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.

Energy Storage and Conversion

It’s not all about electricity. It’s not all about the grid. Local energy storage and conversion will play a big part in our future.

Energy storage is much more than batteries, and does not wait on new battery technology. Heat wells can run absorption chillers and thus eliminate a portion of some electrical loads. Water storage, as the ranch I grew up did with windmills, can provide potential energy of electrical buffering.

Trane began selling ice making capacity to office buildings decades ago. An Ice Maker that runs all night on cheap power can air condition all day with almost no power. The failure of the Public Utilities Commissions to require clearing markets in energy for each time of day is the biggest barrier to adoption. It may not look like a row of car batteries, but this type of solution gets energy from the grid, stores it until needed, and expends it when grid prices are high.

A Scandinavians project painted the streets white and black, and used the black to gather heat for a piping system under the street, pumped down by convection into a heat well underground for optimized hating in winter. Same project dissipating heat in winter under the white pavement to create a second thermal pool underground that is significantly cooler than normal - to help cool the next summer.

Thermal gradients of less than 25 degrees can run new computerized Stirling engines - and thus convert waste heat to power. This type of generator, originally marketed for high-end yachts, can generate electricity from waste flue heat. It may not be a lot, but it can be enough to take a home’s base load off grid—or slowly charge house batteries. Battery efficiency is almost irrelevant in such a scenario.

Even electricity is convertible. Batteries are DC. Most devices in your house (except white boxes) actually use DC. When running off a house battery today, you may lose 15 per cent converting to AC. You probably lose the same or more converting back to DC in the little "vampire taps" and "wall Warts" and internal power supplies of your electronics. Eliminating the double conversion gains back more "battery efficiency" then most anticipate from the next 20 years of research.

The problem is the lack of standards for DC electrical distribution within your house. The international electrical energy conference in Paris last summer proposed using existing consumer electronics standards. Some of you know the USB power supplies Blackberries have used for years. USB power outlets are one of the proposed plug standards. While some see this movement as far-fetched, others see it as a chance to establish a common plug standard across North America, Europe, and Asia.

Once some use of DC power in the home, requiring standards, rather than not-invented-yet technology, is adopted, it makes other technologies cost effective as a secondary effect. Solar generates DC power – and so would become more useful in exactly the same was as batteries. Cost effective storage batteries bring even home wind power into the main-stream.

DC solutions are only useful for the home or office. We still need AC to drive power over distance, so the grid will always remain AC. This makes local storage quite different from storage by the power company.

Benefits will come from re-thinking the processes by which we manage the entire energy life cycle, not by bolting on renewable technologies onto the head-end of the giant broken robot that is the power grid.

Alternative Energy and the Giant Robot

Last weekend, I was pulled into some discussions by concerned well educated individuals who wondered why alternative energies are unable to come to market. One cited studies by the well regarded Research Triangle Institute (RTI) that much more energy can be generated by solar energy. Other argued passionately for wind. Others came up with muddled theories that oil companies, with expertise in geological extraction, as well as certain classes of organic chemistry, were somehow responsible for these quite different technologies. Most of the participants shared one common fallacy—that the market as it has been is the market that we will use for new energy in the future.

The North American power grid is the world’s largest robot, and the robot does not handle unpredictability. Renewable power sources are less predictable, the robot cannot handle more than 15% renewable power sources without losing its ability to guard against unreliability. On February 26, a cold front blew through West Texas temporarily lifting wind production. When the winds dropped, turbines slowed and productivity dropped by 80% to 300 megawatts from about 1,700. TXU is now investing in “improving wind forecasting” to prevent a recurrence. Personally, I am not optimistic that wind predictions, unable to prevent billions in storm damage, will suddenly become as accurate as needed to control the robot.

The component of the power market that is most obsolete is the notion of the grid as the be all and end all. The Grid will never be able to provide you with the quality and reliability that modern electronics demands. Adding unconventional power sources will make the problems worse. Build your generation and storage locally. Expand reliability and quality to the microgrid. Buy from the grid when you must or the prices are compelling.

Soon, buildings will take responsibility for their own reliability. Buildings can accept variability that the grid cannot. Buildings have different options for manipulating energy, energy not bounded by the requirements of long term transmission. Our future energy strategies revolve around energy storage and conversion – and the national power grid will be only one part of it.

To get the energy reliability of the future, we must adopt new technologies. More importantly, we must move beyond are presumptions of how the market is put together. We must re-think the processes by which we manage the entire energy life cycle, not by bolting on renewable technologies onto the head-end of the giant broken robot that is the power grid.

Steam-Punk Data Centers

Data centers are struggling to shed their ever growing heat loads. They are coming up with more and more creative ways to manage energy use, to interact with building air conditioning, to somehow solve the huge load they place on all the resources of a building. I think that some of the proposals out there right now will sound like steam punk in ten years.

Steam Punk is a genre of science fiction that deals with alternate histories constructed around some small change in discovery preserving a now outmoded technology. What if that small note that was discarded as improbable had been recognized, and developed? What if the Greeks had recognized that their steam toys could do work, and thereby been able to defeat the Romans? What if Archimedes had come up with some of his many inventions at any time other than the siege of Syracuse, launching an early industrial revolution? What if the Chinese had dedicate military explosions to ballistics rather than pyrotechnic shock and awe?

The most popular forms of steam punk present neo-Victorian or neo-Edwardian realities. What if Ada Lovelace’s working computers had been translated into working production system after a chance meeting with James Watt? What if the French had developed the Jacquard loom into an alternate computing engine? What if the Napoleonic wars were thereafter fought using steam-driven military computers as steam-engines drive military dirigibles through the skies?

Zero Net Energy buildings are up and coming. The common core the Zero Net Energy buildings is local storage and conversion of energy. Night-time energy prices are stored in ice for daytime use. Daytime solar energy uses molten salt to buffer electrical generation. Perhaps windmills will pump water to roof-top cisterns for emergency electrical generation. Energy storage and conversion are central to every strategy for near-grid buildings.

The astonishing heat of the data center is an energy source that should be tapped, not dissipated. Data centers can heat office space in winter. If we concentrate rather than diffuse machine heat, we can cool office space, in part, using absorption chillers drive by heat. Domestic hot water could cost the landlord the same as cold water. Shedding heat load simply makes no sense in the zero net energy building.

If a landlord can get a data center paying rent in the basement, while harvesting the heat load to drive building operations, then he is doubly rewarded. The technology is rather straight forward. Understanding the tenant contracts and incentives is something else.

The data center can be the steam plant of tomorrow. Their heat is a resource to be harvested. This will make many of the careful technologies of The Green Grid seem almost quaint. Like the technologies of steam punk.