Thinking about Thinking about Turkey Point

Last week five power plants in Florida went off line following a problem in a substation. Active discussion ensued in the blogosphere. One of the first headlines was “Terrorist attack not suspected in plant failures” One of the first comments I saw was on the lines of “Great. Now the IT guys will all come on-line and tell us how we should have done it”.

I’m not going to do that. I have nothing useful to say on the design of any power plants, let alone nuclear plants. All systems were performing as designed. In the belts and suspenders world of nuclear plants, the entire grid is one of the redundant power sources for the cooling systems. The plants were supposed to shut down one of the safety systems lost redundancy. What we saw in Florida was carefully designed systems doing what they were designed to do. If every one of my ideas were fully implemented in the grid, in the building systems, and in building design, these plants would, and should, still have shut down.

If the grid as a whole were re-built as interoperable services with economic interfaces (prices), the blackouts in Florida would not have been as far reaching in their effects. The service oriented grid will enable an ecosystem of local reliability and storage. That ecosystem will support innovation and technology diversity at the distribution and building level. (Note: In power, transmission refers to the long distance transport of energy, the high voltage towers marching to the horizon; distribution refers the lower voltage movement of power around neighborhoods). That market will create islands of reliability wherever it is worthwhile.

The key element is informational interoperability. In engineered systems, interoperability usually means “we can get some signal of some kind between systems”. That signal is data oriented, meaning it is a raw fact that is neither actionable nor useful on its own. Someone with deep domain knowledge program the interactions around those facts. This leads to over-integration between systems.

Very good systematic thinkers tend to extend their systems beyond the domain in which they are skilled. Power engineers tend to build a single giant robot covering continent-sized territories. Faced with the diversity forced upon it by scale, this robot becomes more and more brittle. The only response within the paradigm is for the engineer to become more and more controlling, which ameliorates the systems but makes the long-term problem worse.

Bad systems interfaces hide information about scarcity and value; good systems expose such information. Power systems hide information about scarcity, value, and reliability in systems without interfaces. Utility regulators simplify system interfaces to support historical practice rather than innovation.

The best system interactions are defined around reusable informational interfaces. The most accepted and best understood reusable informational interface is money. Money provides actionable information about scarcity and value. Monetary interfaces are highly re-useable and interoperable.

If we had good informationally interoperable interfaces including a substantial monetary component between each system in the power grid, the plants at Turkey Point would still have shut down. They are well designed systems engineered for safety and long-term reliability. What would be different is that their customers would not rely solely on the fragile power robot. What would change are the local markets in reliability that would spring up. Local markets would let new classes of innovators seek profits in providing new value.

Some things that should be Easy (but aren’t yet)

I get a lot of correspondence indicating that we now have enterprise ready interfaces. Pshaw. We have a lot of control protocols that are serialized to look something like well crafted XML.

We have a lot of points exposed, without any means for the non-engineer to evaluate what they might mean. These points suffer because they lack what Bob Smith of Tall Trees is teaching me to call an upper ontology. Without the fancy words, we have access to a lot of numbers that don’t mean anything.

What follows is a list of some things that should be easy to do. They should be doable by a non-specialist. Exposing the ability to wire these things together should not involve exposing or interfering with the inner workings of each system.

• A tenant entering a lobby door after hours uses a card reader or keypad to gain access. Simultaneously, the HVAC starts and lighting turns on in the tenant's space so the tenant is safe and comfortable when entering their space. The building manager receives the necessary information to bill the tenant for use of the environmental systems from the time they walk in the door until they later leave the building.
• A new employee is enrolled by human resources and a photo badge is printed. Simultaneously, that badge is activated as a credential in the access control system and parameters for when and where they can go are downloaded into controllers and readers.
• An "after hours" security console provides graphical information of alarms for security and HVAC for emergency response at a multi-building office campus.
• Dorm residents leave for the summer. Their card credentials are disabled - but not deleted - until they re-enroll for the fall semester. Student Housing, Administration, and Security all save many keystrokes.
• The provosts office sets up class schedules and space assignments and the building automation systems automatically schedule the appropriate spaces for occupancy
• A building occupant who operates very energy-intensive equipment can access real-time energy use and pricing data to take advantage of time-of-day energy rates when running major pieces of equipment
• An administrative assistant in a conference facility can have a desktop application the enables room scheduling and set-point control for the entire conference facility without any interaction with Building Automation System staff
• A professor in the School of Business or in Information Science can assign undergraduate research that easily makes use of near real-time data from energy producing and consuming equipment to develop business models based on building analytics.
• A High School theatre department can disable a smoke alarm for the duration of a play, confident that the safety systems will re-enable themselves without expensive and hard-to-schedule involvement of a controls company.
• Tenants can directly monitor QOS agreements in provision of services
• Landlords can directly monitor QOS of outsourced utility services such as steam and chilled water.
• Special needs areas within Universities and Biomedical research companies can meet regulatory needs for direct monitoring of key areas (animal care facilities, pharmaceutical storage) gaining instant access to temperature, humidity, and air-turnover rates, information that is today available only within the Building Automation System control silo
• Students wish to be able to manage their own environmental footprint, and see their own net energy use in sustainable dorms, as well as having dorm-to-dorm comparisons during the annual Green Games.
• A doctor’s office is able to integrate the environmental controls of its examination rooms with the schedules for patients into those rooms, enabling the practice to improve patient comfort (warmer rooms when a patient is undressed) while saving money over all (less conditioning when the room is vacant).

The question is, why are any of these things difficult, and why do they require the work of buildign operations staff or an engineer?

Building Systems as Economic Actors

Building system controllers are getting more like the VTEC engine of my car. Whenever I get a tune-up, my car runs rough for a couple days. The controller figures out what has changed, adjusts to things, and once again runs optimally. In the same way, building systems becoming self managing. Controllers from well known brands now tune their systems in the same way.

The next step is a wider awareness. Package systems are just beginning to track humidity and temperature, inside and out, build a knowledge of how long it takes to reach a new state. As we extend AMI (Automatic Metering Infrastructure) to the system, energy use to achieve or maintain each state will become part of the mix. Shortly after installation, system controllers will be understand their actual energy needs. After one year, and a pass through the seasons, this database will extensive.

When a Demand/Response (DR) event comes from the grid, each such system will know what energy it can cut with what consequences. A front end agent, negotiating with sub-systems using higher order (abstract) messages such as the BACnet Load Control object, will be able to assess the energy available for each behavior, compare it with the price offered by the utility, and decide whether to participate.

To take full advantage of the forward pricing under look-ahead DR, price awareness will need to move into the lower level systems as well. DR for load shaving is short term: I need you to shed power in the next 15 minutes. The more effective DR for load shaping delivers market prices for the day ahead.

Ventilation for building spaces today is dumb. This conference room holds 24 people, so always provide ventilation for 24 people. Existing business models schedule a meeting by inviting people and a room to the same meeting. There are systems that can adjust for occupancy already. What few of them have is a standards based way to communicate occupancy. If the room forwards this invitation to its systems, then the room can prepare for the seven actual attendees at this meeting.

With price awareness, the room can decide when to get ready. Is it better to prepare for the 9:00 meeting starting at 8:00? If energy is cheaper at 6:00 AM, perhaps cooling earlier and holding the room ready is the right decision today. The second option will certainly use slightly more energy. More importantly, it will push energy use from a time of relative scarcity to relative abundance. That movement, known as load shaping, will improve energy use across the bigger system. If the utilities price correctly, the cheapest solution is the better one for society and the environment.

Beyond Efficiency, Beyond Sustainability

Regular readers know that sustainable buildings are not sustainable unless their inhabitants are willing to continue using their features. Nothing is less sustainable than the feature that is uncomfortable, or awkward to use. For the owner of commercial buildings, the desired amenities are ones that reduce costs, or extend asset life while reducing tenant inconvenience.

Building Systems that support agile integration open up realms of integration for everyday use. These functions have been available, at great expense, for those who absolutely required them. Others have been adopted by those are simply driven, like the energy strategies used by those who live off the grid. These functions, and the amenities they offer, will make the the operating efficiencies they also provide sustainable.

So what kinds of new abilities will real sustainable buildings offer? Access to information will allow all service providers to improve operating efficiencies and to offer new and enhanced services. Whether the service providers be life safety related or task (contract) related, operating efficiencies allows improved use of resources while reducing risk and liability. Below are some benefits that intelligent, agile integration will offer to building operators:

• Knowledge Systems for Autonomous Maintenance –Intelligent systems able to determine and communicate maintenance and repair needs based on defined requirements (e.g., reliability predictions/calculations) vs. measured performance and sensed and assessed condition.
• Automation Technologies for Life-Limiting Factors - Able to detect, assess, and repair materials, structures, equipment, and systems affected by corrosion, fatigue, breakage, stress, and other life-limiting factors.
• Automation Technologies for Critical Performance Factors - Able to detect, assess, and repair materials, structures, equipment, and systems with respect to safety, security, health, and environmental issues.
• Facility Condition Knowledge Base & Baseline - Real-time human and machine access, both locally and remotely, to as-built/installed configurations, maintenance/repair history, and material/equipment life predictions.
• Uniform Equipment/Process Information Standards - Digital documentation and sharing of data on material and equipment properties and characteristics (including simulation models) and O&M best practices.
• Sharable Standard Equipment/Process Models - Mathematically accurate 3-D simulation and performance models for all forms of material and equipment, such that vendor-provided models can be "plugged together" into the master facility simulation model.
• Facility O&M Advisory System - Intelligent advisory systems able to process status information from all facility sensors and systems in real time and make optimum recommendations for proactive and corrective actions (including emergency response) and which is able to implement the desired actions through automated command and control systems and through communication with O&M personnel.
• Integrated Safety/Security Systems - Continuous monitoring for safety/security hazards and threats from personnel, equipment, and materials and provide automated tracking and alerting capability when a hazard is detected or suspected.
• Facility O&M Systems Integration – Connection of the facility O&M system to higher-level enterprise management systems, enabling passing of status and activity information to enterprise functions such as business planning, labor allocation, resupply, and other site support functions.
• Enterprise O&M Systems Integration –Connection of the facility O&M system to customers, equipment/material suppliers/manufacturers, and automated design advisory systems, including the feedback of maintenance/repair results/data to the master facility simulation model.
• Enterprise Control Model Linkages - Feedback of maintenance and repair results and data to process-level, facility-level, and enterprise-level knowledge systems, enabling visibility of performance and issues, real-time updating of operational control models, and extension of the planning and design knowledge bases.
• Shared O&M Knowledge Bases - Accessible databases of maintenance and repair experience for different kinds of capital projects/facilities, enabling the sharing of expertise across the industry with appropriate provisions for anonymity, security, and intellectual property protection.

These higher order activities require common building semantics (naming of things) BuildingSmart looks to be the only game in town for capital asset semantics. These semantics will unify the information coming from the sensors below into objects intelligible to the building owner.