Looking where it is easier to see

An old joke tells of a man looking for a small lost object of some value, let’s say a pocket watch. A friend comes by, sees him searching in a barnyard, and decides to help. For an hour they search high and low, but with no success. The friend asks the man exactly where he last saw the watch. “I dropped it in the hay in the barn”. The friend, somewhat agitated, asks then why they have been wasting their time looking out in the yard. The man replies, as if stating the obvious, “It will be easier to see it out here where the light is better.”

For power distribution and management, all the light is shining on the traditional organizations and business models of the power companies. They have the big systems in place. We understand how they are organized. They have familiar models for bringing the one solution into the home. They are also economic rent-seekers committed to existing business models, and these business models do not reward new distributed technologies.

For energy storage, we all know the usual suspects. Lithium batteries. Hydrogen in the sweet by-and-by. Peter Drucker wrote that a new technology must be ten times as good as the old to overcome market position, manufacturing learning curve, and incremental improvements. This makes it hard to bet against solutions that might come from incremental improvements on existing technologies, such as the Firefly lead batteries.

There will not be one big solution, and a few select teams will not solve all problems. Some technologies will come from people working to solve the problems of small niches, in scenarios that do not appear to work for everyone. To anyone looking only at the national or global level, these technologies will appear too flawed or limited for general use. These solutions will never come out of big government energy initiatives. By carefully tending to the special needs of the small sites of early adopters, some of these technologies will suddenly be found to be able to scale.

We need to let a thousand flowers bloom. Open markets provide clear information in ways that regulated industries do not. Innovations will follow information to find problems; one of those problems will be just the manure needed for an unexpected solution to grow strong.

The problems of local energy storage, of site generation, and of efficient demand response will be solved by domain experts, people who have studied harder than most. They will be solved by kooks working in niche markets. They will be solved by end users who are just have their own problem to solve. They will find novel solutions that will appear obvious, once they have developed their solution.

In all likelihood, they will not be looking where “the light is better”.

Bouncer or Prison Guard?

Today’s Chapel Hill Herald has a front page on the value that bouncers provide to the town’s economy. It’s an amusing article written for a weekend when the Football team has a bye. It also set me to musing on security, and how building systems never seem to get it right.

Let’s contrast two beefy guys, each working in security. One works at the worst prison in the poorest state. One is a bouncer at an upscale night club.

The article discussed the many roles that bouncer’s around town play. Sure, they stop fights; the better bouncers noticing them before they happen and have a quiet word with someone's friend before they get out of hand. They check ages on the students who want to enter the bar. They spend some time just being highly visible. They prevent those already drunk from entering the bar and they escort those who, even if non-violent, have had too many out. They call cabs. In other words, they add value to the bar and restaurant experience for everyone but the troublemakers, and keep the troublemakers from getting into trouble.

When I was in college, it was popular to go clubbing in New York City (still scary in those days). The better Disco’s would always have a line. How did we know they were better—because of the large bouncers keeping people out. Beautiful people and celebrities would go right in; others would wait in lines that never moved. Even the people who waited in line somehow enjoyed the wait more, because they could watch the A-List go in, and returned to Jersey or Peoria with a story to tell.

If we wore tuxes and evening gowns, and arrived as a group with a good balance of men and women, we always got in. It was important, though, to swarm en masse out of the cab or cabs, arms linked and laughing. Somehow, the same effort that got us by the bouncer meant that we were already poised to have a good time, and to enhance the good time of others in the Club. This meant that we always had a better time when we stayed in our college town, and went out scruffy and alone to see who was in a club.

The ignored bouncer enhanced the value of the experience for everyone who entered the club. He did this by being aware of the situation and aware of the business goals of the establishment. He understands that he provides a service that enhances and enables the other services of the establishment.

Contrast this with the prison guard in the lowest penitentiary. He enforces a consistent experience on the inmates. He may prevent that prison from being an absolute hell. He does not have permission to make many choices. No one will claim that the guard enhances their time in prison. If he does not protect the inner sections of the prison, as well as the perimeter, things can get very bad in a hurry. He is a hygiene factor, necessary but not desirable.

Every time I talk security with building systems guys (or with power grid guys), they tell me “Sure we have security.” They use HTTPS so no one can read our messages. They require long complex passwords so no one can get in. They never talk about enhancing the services offered by the building. They never talk about letting the right people do the right things easily.

Embedded system security sounds just like that Prison Guard. The problem is, we need that situation aware, service oriented bouncer.

Biological Patterns for Systems Control

Last weekend, Fred Hapgood blogged at CIO magazine about network management and monitoring. He described how current models are hitting a wall of complexity and numbers. Conventional networks, and particularly their management, do not scale gracefully. As networks get larger and more complex their management problems will keep get more difficult even faster and the time scales for solving problems get smaller.

Hapgood points out in his blog that many researchers are now looking toward biological models for management and control. Biology is rich with large networks—protein cascades, gene switching networks, intercellular networks, nervous systems, and whole ecosystems that efficiently organize a large number of unreliable and dynamically changing components. These networks manifest adaptive and robust behaviors, despite the lack of any central management. This robustness and tolerance of diversity is in sharp contrast with man-made networks despite embracing far more individual variation among its nodes.

Hapgood went on to cite recent work primarily from the University of Bologna that tried to develop taxonomy of the modes of biological signaling and how they might apply to intra-node network communications and control. These modes of communications handle increase and loss of nodes well; more important, they degrade well, providing reduced functionality rather than failure. Fred was kind enough to share the paper with me (and I have placed it here).

The paper classifies biological signaling patterns into plain diffusion, reaction-diffusion, proliferation, and stigmergy. It goes on to consider biological entities as instances of object oriented design; and the signals as design patterns. Through simulations and modeling, they demonstrate effective and performant control of large systems. I would have liked the authors to reach for one more abstraction, to consider invoking these patterns in aspect oriented design. It is a fascinating and useful article.

Austrian school economics and developmental biology have long swapped concepts and vocabulary to describe the development and behavior of as complex adaptive systems. I think we are, as Fred suggests, beginning to recognize networked engineered systems as complex adaptive systems with the capability for their own emergent behaviors.

Complex adaptive systems have large numbers of diverse agents that interact. Each agent reacts to the actions of the other agents and to changes in environment. Agents are autonomous, using distributed control and decentralized decision making. Eventually, the dominant interaction becomes the agents interacting with the system environment that was itself created by the agents’ own independent decision making.

In economics, we call the order that arises out of markets emergent self organization. In biology, we call it embryology. In either case, a large scale pattern emerges out of the smaller decisions and interactions. The emergent pattern is not imposed top-down, but rather arises from decentralized agents interacting within bounds of distributed control (or self control if you will).

A characteristic of meta-systems (or systems of systems) that demonstrate self organization is resilience in the face of change, what the economists call adaptive capacity. Market design theory, in the news this week with a new Nobel Prize, is in part concerned with ensuring adaptive capacity.

We are just beginning to apply the concepts of biology and markets to aggregates of engineered systems. In nature, systems that have too many direct interactions become brittle, and break badly. The Cleveland Outage of 2001 could be described as such a shattering, with the cracks extending into Canada and the East Coast. Less control and more heterogeneity in agents may be what we need to acquire resilience in our engineered systems.

How do you buy a Green Volt?

Several readers have written to me contesting the entire idea of Green Power, and buying from the producer of choice. Electrons are Electrons they say. They all come down the same wire. It makes no sense to try to buy green power.

I assume these people are also not participants in the modern economy, and barter for all goods. Money is a way to transfer value between multiple producers of commodities more efficiently than direct trades. I don’t need to accept direct value in turnips for my work. The banking system takes this a step further. I get my dollars and put them in the bank. This allows me to write a check and send it to you. You take that check to some entirely different bank and get cash. Neither of us worries whether your dollars have the same serial numbers that I deposited in the bank.

Buying green power should work in the same way. Green producer puts volts onto the grid. I buy volts from the grid. Electronic transactions mediate these processes. Neither of us needs to worry about the quantum serial numbers on each electron.

There is an old parable about Stone Soup. An itinerate comes to town, and asks not for food, but for a pot and water to make stone soup. He places a stone in the water and begins cooking. Soon he tastes it and proclaims that it is wonderful soup, but would be better if it had some carrots. Overcome by curiosity, one of the townsfolk produces some carrots. In the same way, he soon gets some potatoes, and cabbage, and onions, and so on. All the time he extols the virtues of stone soup.

The problem is, today, the doubters are closer to correct. My power company has a portfolio that they claim is green power. They augment it with power from other sources because there is no way to temporally allocate that green power. I, as the customer, have no way of knowing if they have sold the output of a single windmill several hundred times, or if the price is sufficient to encourage adding more windmills. I am suspicious of paying a premium for green power—it may be just stone soup.

If there were markets, then I could buy green power at a higher price. There are those who would do this just as there are those who buy expensive potatoes at Whole Foods. Because of Whole Foods, there are now many more producers of organic potatoes—and no one suggests that the industrial potato farms should get a share. In the same way, honest markets would incentivize green power far better than do today’s regulated offerings.

Some people see no sense in paying higher prices for such power. Some may even argue that flying organic raspberries in by jet from Chile in February may not actually save the planet. It doesn’t matter. In that market, people have choices, and can buy in accord with their values. These purchasing decisions would be reflected directly in Alternate Power profitability (and thus in Alternative Power investment).

With green power comes some reliability issues. Perhaps I want to purchase reliability assurances from a generator consortium. Perhaps I want to store power locally to tide me over. Either way, markets will offer me solutions if we let them.

We have the technology, today, to make each choice available. We have the technology to make these choices transactive, including support for time of day or dynamic congestion pricing. Installing such technology will be cheaper by an order of magnitude or two than building out the transmission infrastructure of today under the cost recovery innovation-averse regulations of today.

And it will create a market wherein I can choose the green power I want, just as I can choose organic raspberries in February. I won’t need to justify it to a utilities commissioner or to an engineer. I’ll be able to do it because I want to. And it won’t be because I like stone soup.