New Daedalus

One of the edgier concepts in computing has been the Personal Area Network, the network that surrounds a person. Seemingly way out there, the PAN is already surprisingly pervasive. What we need is the Personal Area micro Grid to go with it.

I first saw a PAN in an IBM proof of concept in the mid 1980’s, in which a small computer hidden in the heel of a shoe used body conductivity and perhaps sweat, for all I remember, to transmit information, Wearers of the shoe were able to exchange contact information by means of a simple hand-shake. This demonstration was half creepy, and have Maxwell Smart.

Today’s PANs are less exotic. Point to point networking between Bluetooth headsets and personal devices, whether they be phones, PDAs, or music players, make up the bulk of systems. The occasional user has even figured out how to share contacts phone-to-phone, or PDA to PDA.

Niche applications are creeping in to expand the PAN. When my son Josh worked in the Cleveland Clinics spine center, he described wired interfaces enabling people limited remote control of their own paralyzed bodies. With paternal sensibilities raised, I noticed engineering grads building open source responsive homes for the handicapped, using Bluetooth receivers cannibalized from old headsets.

Many people carry a surprising number of electronic devices with them every day. Charging them up requires a rats nest of different chargers. These chargers are as cheap as they can be made, and often draw nearly as much whether the device is plugged in or not. Keeping these devices charged throughout the day would keep them unplugged at night, as well as keeping them ready to use.

Meanwhile, personal power generations has slowly been creeping into society. My daughter spent the money from one of her summer jobs for a solar backpack when she was in high school, demonstrating her cred as a math and computer aficionado. Scott eVest markets a solar jacket to go along with the wiring harnesses in their TEC PAN.

But solar is not enough.

Recent reports talk of systems to generate power from kinetic energy. Science reports normal body movement. One system is reported to generate 13 Watts while reducing the effort of walking. Looking like a garden variety knew brace, the system harvests energy while reducing effort. At the end of a stride, a person must exert energy to slow his moving leg. The brace's generator helps slow the leg for the wearer, capturing energy in much the same way that a hybrid car harvests power from braking.

Others are working on bra-based generators. One lab is capturing swing and oscillation in a complex fabric-based generator. Another effort is focusing on piston-like energy capture from the brassiere straps. The [female] engineer note that different women have different power generation potential; I observe that there may be advantages to keeping that iPod set for dance tunes….

Microgrids use local energy production and storage to be self sufficient. The best reliability comes from a mix of technologies, with different performance characteristics. We have just begun to explore that the Personal Area Micro-grid might look like.

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.

There is a fundamental disconnect concerning the systems that manage building performance between what the system integrator can do and what the owner asks for. Building service performance is not handled well during building design because there is currently no accepted way for owners and designers to discuss the services desired and the performance expected for each service in simple general terms. Our construction processes deliver diverse technical systems each discussed using concrete physical attributes whose effects are understood only by those with a deep domain knowledge not often common to either owner or designer, or even to different contractors. This leads to specifying materials and processes rather than results. This is ineffective in defining success after commissioning and into long term operations and maintenance.

New demands that buildings interact dynamically with entities other than the owner and operator will demand better. The provisioning of services will be managed over the lifecycle of the building rather than merely for procedural completeness at building turnover. Three of these external scenarios are emergency management, remote analytics (to support knowledge-based maintenance and operations), and interactive negotiations with power providers.

By formalizing new semantics to enable discussion of building services and their quality, we can create a common basis for discussing service between all actors over the life of the building. The semantics will also provide the groundwork for buildings to interact with actors external to themselves.

As Adam Werbach writes, the new sustainability is about how to harmonize human culture with our relationship to the living world. Building performance, and building value, includes occupant health, and worker productivity, and not mere energy performance. , then energy performance, as well as other values such as occupant health and worker productivity

As I have noted before in this blog, we will be able to recognize success when building owners adopt these semantics to express their own concepts of value in buildings. Tomorrow’s leasing agent will use the semantics of building service performance to distinguish his properties from others on the market. Commercial real estate brokers will incorporate these measures into the CIE (Commercial Information Exchange); the measures will be reflected in commercial real estate prices.

At that point, no regulation or moral suasion will be needed at that point to drive better buildings.

When I started this blog, I chose a system that was flexible enough to do most of what I wanted, yet constrained enough not to tempt me to tweak the site instead of writing.

Several of you have reported some difficulties with comments. Some do not know that you can comment. Others think all comments are for me only, and never appear. I would like to make this portion of the interaction easier.

Next Monday, there is a new release of the blog software, one that is supposed to make it much easier for me to adjust these features. So, I am waiting until then. If you would like me to consider some change, or you just cannot see how something works, please drop a comment (at the bottom of each post) and I will consider it when I make the changes after Monday.

Thanks

tc

I am reading more and more about how close algal biodiesel is, perhaps a year or two away. I will reserve my judgment on ship dates, but note that there are claims that algae can produce oils suitable for making biodiesel out of without genetic engineering. I am not as concerned with genetic modifications as some are, but do acknowledge that the presence of such modifications would concern others and throw barriers up in the way of permitting.

Biodiesel algae seems to grow best in glass, where it can be exposed to maximum sunlight. It works best when micronutrients can be bubbled through it, although one plan seems to rely on osmosis through a filter from a waste stream.

But what I like best is that this algae (or any algae) seems to grow best when carbon dioxide is bubbled through it. Most of any oil is, of course, carbon and hydrogen, with a little oxygen perhaps thrown in. A good source of carbon is an essential fuel for plants. This is why plants in general, more popularly the rain forest, and more importantly, sea algae are such important consumers of CO2 and producers of oxygen.

Hmmmm – so biodiesel algae would work best with a ready source of carbon dioxide….

One of the fantasies I am enjoying most right now is algal scrubbing of CO2. I do not recall if I ran across this somewhere, or came up with it myself when tossing and turning on a late night. So here’s the deal.

Coal plants scrub their smoke stacks of any chemicals that may be harmful to algae. The result is then bubbled through a huge series of algae vats, which consume CO2 and release oxygen. The oil producing algae is harvested to produce biodiesel. The carbon in the biodiesel would, eventually, end up in the air, but not before another trip, through the nation’s cars and trucks.

Because of the scrubbing, coal becomes one of the cleanest ways to produce energy. The high costs of scrubbing are paid for by biodiesel production.

What’s your energy fantasy?