A chance to do it right

Three weeks ago, I participated in a symposium sponsored by the Pacific Northwest National Labs (PNNL) for the GridWise Architectural Council. It is a fascinating conference, and one with more chance of meeting green and environmental and conservation goals than just many other initiatives hosted by folks who wear their hearts on their sleeves. It was also grounded in good economic theory and humble enough that it might just succeed.

The first principle of GridWise is that while the folks in the room are smart (and they were – this was no small part of the fun), they are not the only smart folks in the world. To actually address the needs of the future grid while moving to new models of energy production, we must create structures that encourage innovation. To encourage innovation, we must create means of realizing value propositions for new energy usage patterns and for non-traditional power sources.

Current market structures are a boat anchor on innovation. If you invent a gizmo that talks to the power grid and somehow saves energy in the house, today, you can only sell it to around 30 customers – all big power companies. Each of them will be required to run an extensive pilot before they can get anything through their local Utilities Commission. This means your initial sale will have to be, say, 50,000 units warranted for 10 years. Then after a year installing those units, the power company can propose a rate structure for them The Utilities Commission may nix the whole project, or ask for more research.

The other problem with current market structures and demand limiting approaches is that no one likes their power company. They spend half the year cursing them. They feel that the standards of reliability, built upon keeping an incandescent bulb lit, do not really describe the house that too regularly, they come home to find with the electronic devices 12:00 flashing. Each month the local power company includes with their bill statements about their quality, and an advertisement for a service that, for an added fee, will come with a guarantee that they will not destroy my home electronics again. Why would I, as a consumer, trust them to get further into my house?

GridWise, instead, imagines an intelligent home or office negotiating with the intelligent grid. The agent doing the negotiation may be in my home, or may be with a third party who negotiates for several homes. Those negotiations may be based upon price, or upon my personal interest in green power, be it renewable, or carbon-free, or habitat-safe. Whatever I want.

The other big part of GridWise is across the board Time-Of-Day billing. This will go beyond virtue, beyond social acquiescence, to let people find the real value in load shifting. Value means different things. In open source circles, they say “Free like in Speech, or Free like in Beer”. Well, finding value is similar. Thirty-day cost avoidance, generating a lower aggregate rate, is something less. Perhaps this is “Free as in Pepsi Free”. But GridWise finding value in immediate market decisions is readily visible cash. Live Dutch auctions to shed load are cash that is visible. *That* is finding real value.

Finding real value means people will spend real money to find it. Individuals spending real money bring the power of markets to bear on innovation. Markets free adoption and mean rapid innovation. And that is the real gem of GridWise AC.

To HAVE and to Have Not

I was talking to someone today who argued, passionately, that if a protocol did not let you get to all the details, then it was irreparably badly designed.

This is wrong in several ways. If a public protocol that exposes systems to people from another domain, it is a security problem. It is harder to use because it has unnecessary complexity. It may be just too hard to use for most purposes.

Reaching for an example, I come to HAVE, the Hospital Availability Exchange. As I understand it, HAVE is a web service that makes waiting lines visible to people outside the hospital.

Imagine a scenario with an ambulance driver performing triage. He picks up the first patient and quickly decides “We’re going to need an MRI for this one.” MRI waits can be several days in some hospitals at some times. Using HAVE, the ambulance driver determines which of several hospitals within five miles has the shortest wait for an MRI.

Imagine someone had insisted that HAVE had to expose all the details. Perhaps have it include the patient scheduling, or diagnostic details. Letting anyone use such a HAVE would probably be a HIPPA violation, exposing the patient’s personally identifiable health information.

Instead, the group working on HAVE wisely limited it to some surface details. Those details are fully adequate to meet the needs of determining availability of service. Even with vigorous hacking, it is unable to reveal inappropriate information because HAVE does not include the detail.

By creating a limited protocol, the creators of HAVE created a useful protocol.

In the same way, advocates of building control protocols who want to be able to perform all functions with an enterprise function simply get thing wrong. In the same way, advocates of Power Grid protocols who want full CIM (Computer Information Models) for each house get it wrong. Such details would make the protocols to difficult and nuanced to use. They would inappropriately expose detailed inner process information to those either who do not know how to use that information, or who do not have sufficient expertise to use that information well. Either of these is a risk.

Enterprise protocols should stick to the surface. It is the nature of enterprise protocols to expose information beyond their domain. Those who know that domain should have enough respect for their own work to occult the details.

Service must trump Process

Today, in North America, very few designers using BIM do anything but structure. If they do design mechanical systems they keep it on the side. Because of this the Energy Model, when made, has little connection to the actual design. As the Mechanical systems have not really been fully designed, the mechanical contractor makes up something as he goes along. The controls contractor varies still further from the design, and creates tags for each sensor point that are not known to the model. This means that Commissioning can rarely be tied to the energy model.

In essence, there is no interface defined, although there is plenty of procedural information. To me this is a problem.

For a good look at a large complex system that defined interfaces (not procedures) across a multitude of systems, many of them proprietary, look to the European Union Seafood Safety System. It scales, and is successful, because it focused primarily on the interfaces, not the internal processes, of its composite parts. A single transaction for them might span a restaurant, a delivery company, a local retailer of seafood, a long distance trucking company, a port-town warehouse, dock operations, a fishing fleet management system, and PDA’s on a boat at sea. You cannot do that while focusing on the internal operations of each step in the supply chain.

My personal interests are in making each building a participant in an open market of energy sources that span a continent. ( www.gridwiseac.org ) At the same time, within a building (or campus) there might be mix of energy generation (PV, wind, Stirling Engine,..) and energy storage (Battery, Hydrogen, water pools, …) systems.

The complexity of such systems is impossible to manage, or orchestrate, or choreograph unless it is hidden behind abstract interfaces. If they are all tied into one tight control system, then we have created a realm wherein the producer of each system cannot be held accountable for performance. We also create a rigid system wherein individual system failures lead to cascading failures rather than simple degradation of overall performance. This means that I want abstract interfaces even between systems in the same building.

With these abstract interfaces in place, one could add new systems as new technologies become available. I can swap in substitute systems without re-programming the others. This intensifies competition between these large systems by reducing the friction on the transaction of switching from one to another in an existing facility. This competition is at the heart of what the new market structures

If we make these abstract interfaces discoverable, the we can easily imagine a competitive market of agents that can find and interact with these building systems as well as with the business processes (or life preferences, if in a home) of the building inhabitants. Those agents could interact with the power grid and live energy pricing on the basis of a single building. As the abstraction level grows, the agent could be located outside the building, to bid aggregate power use for an industrial combine, or for a portfolio of homes with either similar desires (I want all wind power. I want a carbon-neutral mix. I want the cheapest power available.) or complimentary power use patterns.