New Daedalus

Several precise correspondents disagreed with my characterization of the ideal interface on every energy widget as a single Business to Business B2B economic interface. Some argued for Business 2 Machine (B2M) and some argued for Machine to Machine (M2M). A few argued for P2B (Person to Business). I think they all make it too complex, and limit the opportunity for new business models. B2B is meant to liberate new markets, new market entrants, new trading models.

Starting with today’s Automated Demand-Response (ADR) interfaces, we get more benefits as we move them from M2M to B2B. People want to be in charge of their own property, so a Business inside the building puts the occupant in control. A business inside the building can only express their willingness to participate with an offer or bid. As not all bids are winning bids, the energy supplier outside the building must select a group of offers that clears the market and inform the winning and losing bids. To my eye, that is a B both inside and outside the building.

Remember, the biggest Demand Response on record is when ALCOA furloughed an entire plant for the summer to sell power at high prices to California. Business response always has more options than M2M.

The homeowner, or the homeowner’s agent needs the same opportunities to bid as does the business. The homeowner’s bid may be subsumed into a larger bid, say, a bid by the green neighborhood homeowner’s association. For the utility, a single home, a row of townhouses, or a neighborhood should all have the same external interface. Clearly the neighborhood and the business should have all the same options. This means that the homeowner’s agent, no matter how small, has a business interface on its outside.

Homes may sell power to other homes in the neighborhood. This may be generator power after the storm, or solar power in the afternoon. There may be competition between my neighbor and the big utility for my business. Homes need the same selling interfaces as the larger grid.

I may even have an economic competition inside my home. If I have told my washer not to run, or my car not to charge, until the price is less than a target, that might be a simpler market interface. One source of power for the car or washer may be in-home generation. Perhaps I can charge from that whenever I wish. Or perhaps I am able to sell my local generation back to the grid for higher than the target price, so the washer sits idle.

Perhaps my car batteries and my home batteries have their own rules. Each wants a little bit of storage, say for a 20 mile drive, or to run off-grid for 1 day. Each of them also could charge up for longer. Perhaps the car and the house will bid the price higher when they are below these minima. Perhaps the house will sell stored energy to the car, but only at a premium.

Variable pricing makes economic sense out of local storage. Local storage markets grow naturally. Local storage removes Grid reliability arbitrage tax on unreliable sources. This transfers larger portion of dollars (less fee for T&D) to the unreliable producer...Local storage will grow, but only when it is priced properly.

Eco was in economics before eco was in ecology. We can have a vibrant market ecology at every level of the grid, from the largest scale to the neighborhood microgrid, to inside the house.

The Sunday New York Times has some nice introductory material on smart homes. They skate quickly be prices to devices and the smart grid. They write about putting the homeowner in control. They even show several home panels.

With only one screenshot, I cannot comment on the systems described. One looks more like a home theater console with a dishwasher added. Another allows scheduling of building systems, but gives no sign of interaction with and feedback from the power grid. Admitting that it might be based upon selection bias, the Echelon screen is the most interesting to me.

The Echelon product, shown above, is the only one that clearly indicates the economic aspect of each device. What it does not show is the effect of variable pricing on costs. What we need is Echelon (or someone else) sharing information like that in a standard format that consumer programmers can interact with. By consumer programmers, I mean that I want to see consumer oriented interfaces develop for the PC, for the Mac, for the iPhone, and for the Android.

Schedules, electrical use, and services are the important abstractions. Standards, and interoperability

What’s more, these standards are then at the level of business interactions. Such a standard is ready for third party management. Such a standard is ready for driving maintenance by value.

Check out the article, in the references below…

My hydronic system failed this summer. Spare parts for the boiler, still more efficient than most on the market, are no longer available. It supported a hot water heater and two zones in my house. I am splitting out the water heater, moving to a tankless system. While the best boilers haven’t gotten any better, the price for an equivalent efficiency boiler has gone way down; the incentive to put everything on one boiler is gone.

I would like to add one or more zones to the house. The upstairs of this old house, with bedrooms and bathrooms, has never been conditioned. With the kids away, half of the bedrooms are only rarely occupied. I like keeping the rooms for a few more years, as long as kids show up for various holidays and vacations.

There are two frustrations with this process.

The first is the contractors. They arrive, already knowing which product they will install, based upon manufacturer incentives. The manufacturers seem to be responding to energy prices by offering dealers incentives on big systems, much as auto dealers are offering incentives on SUVs and Hummers. I tell them what I want over the phone, and warn them what the criteria will be; even so, they waste my time and their own. They decide the best fit based on incentives before they look at the space, they push the incentives, and they wonder why they leave without a contract. I cannot even imagine why they think I will accept fewer zones in twice as much space. Until the installers move beyond this attitude, home building system performance will remain abysmal. The worst part is that this must work, as these jokers stay in business.

The second issue is how little intelligence the control systems have. The home market appears to be dominated by systems that pretend to have taken the digital age into account. The thermostat is a nice flat screen. The time of day functions are easy to access. The actual control sequences are not as sophisticated as my last installation, which was constructed out of a complex nest of relays to squeeze extra energy out of each cycle. If this is what the American control companies are offering through their dealers, they deserve to lose to the Chinese.

The third issue is flexibility. I have been offered many controllers, but no flexibility in any of them. Single purpose systems are offered with different controllers than hybrid systems. Adding a third energy source is yet another decision. Each representative who comes by seems surprised when I ask for flexibility, and explain that it would be far too expensive. Based upon what their dealers, the home comfort system companies have not learned the essential lesson of the digital age, that simple product lines with large production runs are cheaper, and therefore multi-purpose re-programmable controllers will be cheaper. Every brand (and I have seen them all) is done a disservice by its local distribution.

So what do I think a standard, flexible controller would offer?

A home system should support hybrid systems, with enough abstraction so that multiple fuel sources are supported. A standard controller would balance the price and availability of each energy source installed to provide heating and cooling. It is common for systems to support an outside set-point to change from, for example, a heat pump to a gas pack. A proper system would tune itself, and be able to suggest what that outside set-point should be.

It should also be able to accept prices. For now, there is no live energy pricing in my area; I should be able to enter the price from my last electric bill, and the price from my last gas bill, and let it suggest another cutover point. If I add a thermal store, I should be able to include that in the same algorithm. It should not matter if the thermal store is driven by time of day prices and pre-heating (or cooling) or by a solar thermal unit. If I add photovoltaics, the system should be able to understand the availability and pricing of that as well. The system should be live pricing ready, ready to receive live price signals for any of the energy sources when they become available in my area. Clearly there should be a means to upgrade the system to support ADR (automated demand response signals) when they come to my area.

There is no reason for this to be more expensive. The controllers they are selling already have enough muscle power. The interface and system logic, while more extensive than today, would be less extensive than the multiple product lines I am being offered each evening.

Until the control vendors and home automation vendors offer products like this, than it is a sham they provide any sort of sustainability or energy control. If they are offering products like I want, than they should support hot lines to report the local dealers who besmirch their names with poor proposals. Like GM, sitting fat and happy on the no competitors assumption of generations ago, they will slow lose their customers and their companies.

And if you think the products are available, here in central Carolina, let me know. I will write that up later….

Building systems do not often produce useful information because they usually serve up concrete data, not abstract information.

Data is that annoying stream of consciousness woman who sat next to you on the bus. “Now my arm itches. Look at that girls over there; didja ever see a dress like that. I have something in my shoe. That man is looking at me funny. My nose itches. I hope I don’t miss my stop. I wonder if the fish at the store will be fresh. The fish last week was not fresh. My bra is uncomfortable.”  You really can’t do much with data, unless you know a lot about its source.

Information conveys something that is actionable. This means that all of the background details have been stripped away and you are presented with something simple, something that offers a choice.

Right now, there is great concern about information and choice about energy as a matter of national policy. Many measures are being presented as the basis for policy and law. Social and editorial arguments are being made about metrics and information. One element I am thinking of is, is fleet mileage and miles per gallon (MPG).

Richard Larrick and Jack Soll have just published a study of decision making using the MPG standard on cars. They have concluded that when presented with multiple choices, people usually make the wrong one when presented with MPG, and indicate that people would make much better decisions if presented with GPM, (or perhaps Gallons per 100 Miles).

You see, if we can move 10% of our automobile fleet driving SUVs from 12 MPG to 14 MPG, we will have a much greater effect on total gas used than if we move a different 10% of our fleet from 38 MPG to 44 MPG, assuming both segments drive the same miles. My readers are a numerate bunch – do the math; it is bet to upgrade the least efficient vehicles. People presented the same information expressed in terms of Gallons per 100 miles, have a much greater tendency to make the correct choice.

Now if everyone switched to driving 44 MPG cars, it might be better still, but that is not likely to happen. The people who sneer at hybrid SUVs may be off the mark, because there may be a lot more value for society in hybrid SUVs than there is in hybrid coupes.

Even though it grieves me, as a Carolina boy citing work from economists at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke, I recommend checking out the article in the June 20 issue of Science.

Regular readers know that I am interested in developing simple numbers to represent building performance and service provision. This study provides a caution. Even if we get the variables correct, deciding which is the numerator, and which the denominator may be critical…

Many problems of sustainability stem from costs that are invisible or are ignored. Building performance is rarely managed as building control systems are rarely accessible. As long as building systems are invisible and uncontrollable, then they will only rarely be operated with more than minimal efficiency.

We are just completing a multi-year project at UNC in exposing building control systems using ecommerce protocols. We called this system the Enterprise Building Management System (EBMS).

We had hundreds of existing buildings, each with its own low-bidder installed systems.

Most solve such complexity by opting for sole source acquisitions. Some areas, however, have special purposes that demand a special solution that may not be available from a sole source. In any case, we were starting with a substantial installed base. Merely achieving a traditional sole source solution applied to hundreds of buildings would take decades to complete, and cost far more than our budget.

We placed each system securely in its own sandbox, keeping the low level protocols off our network while exposing web services interfaces to operations staff and our customers. Our central monitoring and operations, based upon open source software, can now interact with systems from each vendor. Its interface is exclusively the web browser, and we have used it, and its graphics, on devices ranging from PCs to iPhones. We are planning to introduce these interfaces to the wider campus, faculty, and students.

While we were planning EBMS, I recognized we needed a new model for interactions with building systems, to open them up to the interaction with business operations, and make their operation visible to building occupants, to students, and to the public. Low level standard protocols such as BACnet and LON and proprietary vendor protocols require deep integrations while shielding information from the non-elect. Even when based on low level standards the supervisory systems are proprietary and without programming interfaces.

Five years ago we decided to move oBIX to OASIS for standards development. We lost several members of the team at the time, members who wanted to develop the standard within the traditional building system community. Web services are the protocols used for business-to-business interactions, but not all web services are usable by business or e-commerce. OBIX uses ecommerce style interfaces so that business programmers with normal skill-sets can interact with buildings.

The approach opens up systems to market competition and innovation. Each building system can be chosen based upon performance and functional fit, rather than compatibility to installed base. We anticipate this will help us see more rapid improvements in the future.

With this work in place, we are now moving forward to more exciting opportunities that our open interfaces create. We are working with the Registrar to schedule building operations around actual use, exchanging information using the same protocols used to schedule meetings by email. This will enable us to schedule heating cooling tied to actual building use. We are opening up environmental monitoring information to building users. The data center can see the building’s operating posture. Archeology can see each collection's environmental conditions.