Ontological requirements of the service oriented grid

We will be unable to scale out the integration of the power grid on a continental scale, to support the diversity of systems currently installed using process oriented integration. We must support even more diversity, from technological innovation as well as from business innovation to achieve the new markets in energy today’s challenges require.

While simple demand-response capable systems provide great aggregate value to the grid, the small-scale benefits they offer seldom make a compelling interest to the home or commercial building occupant. This limits new energy scenarios to small advantages that can be achieved by static regulation. If we enforce participation through regulation, we will only harvest the lowest of hanging fruit and encourage cheating and “malicious compliance.” To do more, we must increase the value proposition for building and home owners. This means either decreasing the costs of integration, offering more value for integration-capable systems, or both.

Service oriented coordination is opens up new avenues for energy re-allocation and conservation in the home and business. Service orientation solves the diversity of systems challenges while providing the building owner/operator with new means of controlling power use. A key challenge to establishing such services is common semantics to enable conversations about energy use and system performance. If properly defined, these semantics enable the owner to recapture investments in performance and interactivity through non-operations business processes, reducing the barriers to adoption.

The energy grid itself must acknowledge its roles as a service provider in the systems architecture of each building owner and operator. To be a full participant, business negotiations between building and grid must beyond availability and burn rate to a fuller model of cost, and scarcity, and projected reliability. To create discoverable markets in power, power source semantics must be mappable to ontologies of value that are relevant to the energy purchaser. In other words, we must move beyond mere price signals of demand-response. The integration client must be able to decide whether to make or buy based upon projected quality and reliability. Markets that allow the building to discover and negotiate with power sources must also enable the building to negotiate for which kind of energy sources.

 Electric cars and their batteries are popularly cited as a solution to problems of peak shaving and energy demand smoothing. Wholesale adoption of electric cars would instead increase peak demand volatility in many scenarios. To achieve the hoped-for benefits of electric cars, drivers, automobile producers, and the power grid must develop a common vocabulary for use in the acquisition, storage and use of power. This semantics will be critical to the e-commerce underpinnings of electric car adoption.

 To achieve full realization of the potential benefits from the new energy technologies, we must move beyond process oriented interactions to service orientations that accept diversity and enable technical as well as business innovation. These approaches will require the development of ontologies around building-based and grid-based services so that each can be full participants in enterprise and consumer interactions.