Organizing System Behaviors

One Ring to rule them all , One Ring to find them , One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them – J.R.R. Tolkien

Central control, including influences on apparently distributed systems that their owners do not anticipate, are the bane of civil society in Tolkien’s classic trilogy. Today’s models for the control of another kind of power reach deep into businesses and people’s homes, and will ultimately provoke reaction that will limit their scope and range.

Today, building systems and energy user are participants in some very bad markets. Good markets have multiple participants making value decisions to trade freely. Good markets encourage the buyers to selected products based upon value delivered, however the buyer perceives value. Good markets drive innovation and performance as sellers compete to find more profitable ways to deliver the same value, or new ways to deliver more value, to those customers. Building systems and energy are not part of such a market.

Future power systems and future buildings will be interactive at every level, from the generation of power to the provision of building-side amenities. Old centralized models of control, especially a regulated focus on cost recovery instead of value delivery, provide the organizing tenets of today’s energy markets. Energy markets that share information and decision making will achieve greater acceptance and benefits through their influence on autonomous systems than central control ever will.

Buildings are becoming complex adaptive systems that involve large numbers of distributed agents and rules governing their interactions. These agents will react to the actions of other agents and to changes in the environment. The building systems will be autonomous, so control and decision-making will be decentralized and distributed. As these agents mature and develop, they will interact with the businesses in the buildings, the lives of those in the homes, and the external environment of the power grid and environment. These autonomous systems will ultimately adapt to the changes that they themselves helped to bring about through their independent decisions.

A defining characteristic of a complex adaptive system, and thereby of well functioning markets, is that they are self-organizing; self-organization is an emergent property. Emergence simply means that a larger-scale pattern emerges out of the interaction of the smaller-scale decisions and actions of the agents.

Emergent patterns arise out of the interaction of decentralized agents acting with distributed control. Distributed control is actually self control in response to individual incentives. The most effective and innovative markets exhibit emergent order, when the larger-scale pattern that emerges is one of coordination of voluntary activity. This contrasts greatly with the ineffective and anti-innovative results that derive from the imposition of a pattern in a top-down or command-and-control manner. Even in ostensibly similar markets, the two processes of achieving order can yield dramatically different results.

This month marks the 100^th anniversary of the decision to regulate U.S. markets in energy generation and distribution. The decision was in part technical; the means to measure use were limited and control functions were primitive. A poor understanding of markets contributed to the decision. The largest factor, however, was the technocratic populism that held sway around the world for much of the century—a now discredited theory that was at the heart of most of the last century’s wars and social unrest. Markets for electricity generation, distribution, and use are among the last remnants of these failed models for organization of complex systems.

The technology props to this bad theory are no longer valid. It is time to use new technology and new models of system organization to end the 100 year experiment that wastes energy and inhibits innovation in the name of control.

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.

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.