Secure this Building!

There’s an old story told in military circles that illustrates the problems of discussing security. Each of the three forces was told to secure a building. The army arranged for a platoon to set up a perimeter guard around the building. Troops surrounded the building, and let no one out. The Navy sent in the Marines, who took possession of the building, searched it room by room, and set up a guard at all of the entrances so no one could come in. The Air Force contacted a procurement officer, who negotiated a three year lease on the building.

That’s the problem with security. Everyone knows what they mean when they say it, and no one asks what anyone else means.

Proper security is an absolute requirement for modern building control systems. Modern systems have added IP communications, the standard protocol of the internet and sit on the corporate network. If we are going to allow enterprise programmers, and even tenants, to interact with embedded control systems, security is the key. Security is specified as a requirement in every new construction job.

When I ask for security, though, I never know what I am going to get. I am also pretty sure that I will never be asked. Will I get the Army, the Navy, or the Air Force?

Straining the analogy, I can pretty much assume I will get the Army version. Building systems put in perimeter security; nothing gets in or out. To my mind, perimeter security is the most expensive kind.

Perimeter security is too expensive. The control system costs what is costs. I get some minimum value for that cost. Perimeter security means that I will never get more than that minimal value because I cannot get to the systems and their information. Perimeter Security is too expensive because it is the hard way to accomplish results; if I want the system to talk to no one, it is far cheaper and more secure to cut a door into a wall than it is to lock that door carefully. Perimeter Security is insecure because it is not as secure as no access at all.

Until building systems define higher level functions for network access, any security beyond perimeter security indefinable. What does secure access to a temperature setting mean? How to I define the proper access for a C-Level executive, for her administrative assistant, and for a building tenant, if all I have is tags and sensor readings, never defined. IF those tag reading turn into the lobby thermostat, or the building security schedule, then perhaps we have some way to talk about security.

I want better security. I want to have serious discussions about what better security means. But first, we need to define what is being secured.

Big Decisions and Big Process

I hear arguments that electricity is too important to leave to markets. The tasks are too large. The complexity is too great. The mandate of universal service is too important. In fact, so the argument goes, the long term risk to society is so large that we cannot trust or rely individual actors. We need to involve of society to make the best decisions for us all. This argument is coherent, engaging, and false.

Time and time again we see examples of misallocation of economic resources toward stasis and incidentals and away from service and innovation, and thereby away from conservation and reliability as well.

In Mission Hills, San Diego, the homeowners opted in the 1950’s to impose a fee on themselves to put their power lines underground. The decision was largely aesthetic, rather than engineered, but even so the homeowners voted to pay an additional fee on each month’s bill until sufficient funds were available. Twenty years later, enough money had been paid in. Forty years later, after being ignored by the Utilities Commission, lawyers became involved.

During the 80’s, the power quality in Mission hills slid from poor to worse. Long-time denizens would share complaints about short black outs and random brown-outs at back-yard cook-outs. Electronics equipment in the neighborhood had a short life. Despite charging a premium for premium distribution, the neighborhood got the same old service. If regulated monopolies and utilities commissions were attuned to fairness, and service, and meeting agreements made, Missions Hills would have had its distribution system fixed a generation earlier. Instead they are focused on stranded costs, and historic rates of renewal, and, presumably, hoping that the customers would never complain, so they failed to meet their agreements.

If we were considering some sort of larger societal concerns, we would allocate energy supplies so as to build redundancy and to pay rational heed to the physical demands of each energy source. For example, coal requires advanced technology and significant transportation infrastructure. Natural gas can be delivered easily, economically, and cleanly to point generation sites like the home or neighborhood. New low maintenance small-scale generation technologies like fuel cells and old efficient uses as heating can be reasonably distributed to the home. If regulated monopolies and utilities commissions were able to look to the future, they would demand that central plants be coal, and reserve gas for distributed generation. They don’t, because they are always looking back.

Yesterday I heard on the news that the local power company is buying light bulbs and selling them at a discount through the local Lowes home improvement stores. Despite the huge improvements that an intelligent grid would bring in reliability, and in economy, the path that the Utilities can find in current markets is to subsidize purchases by the middle class through a selected vendor. Getting points on some sort of green scorecard has trumped attention to the power companies own domain.

Numerous new technologies are close to market for the provision of light more efficiently; if there were a cogent argument for central selection of the next lighting technology, the rational decision time would be a year out. If we, as a society, were looking at the big picture, we would look at incentives to steer some of those decisions toward the newer technologies that can work on DC. We certainly would not lock in on fluorescent bulbs, and the heavy metal waste disposal problems they pose.

Adaptation and innovation are critical to meeting emerging energy needs. Neither of these is attained without vision and neither is attained without risk. Public processes have a keen vision focused backward on the last problem. New technologies constantly reduce the value of historical cost. If you eliminate all completion on price, then there will be no competition on service. This is true whether the service is rendered through new definitions of quality, or through differential amenity, or in innovation.

The public management of “natural” monopolies demands a focus on only on cost, and none on opportunity. New approaches like IT-based demand smoothing will make huge game-changing differences, ones we cannot make looking back. We cannot afford to ignore the dollars in opportunities, even though preparing for them may cause us to abandon the pennies we spent a decade ago.

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.

oBIX – Why have an Enterprise Interface to Control Systems?

What would it be worth to you if building systems could respond to the enterprise?

What if your building could respond to you and your tenants? What if your building was responsive to normal business processes, so that a simple invitation to reserve a room on Saturday set the operating rules for the air conditioning and security systems? What if your tenants did not have to hunt down facilities staff? What would that be worth to you?

What if you could tell how well your building was operating, without expensive on-site expertise? What if you could eliminate unnecessary maintenance? What if your building could tell you when it needed a filter change, so you replaced only on request? What if building system problems were fixed before your tenants knew about them. What would that be worth to you?

What if you could share operating information with off-site experts who would tell you what to fix before it breaks? What if you could find air conditioning problems in the spring instead of on a hot summer’s day? What if these systems could track live energy pricing , so every repair recommendation included the additional cost of not making the repair. What if you could schedule repairs to never inconvenience your tenants. What would that be worth to you?

What if you could tell your building when the repair contractor was coming? What if your access control system could let him in, using his company badge? What if your building logged the time he arrived and left, and f that log were linked to the original service order? What would that save you, in time, in billings, and in staff?

What if your building could negotiate with the power company, buying electricity when it was cheapest, and storing it later use? What if you could disconnect from the grid when prices were high? What if you could offer your tenants power that would not damage their computers, not damage their equipment. What if you could sell energy options back to the power company, and get new revenue from your building? What would that be worth to you?

For the last five years, representatives from major buildings controls companies have worked on an enterprise -ready interface for embedded building control systems. Building control systems include all the intelligent engineered systems in a building, whether HVAC, Access Control, or Medical Gas Distribution. These systems are traditionally invisible and uncontrollable, using protocols little known in the IT world.

Four years ago, oBIX (open Building Information Xml) became a committee of OASIS, (www.oasis-open.org), the premier open standards organization for the enterprise. oBIX 1.0 provides low level access to essential control system functions. oBIX 1.0 offers normalized access to system watches, points, events, and histories. Building systems are no longer invisible and uncontrollable.