Shedding old habits is the Hardest Task

We can't replace decades of "natural monopoly" regulation overnight without some effort to create new markets. We can’t replace decades of monolithic systems design without constantly re-examining our assumptions. It is going to be hard work to move to agent-based integration at every level. It will take continuing hard work at each transaction surface. The hardest part, though, will be changing the habits of thought.

This is why many of the “lessons” learned from the last round of electrical de-regulation are not very useful. A little de-regulation of the wholesale markets power without allowing new market entrants as buyers accomplishes just a little. A mix of regulated and un-regulated markets just creates gray markets for the pre-existing products. Today’s technologies, when brought to bear on power generation, distribution, and consumption, give us new opportunities, opportunities for markets and opportunities for innovation.

Today, at every surface of electrical transaction, the technology could easily handle open markets. The surfaces are the borders between Generation / Transmission / Distribution / Consumer. With today’s technology, there is no reason why individual consumers should not be able to contract with any generator they wish, whether individually, or through third party aggregators, the equivalent of mutual funds. With today’s technology, there is no reason for local distribution to be owned by the same company that owns the transmission lines – and some good opportunities to be had by separating them.

In the early PC era, common practice and ITS guidance was that computer equipment must be fully depreciated over 5 years. Looking backward at cost instead of forward at value prevented companies from realizing benefits from technological change. By some accounts, the moment when Microsoft seized control of the PC industry from IBM was when Gates realized that IBM was maintaining 286-based systems until fully depreciated. Utilities, with their focus on regulated cost recovery and static efficiency are stuck in the same trap. Until this changes, the electricity industry in the US will never be focused on the value creation and dynamic efficiencies that are the hallmark of every other engineered business in today’s world.

The old model for power markets was vertical integration from generation to consumer regulated as a natural monopoly. Economical microgrids integrating heterogeneous sources and storages methods cast doubt on how natural the monopoly is. Live metering technology with two way communications enable a market at each transition. Intelligent building systems let end users manage their power consumption, in response to their internal needs and to live pricing from the grid. The operations assumptions based around integrated operation, dumb metering, and lack of information are no longer valid.

We will recognize true deregulation of power markets by an increase in end user autonomy and an accompanying increase in innovation. It will enable market models that are nimble, looking to future value rather than back to sunk cost. Future value is dynamic, as it reflects changing consumer tastes in environmental policy, social environment, and in technology. True markets will let new entrants in, seeking to create value in novel ways. The last round of deregulation focused more on freeing up rent seekers, and, for some, escaping from poor [nuclear] plant decisions more than it did on creating any actual markets.

The technology is hard, and will be hard. Skilled engineering will be needed to find the value in new approaches. Great patience and public communications will be required to convince the public and utilities commissions to stay out of the way. But what we will need most is nimble vision to discover the new business models that will unlock innovation.

And the lenses that cloud the vision the most is seeing the way we have always done it.

Looking Ahead: Evolution of the End Node

So how will building systems fit together in the future? I have some pretty solid ideas about what it will look like, but it is hard to project the time sequence, or the time scale. Here’s what I see.

Embedded building systems become visible and controllable. Current integrated systems are “dis-integrated”. Systems that now are only accessible for the whole building will be accessible floor by floor, and perhaps mapped to tenants. Building systems will become as recognizable, to your computer, as networked printers are today. Like printers, they will not share their inner workings, but they may tell you “filter needs changing” in the same way newer printers inform you that toner needs replacing.

Systems, suites, and circuits will be able to report their current energy “burn rate”. Live pricing from the building service entrance, the electric meter, will be available to all systems. Each system and each suite will know and be able to report what they are costing per minute or per hour right NOW.

As the systems become better factored, and sub-metering is added to each floor and perhaps to every breaker, all electrical usage will be verifiable rather than calculated. As building systems become abstracted to the business services they support, their function and performance will be visible and understandable to the owner or the tenant. This will not happen overnight, energy intensive areas like the data center lead the way.

Customer centered areas get better understood as system sensors become visible to sales and customer relationship software. Door sensors (the little black mats going into a store) expose live foot traffic and occupancy to the enterprise. Comfort metrics drawn off the environmental controls are evaluated directly against customer traffic.

Special purpose spaces will have their own metrics. The conference room scheduled for tomorrow’s meeting will receive the invitation directly from the corporate calendar. The room’s support systems will review the attendance and make appropriate decisions about room cooling and humidity control. The room will read its own electric meters before and after the event and transmit usage and cost information directly to the corporate accounting or tenant management system.

Other special spaces will have their own needs. Medical clinic space, for example, will be driven by its own unique needs. Special purpose systems might include medical gas distribution or high energy diagnostic equipment. Patient scheduling for the use of such equipment will acquire components tied to time of day and energy pricing. Building system integrator niches will exist for each specialty business need.

Each of these changes will be compelling. The forces of inertia that today tell us “You can’t get there from here” will last only until we all ask “What took that so long?”

Solar Thermal Comes Out of the Dark (or is that in from the cold?)

Our culture always looks for the next big thing to be the same as the last big thing. In movies, we see this in sequel after sequel. In television, well, Star Trek was initially pitched as “Wagon Train to the Stars”. In solar power, we see it in the fascination of the press with photovoltaics, the solar silicon sequel to computers.

And so I like to see the rise of Thermal solar power, the less glamorous twin. Thermal power may be able to move out into site generation better, may shine a path to successful energy storage, and may be a better participant in the suite of technologies that will build the home or office microgrid. In the deserts of Arizona and Southern California, large new solar projects based upon thermal capture have recently come on-line.

In Spain, large mirrors with computer controls track the sun and focus the rays on tall towers where traditional steam generation occurs. In this case, the technology of the generation turbine could be that from a coal plant. Two other aspects make this worth notong. First, a considerable part of the effort was in developing the software that tracks the sun and controls the mirror array; this sort of investment scales out very well as the same software can be used repeatedly. More intriguing is a process whereby excess heat is captured and stored in liquid salt. The molten salt stores the heat to allow the production of electricity to continue during gaps in the sunlight.

In the southwest deserts of the USA, more traditional parabolic “satellite receiver” dishes with lots of smaller mirrors follow the sun. They focus the light at the center where Stirling engines generate the electricity. It may be in part sentiment that draws me to Stirling engines; they are Victorian-era technology that is at last useful – the same sentiment that finds me living in a 200 year old house. I also like Stirling engines because they work without the large pressures and temperatures required by turbines.

These two new solar installations are big, very big. Yet I think they might show us a path to decentralized systems that are small. Because they are each heat based, they illuminate what diversity brings to the local energy grid.

The Spanish system stores energy in molten salt. This innovative approach moves solar power away from “only when the sun shines” to a model that can move energy from when you can make it to when you need it. Energy storage is so much more than batteries, or than hydrogen. I’m glad to see heat storage for electrical energy buffering in a large scale application.

The southwestern system uses industrial production quantities of software-driven solar collectors. The dishes should be able to scale down the right size for the home or office. The software will certainly be able to scale down. But the industrial production of Stirling engines is as exciting. Traditional thermal generation requires high temperature differentials, the difference between ambient temperature and your energy source, and high pressures. Stirling engines work at low pressures. Stirling engines work when the temperature differential is low.

Many things in your home or office generate heat. Air Conditioning exhaust, data centers, the furnace chimney, even composting toilets could be producing heat to store in the heat battery. A software driven rooftop dish can be one more. That heat can then drive Stirling engines to produce electricity as needed.

How will we know when it is needed? That is where enterprise-aware software in the office, home-owner driven software in the house come in. Negotiations with the services available in embedded systems determine the need. Negotiations with the power grid about pricing complete the picture.

The third definition of battery is a “collection of related things intended for use together”. A battery of guns is used in war. A battery of electrochemical devices is used to store electricity. A battery of diverse energy storage devices, electrochemical, potential, hydrogen, or thermal may be the building battery – and software will make them work together as a one.

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.