ZEB – Shifting Power Consumption in Zero Energy Buildings

Today’s building is unable to recognize congestion on the power grid, and so uses power without regard to its scarcity or abundance. Today’s power grid was designed in the 1930’s when there was no way to send signals across the grid. Tomorrow’s grid will know when power is scarcer than demand, and will be able to inform buildings. This information will come in the most traditional form: price.

In the post Zero Energy Buildings Explained, I described buildings able to buffer their demand for energy. We generally call electrical buffers “batteries”; many other technologies can be used. I know one installer of off-grid systems who stores energy in water in bath-tubs in the attic. Buffers require merely that we have some way to save energy for later, and some way to charge up that storage.

These innovative approaches are all driven by introducing actual instantaneous energy pricing. This is similar to the congestion pricing that is now used to reduce traffic in London, and is being discussed for use in New York. In simplest terms, when everyone wants power, it becomes expensive. When fewer people want power, it is cheaper. If you can shift when your building needs power from the grid to times when no fewer people are using it, you save money. If you can provide power to the grid when everyone wants it, you get more money.

There are three ways to you can shift energy consumption from the grid.

1. You can turn off things when power is expensive.
2. You can store energy for later use in buffers (batteries).
3. You can, if your building understands its occupants, push system usage around based upon your needs and current pricing.

We need little technology for the first option. A red light and a siren could tell you to rush around and turn off lights. You could let the power company turn off anything they chose when they choose. A lot of people are stuck at this point. The effect on power with this approach, and with today’s market structures is limited

Two-way communication with the power grid would enable (2) and (3). Live pricing would let you decide how you operate your office or home. If you have some way to talk to all the systems in your home, you can coordinate their performance. (Remember, although I have been obsessing on the grid, this is a blog about oBIX and intelligent buildings…) . Hourly, or better minute-by-minute, energy pricing is a necessary precursor to developing the markets that make these strategies worth pursuing.

An intelligent agent, negotiating on your behalf with the power company and with the building systems will make this less onerous for the consumer, whether home or business, to participate. This agent could run on your home computer, it could run in your data center, negotiating with all the enterprise operations in the office, or it could be outsourced to anyone, not limited to the traditional power companies.

Because there is money to be found with these approaches, there will be money in developing products to better serve these approaches. You, as the owner / operator of the home or office will be able to choose how you participate. Money plus choice means markets, and markets drive innovation.

ZEB - Zero Energy Buildings explained

All the ideas in Zero Energy buildings have been around in some form for a while. The problem is the key elements, such as demand-response, have been centrally controlled. Sign up for this program months in advance, and then the Power Company controls your [water heater]. But what if I want to stay home today? Too bad. Consumers do not want loss of control. This limits participation.

New initiatives are getting closer to changing this. There are now a couple web services protocols for building controls: oBIX and WS-Devices. The newest Windows now is able to discover such services automatically. Soon there will be software to let your PC discover and operate building systems much as they discover printers today. It is not hard to imagine an agent talking to the power spot market, talking down to the systems, reading the electric meter live…

Some of the so-called “Zero Energy” initiatives envision each building supported by multiple on-site energy collection and generation systems. Based upon the building’s operating posture, and the mix of energy sources available, such a building would pull 35% or less of its total energy budget from the grid. If the facility includes local buffering and storage of electrical energy, whether this buffering is in the form of souped-up traditional batteries or new-fangled hydrogen storage, this become viable.

Power comes over the grid as Alternating Current (AC). Power is stored in batteries as Direct Current (DC). Power from the grid must be converted from AC to DC for storage. Before it is used in your home of office, it must be converted back to DC. Power is lost with each conversion. Power from most on-site generation is DC. On-site DC power generation can be stored in those batteries without the losses you expect converting from the AC grid to DC.

If future houses support DC distribution for internal use, then the batteries can become the primary source for the house. Because this removes the loss from converting the DC battery to AC, this effectively increases power stored in the battery with no new storage technology required. Most devices in modern houses are DC anyway. Those little bricks and wall-warts, the rectangular boxes attached to the plug or in the middle of some power cords convert power from AC to DC. This conversion is very inefficient; a third of the power may be converted to heat before it goes any further. The Galvin Power Initiative (www.galvinpower.org) is a good source for the engineering behind this. With appropriate local buffering (batteries), an awful lot of power consumption can be shifted to off hours without loss of occupant autonomy.

Zero Energy Buildings, then, are engineered to be efficient, make some of their power on-site, and shift energy use to when it is cheaper and more plentiful.

Next – Zero Energy Buildings and Shifting Power Consumption

Understanding the full costs of Corn Ethanol

Combining Sugar Protectionism with Corn subsidy created a product searching for a use. Corn syrup came out of nowhere to replace sucrose in thousands of products. Because it is metabolized differently than sucrose, its pervasive use is suspected by many to be a contributor to the diabetes epidemic.

Now this subsidized corn syrup is being priced out of the market amid huge distortions in productions of all crops, as farmers switch crops to take advantage of the subsidized corn bubble. Maybe it is time we just fixed the mess by ending sugar tariffs. Whatever benefits those domestic sugar producers were supposed to get from protectionism was lost when it priced corn syrup into the market in direct competition.

This would aid Caribbean and Central American foreign policy, reduce foreign aid requirements, and improve health (as producers switched away from corn syrup). It would also, of course, free up the crops dedicated to corn syrup for corn ethanol – without requiring subsidies. This might even change the economics of corn ethanol to make sense.

It still wouldn’t make Corn Ethanol useful as a Carbon / Fossil Fuel / Energy Independence policy. Corn production would still use a more fossil fuel than the energy produced. Ethanol would still generate more carbon dioxide per mile than the octane it replaces.

All of this leaves out the truly horrific effects of the spiral of corn and sugar subsidies.

Farmers across the country have switched crops to catch the corn subsidy wave. While the bad effects of Corn Ethanol policy on Mexican tortilla are prices are well known, the external costs of crop substitutions are less publicized. Among the crops that farmers have shifted from are Barley and Hops. There are now spot shortages in both of these markets

Barley and Hops. That’s right, the ingredients of Beer. Small brewers, especially microbreweries are expected to raise their prices across the board this winter to cover the increased costs for these basic supplies.

Bad economics and market interference are an American tradition. But they have gone too far when they mess with the price of beer.

Shedding old habits is the Hardest Task

We can't replace decades of "natural monopoly" regulation overnight without some effort to create new markets. We can’t replace decades of monolithic systems design without constantly re-examining our assumptions. It is going to be hard work to move to agent-based integration at every level. It will take continuing hard work at each transaction surface. The hardest part, though, will be changing the habits of thought.

This is why many of the “lessons” learned from the last round of electrical de-regulation are not very useful. A little de-regulation of the wholesale markets power without allowing new market entrants as buyers accomplishes just a little. A mix of regulated and un-regulated markets just creates gray markets for the pre-existing products. Today’s technologies, when brought to bear on power generation, distribution, and consumption, give us new opportunities, opportunities for markets and opportunities for innovation.

Today, at every surface of electrical transaction, the technology could easily handle open markets. The surfaces are the borders between Generation / Transmission / Distribution / Consumer. With today’s technology, there is no reason why individual consumers should not be able to contract with any generator they wish, whether individually, or through third party aggregators, the equivalent of mutual funds. With today’s technology, there is no reason for local distribution to be owned by the same company that owns the transmission lines – and some good opportunities to be had by separating them.

In the early PC era, common practice and ITS guidance was that computer equipment must be fully depreciated over 5 years. Looking backward at cost instead of forward at value prevented companies from realizing benefits from technological change. By some accounts, the moment when Microsoft seized control of the PC industry from IBM was when Gates realized that IBM was maintaining 286-based systems until fully depreciated. Utilities, with their focus on regulated cost recovery and static efficiency are stuck in the same trap. Until this changes, the electricity industry in the US will never be focused on the value creation and dynamic efficiencies that are the hallmark of every other engineered business in today’s world.

The old model for power markets was vertical integration from generation to consumer regulated as a natural monopoly. Economical microgrids integrating heterogeneous sources and storages methods cast doubt on how natural the monopoly is. Live metering technology with two way communications enable a market at each transition. Intelligent building systems let end users manage their power consumption, in response to their internal needs and to live pricing from the grid. The operations assumptions based around integrated operation, dumb metering, and lack of information are no longer valid.

We will recognize true deregulation of power markets by an increase in end user autonomy and an accompanying increase in innovation. It will enable market models that are nimble, looking to future value rather than back to sunk cost. Future value is dynamic, as it reflects changing consumer tastes in environmental policy, social environment, and in technology. True markets will let new entrants in, seeking to create value in novel ways. The last round of deregulation focused more on freeing up rent seekers, and, for some, escaping from poor [nuclear] plant decisions more than it did on creating any actual markets.

The technology is hard, and will be hard. Skilled engineering will be needed to find the value in new approaches. Great patience and public communications will be required to convince the public and utilities commissions to stay out of the way. But what we will need most is nimble vision to discover the new business models that will unlock innovation.

And the lenses that cloud the vision the most is seeing the way we have always done it.