comforting to the current politics of any organization. Single purpose data cannot be used for any reason other than what it was designed for. Single purpose data only rarely rises to the level of information. Information that is horded and isolated never becomes knowledge.

Knowledge is power, they say. When share information, you change the power relationships in any organization. Technology is hard, design requires work, but changing the power relationships, that is politics, and politics releases the largest and hungriest alligators.

We had a vision without alligators. We had a vision that maximized the University’s return on investment by maximizing the value received. Sensors cost what they cost. The low voltage systems that string them together cost what they cost. The value, however, the value is in how many ways you can use the information. Opening the doors to information opens up the organization to new sources of value. If you can expand value while maintaining a fixed cost, you come out ahead.

Recently we have caught glimpses of this. A professor in Biology requested the availability of our operations data, i.e., minute by minute temperature, light, and humidity, for experimenters in the new greenhouses. The Archeology department wants ready access to all information on managing their archives. The Geology department can let students pull live data from the outside air sensors in hundreds of buildings to better understand microclimates across campus. Information pulled from mapping, from building operations, and from the chilled water loop can help engineers understand big picture issues abstracted away from the mechanical details.

And that is just in mechanical systems. Later this week I will write on the opportunities in exposing laboratory systems to open interfaces. At the end of it all, we started this work to expand value.

It’s just that the alligators are so large, they get all our attention.

IT is the One Department that Can’t Afford to Miss This Boat.

A recent poster commented that IT Departments word be serious opponents to enterprise enabled building systems>

The IT groups have the least to gain and will be asked to support additional risk. Without a high level sponsor for the project, the chances of success are minimal. Even with high level support the IT department wields a lot power, they throw around support issues, delays in core responsibilities, risk and fear.

I think this is partially true.

A report that came out this week reported that Servers, PCs and network gear us 9.4% of the entire energy load of the US. A conservative estimate is that data centers use 45 billion kilowatt hours per year. I suspect that number is low because cooling is often on a different budget than the data center.

The poster continued that corporations only want to be “Green” only if it doesn’t cost appreciably more than the status quo. With $80-a-barrel oil, we will find that many data centers will soon scramble to explain their new costs. Many a data center manager will find that the cost of not integrating building systems into data center operations is larger than integrating them.

oBIX, and even BACnet Web Services, reduce the cost of integration. Certainly, there some IT shops who still do not have an architecture. Many who claim to will say something nonsensical like [database vendor] is our architecture. If we set the bar higher than that, the better IT shops are moving to some sort of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), often based upon web services. (I must admit, though, that many are become disillusioned with SOA. These are often the ones who “bought” SOA as a product without adapting their IT business processes.) Those IT shops that have developed some experience with SOA, that is, the better IT shops, will not see as much risk.

I have worked with a data center whose first request was “Can you take all that web services and change it to SNMP.” They were definitely risk-adverse, with change being the risk they feared most. They certainly did not want to be anyone’s whipping boy, again, certainly not for embracing something new like SOA. Still, they were asking the right questions. They lived by their old fashioned network service monitor. It ran on old fashioned SNMP. By demanding that the building interfaces communicate with them in their language, they were actually embracing SOA. Shhhh – don’t tell their management.

Some of the best companies are already integrating building system operations with the enterprise. They do it with great expense, and great effort. These companies have so many facilities, and such large demands, that they cannot turn a blind eye toward them. Each site, each store that they interact with requires a custom integration. These are the companies that will leap first upon the tools for simpler integration.

IT groups fear additional responsibility for systems that are complex and outside their expertise. The disciplines and techniques of building systems are outside their experience. Inappropriate integrations may put at risk both the IT shops current responsibilities and the performance of the building systems.

The answer, then, is to not do inappropriate integrations. Let the building system be a building system. Leave the contractor or engineer responsible for the internal operations of the building system. Integrate only with the external surface of the building system. Define the surface of the building system in terms of services.

Services concentrate, rather than dilute responsibility. Services hide their internal processes and thus reduce complexity. Services imply their own metrics for measurable performance, increasing accountability. Service definitions enhance interoperability, and thus reduce the risk of technology selection. The service, not the process is the right level of integration.

The IT is the only group that by speaking out early, can mandate the building systems expose only services. It is failure to do so that will increase their risk most.

Looking where it is easier to see

An old joke tells of a man looking for a small lost object of some value, let’s say a pocket watch. A friend comes by, sees him searching in a barnyard, and decides to help. For an hour they search high and low, but with no success. The friend asks the man exactly where he last saw the watch. “I dropped it in the hay in the barn”. The friend, somewhat agitated, asks then why they have been wasting their time looking out in the yard. The man replies, as if stating the obvious, “It will be easier to see it out here where the light is better.”

For power distribution and management, all the light is shining on the traditional organizations and business models of the power companies. They have the big systems in place. We understand how they are organized. They have familiar models for bringing the one solution into the home. They are also economic rent-seekers committed to existing business models, and these business models do not reward new distributed technologies.

For energy storage, we all know the usual suspects. Lithium batteries. Hydrogen in the sweet by-and-by. Peter Drucker wrote that a new technology must be ten times as good as the old to overcome market position, manufacturing learning curve, and incremental improvements. This makes it hard to bet against solutions that might come from incremental improvements on existing technologies, such as the Firefly lead batteries.

There will not be one big solution, and a few select teams will not solve all problems. Some technologies will come from people working to solve the problems of small niches, in scenarios that do not appear to work for everyone. To anyone looking only at the national or global level, these technologies will appear too flawed or limited for general use. These solutions will never come out of big government energy initiatives. By carefully tending to the special needs of the small sites of early adopters, some of these technologies will suddenly be found to be able to scale.

We need to let a thousand flowers bloom. Open markets provide clear information in ways that regulated industries do not. Innovations will follow information to find problems; one of those problems will be just the manure needed for an unexpected solution to grow strong.

The problems of local energy storage, of site generation, and of efficient demand response will be solved by domain experts, people who have studied harder than most. They will be solved by kooks working in niche markets. They will be solved by end users who are just have their own problem to solve. They will find novel solutions that will appear obvious, once they have developed their solution.

In all likelihood, they will not be looking where “the light is better”.

ZEB – Shifting Power Consumption in Zero Energy Buildings

Today’s building is unable to recognize congestion on the power grid, and so uses power without regard to its scarcity or abundance. Today’s power grid was designed in the 1930’s when there was no way to send signals across the grid. Tomorrow’s grid will know when power is scarcer than demand, and will be able to inform buildings. This information will come in the most traditional form: price.

In the post Zero Energy Buildings Explained, I described buildings able to buffer their demand for energy. We generally call electrical buffers “batteries”; many other technologies can be used. I know one installer of off-grid systems who stores energy in water in bath-tubs in the attic. Buffers require merely that we have some way to save energy for later, and some way to charge up that storage.

These innovative approaches are all driven by introducing actual instantaneous energy pricing. This is similar to the congestion pricing that is now used to reduce traffic in London, and is being discussed for use in New York. In simplest terms, when everyone wants power, it becomes expensive. When fewer people want power, it is cheaper. If you can shift when your building needs power from the grid to times when no fewer people are using it, you save money. If you can provide power to the grid when everyone wants it, you get more money.

There are three ways to you can shift energy consumption from the grid.

1. You can turn off things when power is expensive.
2. You can store energy for later use in buffers (batteries).
3. You can, if your building understands its occupants, push system usage around based upon your needs and current pricing.

We need little technology for the first option. A red light and a siren could tell you to rush around and turn off lights. You could let the power company turn off anything they chose when they choose. A lot of people are stuck at this point. The effect on power with this approach, and with today’s market structures is limited

Two-way communication with the power grid would enable (2) and (3). Live pricing would let you decide how you operate your office or home. If you have some way to talk to all the systems in your home, you can coordinate their performance. (Remember, although I have been obsessing on the grid, this is a blog about oBIX and intelligent buildings…) . Hourly, or better minute-by-minute, energy pricing is a necessary precursor to developing the markets that make these strategies worth pursuing.

An intelligent agent, negotiating on your behalf with the power company and with the building systems will make this less onerous for the consumer, whether home or business, to participate. This agent could run on your home computer, it could run in your data center, negotiating with all the enterprise operations in the office, or it could be outsourced to anyone, not limited to the traditional power companies.

Because there is money to be found with these approaches, there will be money in developing products to better serve these approaches. You, as the owner / operator of the home or office will be able to choose how you participate. Money plus choice means markets, and markets drive innovation.