Edison was Right – or – Green up with DC

Sustainability initiatives come in four kinds. No harm initiatives accomplish something, but perhaps not as much as their proponents think. Let’s pretend initiatives make people feel good, but with reckless disregard for the actual results. Let’s pretend initiatives, like corn ethanol, may well do more harm than good. Yeah but initiatives would work well, maybe very well, but for some reason, you can’t get there from here. Usable initiatives are the few remaining that are simple, cost effective, and uncontroversial.

DC (Direct Current) in buildings has long been a “yeah but” technology. DC is clearly superior for the home and office. Almost all modern equipment is already DC. We all convert power from AC (Alternating Current) to DC again and again in our homes and offices. Every frustratingly unique power cord, every rectangular wall wart with its glowing green eye is a transformer producing DC power.

Larger appliances, such as televisions and computers, perform the same conversion. The transformers in these devices are hidden inside the cabinet, but the process is the same. There are some exceptions, such as the washer and refrigerator, but certain characteristics of DC motors might push them in to DC in time; already their control consoles are moving to DC. Surely, we already live in DC homes and work in DC offices.

This plethora of AC/DC transformers is a problem. It is easy to get them lost or confused. Each manufacturer selects a transformer as cheap as he can get away with; power, too much power, is lost in every one. That lost power is released in the home and office as heat. In the worst cases, the power used is too much the same whether the device is on, off, or even detached. These transformers have become a significant part of the power use in every building.

If power in buildings was distributed by DC, all these transformers could be eliminated. Better, more efficient, building-scale transformers would convert power from AC to DC more efficiently. Even efficient transformation from DC to AC loses energy, and that energy is lost as heat. In a building-scale transformer, all that heat would be concentrated in one location. In one collection it can be captured and recycled for new use.

Zero net energy buildings come closer fast if we have DC buildings. Solar, wind, and other local power generation technologies produce DC power. Today, that DC power is subject to an AC tax. All DC power must be converted to AC, distributed, and then converted back to DC. This tax may consume as much as 30% of the power available. Even batteries, which store DC power, are subject to this tax. Without the AC tax, every battery that loses just too much energy during storage, is now effectively 30% better without waiting for new technology.

Yeah but...

But buildings are wired for AC. Everything I own today plugs into AC. Even if I could afford to re-wire my building, I cannot afford to replace all the equipment inside. Where would a landlord find someone willing to move into such a building? You can’t get there from here.

I have seen technology that changes all that. Technology that is almost a product enables cost effective installation of a hybrid AC/DC power system in the existing office building. The system uses DC to immediately reduce lighting and networking costs. The solution provides a means to reduce the costs of all building systems that rely on networking. The system can make each room in a building more responsive to the tenant. And the tenant can continue to use his existing equipment as the market matures.

It is time to move DC buildings from the category Yeah But to the category Usable. Migration from AC to DC in commercial space will soon be simple, cost effective, and uncontroversial.

OpenADR must respond to future demands

I have been reading through the current draft of the OpenADR standard this week. The ADR stands for Automated Demand Response (although I would prefer autonomous demand response, as regular readers might guess). Demand-Response refers to the conversations between electrical utilities and their customers, so that when the former anticipates a too large demand, the latter might respond with a curtailment plan. This curtailment might be under an existing rate agreement or subject to a live auction.

OpenADR is a nice and well rounded specification, focused tightly on solving today’s problems. Even the documentation, generated using LiquidXML Studio, is clear, crisp, and visually attractive. I wish it were more focused on emerging markets, because the work within it can clearly help them to develop.

OpenADR today has three components: communications between utilities, communications from the utility to the consumer, and communications from the consumer back to the utility. Utilities can exchange information on how much power they can produce. Utilities can alert customers to anticipated shortages and request bids to meet anticipated shortages. Customers can respond by making commitments to shed load, and bidding for the prices they would demand to do so. In the future, the lines between these areas will be blurred, causing the components to blur.

The proper target for OpenADR is the enterprise, not the building. OpenADR and its predecessor, DRAS, started out as interactions with building systems. The proper focus of DR requests is the enterprise. The enterprise owns the building systems and so can decide which requests are worth responding too. The enterprise also owns the business processes, which can enable still greater response than can the building systems. If we do this right, these negotiations will be two-way, creating non-hierarchical markets.

So what do I think the emerging market of the future looks like? How is this market different from the simple interactions in today’s ADR?

Participants will want to schedule things further out. Today’s long range DR is essentially a guess based upon tomorrow’s weather report. Longer term options will be based upon longer horizons. What price can I get if I commit today to a maximum use in the afternoon for Thursday and Friday for the rest of the summer? If I opt for four ten hour days during the summer, will the grid pay more for me to turn off the building on Mondays or Fridays? Building Resources such as conference rooms will know that they are unable to provide conditioned space on these days. Scheduling questions should look more like the corporate standard ICAL (used for scheduling meetings) and less like any control system interval.

What if I am a third party energy manager. I have an ever changing portfolio of customers/office buildings. Because the grid is a physical distribution system, shortages have a defined geographical range. Some of my portfolio will be inside the DR area, some will not. I might wish to shut off some systems in each facility for 10 minutes and meet my bids in aggregate. Every Demand request will include geographical areas following open standards that can be reviewed on any tool I use, even Google Earth.

What if I follow the French model and have an all company vacation during the heat wave. Can I get bids in advance to run my generators during afternoons and sell lit back to the grid? What about my solar cells on the roof for all day re-sale? In the future, every building is potentially an energy source, so every building is a potential participant in as a power seller.

Then there are the questions, the questions that must be answered whether or not there is any current DR event. What is my current use? What is my current price? If I needed more power, what would it cost me? Would the reliability of my portion of the grid be reduced by that request? How much more power can I ask for?

I will write more about this later. But watch for OpenADR.

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.