Energy Demand Management and the Home

The argument is over. People have claimed that the home is a market where time of day pricing and user control will not work. That claim is false. Dave Chassin has proved it. It is time to let the state utilities commissioners know and begin planning new business models.

People in the home won’t pay attention. They need the big utility to help and control them or we will never save power in the homes. They must be subjected to programs with ugly names such as “Load Curtailment” and “Demand Control”. The Big U will turn off your water heater when it needs to. It’s for the best.

Dave Chassin is a staff scientist in Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Energy Science and Technology Division. He has more than 20 years of experience in computer applications for the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry. Dave’s work centers on non-linear system dynamics and high-performance simulation and modeling. Recently he has focused on the emergent econo-physical behavior of large scale engineered infrastructure systems. At Connectivity Week, Dave delivered a preliminary reported on the GridWise Olympic Peninsula Testbed project.

The results were unambiguous. The project let homes set on a daily basis a balance between comfort and economy. During times of high demand, this would result in higher prices for each aliquot of comfort. I won’t go into the details, because I would get them wrong. Dave was cautious about what it meant because he is an engineer and a scientist and will not speak beyond what he knows from the numbers. But the graphs and curves were clear. In aggregate and in detail, they showed that the home user could and would choose energy strategies that result in improved power distribution dynamics as well as reduced energy use.

Dave will study the details for a while. But anyone who saw, knows. We know that the home can be managed the user better than it can be controlled by the utility. Better for the Economy, better for distribution dynamics.

So, what business model will you develop today?

Thanks to the Council

Thursday night I got an award from the GridWise Architectural Council, for introducing the vision of GridWise AC to standards groups, and the standards and architectures of e-business to GridWise. I stumbled through something, said something tongue-tied, I don’t know. I knew it was coming, but I was still caught off guard when it happened.

What I did not say was thanks. Thanks to a group of intelligent vital people who are working very hard to make things better. Thanks very much to a group that may do more to enable the greening of the buildings industry, and the reduction of carbon, than any 500 ”leaders” you are likely to read about in the popular press. Thanks to a group of people that understands the wisdom and creativity of markets, and wants to set them loose on the toughest problems of our time.

All analysis of GridWise suggests that it can accomplish huge reductions in the requirements for power in the US by shifting power allocation during the day. The part that is exciting is that these benefits are only the first generation. With innovation and incentive yoked together, there will be secondary changes driven by the first generation. Near-Grid housing, Zero Carbon Buildings, and many other initiatives will all be birthed by the initial changes to the economics and operation of power generation.

Thanks, gang, for letting me participate.

Quick Update from Connectivity Week

This is a quick post to share the most important phrase of the day.

In one of this monrning's plenary sessipons, Peter Kelly-Detwiler (or PKD as I have learned he s referred to) uttered the phrase "Option Call on the customer". Wow.

Peter is with Constellation Energy.  As they manage power for their customers, they have to negotiate hour by hour, minute by minute, where is the power coming from. THey always have a portfolio of power, and know the expensive dirty power sources they may need to buy power from. In other words, they are always tracking where there next kilowatt/hour of energy may be coming from, where they may need to place an option call.

 Often the greenest call may be a load shedding request from one of their customers, But he doesnt look on this as load shedding, he looks at this as givining him back energy that he can re-sell elsewhere. In other words, each load shed event is, to him, equivalent to power production. And he may need an option to buy power production.

An Option Call on the customer.

 More later, as the conference is proceeding, but this is good stuff.

Can’t Build to Design

Building Controls don’t work because they were never designed. That was the recurring theme, both in and out of sessions, for Tuesday at BuilConn. Speaker after speaker repeated this, both on and off the podium.

Alan Edgar, of the executive board of NBIMS, came to BuilConn yesterday. He attended the Buildings 2.0 sessions in the morning, and was very interested; I did not, as I was talking to an “Experiences with Web Services” session. He seemed to enjoy it, and though it needed to be a perspective in NBIMS. The complement, of course, is that currently, controls are not.

I have long relied on a prop to explain the problems of control systems design. At any moment on the UNC campus, there are numerous capital projects under way. On any day, I can walk into the construction plan room and pull out one of the current plans. I turn to the Mechanical controls page – the one with three panes on it. There is one sheet for each floor, and the three panes are (1) a tag list for the controls, (2) a schematic for the controls and (3) a sequence of operations for the controls.

This is a reliable prop, because, I have never yet had to go to a second building. Flipping through the floors, it become obvious, even to cursory inspection, that these are not right. The tag lists will prove to have been developed for the 4^th floor and cut and paste onto the others, even onto the radically different first floor and lobby. Perhaps the Sequence of Operations will describe some system that is clearly not the one in the schematic. There is always some gross error – I have never had to go to a second building.

But perhaps the University of North Carolina is uniquely cursed? Last night, I talked

In conversation with an engineer who was doing a retro-commissioning project at another university. After collecting data on 47 buildings, he began trying to understand the pattern to the building’s consistent bad performance. The common thread? Not one of them had more than a partial design.

There is no excuse for this. A system design for a control system should modeled up front as part of the design, The schematic, the SOO, and the tag list should be 3 views of the underlying model. If a “designed” system does not meet this low bar, that of internal consistency, one has to wonder if it was designed at all.

If we do not design the buildings we send out to be built, we will never get to the next bar of designing them well. If we do not design them well, then LEEDS, Green Buildings, and Zero Carbon Facilities are a sham. If they are a sham, the design profession has been overcharging a lot of people.

Consider that the next time you walk into a “Green” building.