Informational Interoperability

Power grid reliability, human heat pumps, and data centers as energy resources – what is the common thread? All of these rely on being to get above the details of the systems to see interrelationships between the systems. This approach requires systems to compete on delivering of service, rather than focusing on process. Systems that provide a similar service, albeit with fundamentally different internal processes, must be swappable.

We must move beyond protocol interoperability to 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.

Informational interoperability raises the bar, by allowing systems to compete on performance and service. Data is not information; often too much data can hide information. Only when facts from the underlying process are assembled into patterns that have meaning and can influence action does data rise to the level of information.

If you have two or more systems that can both consume and produce the same information interface, then those systems are informationally interoperable. If several external systems share the same informational interface to the local system while performing different services, then the local systems interface is reusable.

If I am performing an energy intensive task such as intake reheating, it matters little if my heat source is electric coils, a central steam plant, a solar thermal collector, or the data center downstairs. Each has a cost (which may even be negative), each has a quality, and each has performance characteristics. Systems with informational interfaces can select or which thermal source to use, either at design time or on the fly. Such systems would not need to know any details about the internal operations of their design source.

The best system interactions are built using 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.

Bad systems hide information about performance, scarcity, and value; good systems expose such information in ways that allow innovators to take advantage of this information. Let the systems use whatever low-level protocols they want internally. On the outside, we need information interoperability.

Human Heat Pumps

I was discussing service oriented buildings with my colleague Neil McKeeman last week. We discussed how the enterprise agent could offer more responsiveness and more strategies to react to demand response signals then ever the building systems can. As we make the economic basis for building strategies clearer with open markets, buildings will have more and more responses; not just load shedding, but demand shaping as well. Many buildings will become their own microgrids, with some generation and energy storage of their own. Such buildings will use their knowledge of the inhabitants and their business activities to become autonomous energy traders for their owners.

Neil had a moment of revelation, and began throwing out scenarios. One of them was for the mixed retail buildings. In our region, such buildings may have little if any heating component; their challenge is the shed heat year round. Neil imagined the landlord offering incentives for heat sources in the building in certain circumstances. Would the restaurant or club offer happy hour or instant discounts to pack the rooms to meet heat incentives?

Our conversation went on to what sort of business could respond in this way. It would have to know its customers and be able to communicate with them. Would the business harvest SMS addresses from the bowl of business cards by the cash register, you know, the one offering free lunch to the winner of a once-a-week drawing? Maybe twitter services could pull in customers quickly to meet a heat incentive.

My thoughts turned instead to energy harvesting. Would there be a place for small heat pumps to capture energy from vent systems before the air goes outside? How could you distribute and market this within the building? Could such energy recapture ever replace the district steam plant?

There are many proposals out there for conversion of direct physical energy from building inhabitants into energy. There are nightclubs that capture vibration energy from the floor to power the lights; the intensity of the light show is driven directly by the intensity of dancing (or so they claim). At least one gym claims to provide heat and power from the exercise bikes and other cardio machines. Several proposals for capturing tread energy to power subway and train stations are floating around.

But Neil’s is the first proposal I know for direct human heat capture and re-sale within a building.

Central energy conversion and management must be focused on the large-scale and controllable processes we use today for power generation. Distributed energy conversion and storage management can rely on the particulars of each scenario. Maybe waste heat will not be worth re-capturing until it can act as a catalyst for hydrogen conversion in building fuel cells. Maybe thermal storage will suddenly be worth much more to meet financial markets in load shaping. Maybe the smartest energy buys will be in punctuated gaps between business day loads and car-charging spikes, making buffered storage much more valuable.

Some of these ideas will fail. Some will succeed beyond all expectations. We need an environment that will reward risk-taking and innovation, that will focus and reward all the bright people who might put this together. We need open markets in energy, markets with informational interoperability at the interfaces to intelligent systems to support many diverse strategies.

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.

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.