Energy Storage at the Home and Office

Energy Storage is always the shoal upon which new energy use pattern run aground. Energy storage is what can disconnect us from the increasingly fragile grid. Energy storage would let the nation’s transmission lines work around the clock, increasing their capacity server fold.

Energy storage is what will make local generation deliver honest pay-back. Energy storage is what will align sunny day-time generation with home occupancy at night. Energy storage will let the home and factory trade freely in power markets.

Energy storage is so important, we have given it a pet name. We call it “The Hydrogen Economy”. But an actual hydrogen economy, like actual commercial fusion reactors is always, it seems, a decade or two away.

The shimmering vision of the hydrogen economy blinds us to how close the real solutions are. We have numerous ways to store energy today, from electrochemical to thermal mass, from raised ponds to bathtubs in the attic. We even have, well, old fashioned Hydrogen, good enough to work in the home, if not the car. Let’s call these amazing technologies batteries.

The battery economy won’t get its name on the cover of any magazines, but it’s the right place to watch. New kinds of batteries may come out of the places we are not looking. Peter Drucker once wrote that a new technology must provide a factor of 10 improvement in cost over the old to overcome the economic infrastructure supporting the old. Small improvements in existing batteries and simple rethinking of existing processes may always stay ahead of Hydrogen.

So where might we look?

Battery efficiency is properly understood not from anode to cathode, but from battery input through the device powered. Home and office DC power distribution can improve the practical efficiency of any battery by removing a round trip between DC (battery) to AC (to the plug) to DC (to supply today’s electronic devices). Improving the effective performance of a battery by 30-50% makes many technologies more viable.

Information technology is making long known methods to transform energy into suddenly new approaches. Stirling engines, for example, are a Victorian-era oddity that has amused generations of high school physics classes. Place one in your hand and the rotor spins – using the temperature difference between your hand and the room. Stirling engines are now coming into their own. Stirling Energy Systems has recently added a very large solar–based system to the western power grid. A commercially available home system recaptures waste heat from domestic hot water and space heating and generates electricity – and it can work on temperature differentials of as little as 15 degrees.

This makes thermal capture and storage an exciting part of the electrical mix. I can capture heat now to generate electricity now or later. I can store the electricity I generate for use now or later.

We may develop completely new approaches to thermal storage. One large solar facility in Spain uses mirrors to focus light and get temperatures high enough for generating electricity using traditional steam. This technology was made possible with embedded intelligence that allows a mirror array to constantly adjust to the current sunlight. Excess heat is stored by melting salt; the high heat molten salt is used to generate power later. Can this approach be scaled to the home or office? The most critical element is the software, which costs little to reproduce.

When we combine on site generation and distribution and use, it is called a microgrid. Microgrids become many times more reliable and economical with even a little on-site storage.

The home and office of the future will have its own microgrid with storage. A software agent will operate the microgrid while negotiating with the building systems to manage energy use. The agent will listen to the power grid to get up-to-the-second energy prices. The agent will be under the control of the building owners and occupants, responding to their wishes rather than to the wishes of the power company.

Location, Location, Location

In real estate, there is a saying: the three most important factors are Location, Location, and Location. For some classes of building systems, these same three factors should be the most important factors in choosing systems. Either this requires lots of tight integration, requiring lots of time and expense, or it requires interoperability.

One of the benefits of interoperability is to support diversity. There are many reasons to have a diverse set of systems in each house. Some people will want to choose the best of the breed. Some people will have different tastes. And sometimes, especially as each site contains a mix of generation storage and systems to supplement the grid as well as its array of building systems, diversity will support the special needs of the location.

My mother told me tonight of a system her father’s friends had in the high Sierras. The remote location made fuel difficult to bring in. The alpine terrain limited the use of geothermal solutions. The extremes of heat and cold in the high desert made climate control daunting.

Despite these problems, the house was warm or cold as desired. The site specific system provided this service economically. The secret of the site-specific system was…the swimming pool.

The swimming pool served as the heat sink for the house. Tucked deep into the mountain side by the house, the pool maintained a temperature mediated by contact with the soil far below the frost line. The pool kept the house warm in winter and cool in summer.

As we build transacted energy systems interacting with agents at the level of every house, a pool-based climate control system should fit right in. The agent should see what is merely heating and cooling; in the same way, my laptop sees a thumb-drive and a disk drive as identical. All internal actions should be abstracted up to simple interface that does not know the internal details.

This will let me choose the best of breed agents to run my house with its best of breed systems. Those systems will be different from what someone else chooses as best of breed because people have different criteria. One of those criteria will be the location of the building and its site-specific needs.

Abstract interfaces create interoperability. Interoperability lets you choose the systems you want to fit the needs of the site you have. Interoperability will let systems compete based upon performance with the location, and meeting the needs of the house.

Abstraction creates interoperability. Interoperability enables markets. Markets drive diversity. Diversity offers choice. Choice drives competition. Competition drives innovation.

Each of these options should be at the system level, not at the component. Because systems offer service. And service is where competition is best.

Corporate Transparency and Energy Boondoggles.

There is an abstract interface already in place that most of us understand. It communicates scarcity and abundance. It allocates resources over time. It relays the comparative worth of alternate solutions. We call the interface “the economy” and we call the abstractions “money”.

When we interfere with the prices in the economy, we are deliberately miscommunicating value and scarcity. When we deliberately falsify communications, people will make the wrong decisions. Those decisions will be bad for the economy, bad for resource allocation, and bad, in the long term, for the person making those decisions.

I wrote last week (other-peoples-money-and-poor-decisions.html) of a proposed program in Wilmington, Delaware to offer reduced electrical rates for 5 years to new businesses setting up shop in the area. Each of these businesses is wasting time by putting off developing new business processes that use less energy. These businesses have self-identified themselves as being among those most in need of new processes by relocating to take advantage of the deal.

As a country, we have dedicated a lot of effort toward transparency in corporate governance. Many of the rules are bound in the Sarbanes-Oxley (SarBox) legislation and the resulting regulation. The aim of these rules is to require corporate officers to take responsibility for full and honest reporting of business practices and potential liabilities. The spirit, if not the letter, of the law should require these businesses to report their strategic failures and the anticipated costs of ignoring true energy pricing.

Most likely, the corporate officers will award themselves bonuses for short term profit goals, and be long gone before the costs of their decisions become visible. The activists who might be expected to protest will be blinded by the fulfillment of their progressive fantasies of job creation. And all of us will pay in continued high energy use, subsidized by the muddy thinkers of Wilmington, Delaware. Bad information leads to bad actions. Fully transparent pricing for electricity is the basis upon which good decisions can be made.

Technology has given us an historic opportunity for transparent energy markets. The Energy Bill of 2005 has spread the enabling mechanism of time of day metering across the country. We can now apply the most commonly accepted abstract interface to time of day allocation of energy resources. We should get past politics as usual to take advantage of it.

AMR, AMI, and Autonomy

Automated Metering is one of the critical for changing how we think about and use electricity, both within and outside buildings. Sean Dempsey pointed out ( /articles/ami-doesnt-make-much-difference-without-fundamental-process-.html ) that I had elided AMR (Automated Meter Reading) and AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure. AMR is simply automating the old meter reading process, reducing head counts and reducing dog bites, but not essentially different from old processes. AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure) refers to more advanced systems that enable dynamic pricing mechanisms, new payment and customer service options, and control of electrical loads within the home. One source of confusion is what the electric companies are actually doing. Many utilities are installing AMI-capable equipment to support AMR.

Not even AMI, as usually implemented, fundamentally changes the traditional relationship between buildings and the grid. Neither process puts the building inhabitant, whether home or business, in control. Neither one creates the change in markets and attitudes that will create fact-based building operations. Fact-based building operations will create the open markets needed to power innovation. Without control by the inhabitants, fact-based operations will not create sustainable drivers of market-based innovation.

The information of AMI must be accessible in real time and fully trusted by both the power company and the building inhabitant. Rights to AMI information and control must be securely assignable to whatever agents the inhabitant chooses.

The power company must not have privileged position in managing the facility. The power companies interests are not and never will be aligned with the desire for maximum amenity and control desired by the inhabitant. The power company’s interest is in maximizing its own revenue by eliminating peaks; it will never have a strong interest in limiting off-peak demand. That is as it should be.

The inhabitant, of the building, whether a home owner or a business, should be in charge of the buildings responses to the information made available through AMI. The building inhabitants will be the customers for diverse markets in demand response and price reaction. Building inhabitants will have the proper incentives to manage the overall economic and reliable provision of power-based services. Building inhabitants will be the market for integrating local power storage, on-site generation, and time-based energy purchases. Electric companies can only commit to technologies guaranteed no to fail in large scale installation; building habits can afford to gamble on innovation.

The inhabitant may choose to mange this internal energy portfolio internally. The inhabitant may choose to outsource this portfolio management to any of a number of vendors which already have a connection to the building, from industries such as telecommunications, or home security, or cable. The inhabitant may even decide to let the power company bid on providing these services.

What would you do if you had full access to your own AMI infrastructure?