New Daedalus

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.

This was the post I started writing a couple days ago until the first paragraph just metastasized to fill up the page. Once we have more than a few electric cars in town, then those cars will be potentially the biggest stress on the grid.

The peak stress on the power grid starts during the afternoon, during heat-of-the-day air conditioning and work, but it continues through the early evening. Offices are still turned on. Programmed houses are kicking in with their air conditioning in preparation for their owner’s arrival. Families are cooking dinner. The power grid is still working nearly as hard as it can.

Now let’s posit the electric cars coming home, drained from a day of driving. Perhaps they were doubly drained, used to carry their office buildings during the afternoon brown-out. What will people want from their cars next….

• To sit in the garage overnight, slowly charging.
• To be ready to drive 15 miles in twenty minutes when I go get one last kid from athletic practice.
• To be at least half charged and ready for anything in two hours when the baby sitter arrives and mom and dad head out for an evening on the town.
• To quickly get to at least a 40 mile range in case I get an emergency call from the nursing home, and thereafter just be sure to be ready for the morning commute.
• To get a charge for 15 miles by 8:15 when I head to choir practice at church. Better make that 25 lest we stop for coffee afterward.
• It's two hundred miles to the beach and we plan to take full advantage of the expensive week-long rental by getting there tonight! Kids, grab your bags, we are leaving in 20 minutes. Oh, and the car needs a full quick-charge, no matter the expense.

Gasoline handles all these scenarios. Many of them involve discretionary electricity purchases during the early evening peak. We will never solve these problems at the level of machine-controls. We need time of day pricing, to allocate the scarce resource. Just as many restaurants offer Monday-night specials, we need day-by-day pricing, to encourage people to choose when to schedule their evening activities. Electric cars will require live power pricing, by the minute, and by the day.

Let’s consider driving the electrical car further into our lives, and further into our infrastructure. Sometimes I will want to charge my car when I am not at home. This will require that cars identify who they are at the plug.

• When parking downtown, I want to plug in my car. I may want to choose between a quick visit, for a cup of coffee, and an all-day back-to-school shopping event.
• The Green Garage™ offers locally generated wind power for re-charging at its own special rates that vary with the wind. Having been burned once, I want to check prices before I leave the car.
• When I go over to your house for dinner, I want to plug in. Being a polite guest, I of course want the charges to go onto my own bill.
• The whole family gathers in the next town for Thanksgiving dinner. All cars are drained, and need to recharge over the next five hours except for the college kid, who arrives at the last moment, and leaves as soon as he can. Grandpa decides to overrule all normal agreements and cover all the charges for cars plugged in at his house.

The technical feat of creating amazing batteries and lightweight materials, however astonishing and inspiring, will be undone without the capability easy interaction with the lives and aspirations of those who drive the cars. Electric cars will require powerful intuitive systems interfaces, able to learn their owner’s tastes and habits. These systems can only interact with the power grid through simple standard economic interfaces.

Sustainability initiatives come in four kinds. No harm initiatives accomplish something, but perhaps not as much as their proponents think. Let’s pretend initiatives make people feel good, but with reckless disregard for the actual results. Let’s pretend initiatives, like corn ethanol, may well do more harm than good. Yeah but initiatives would work well, maybe very well, but for some reason, you can’t get there from here. Usable initiatives are the few remaining that are simple, cost effective, and uncontroversial.

DC (Direct Current) in buildings has long been a “yeah but” technology. DC is clearly superior for the home and office. Almost all modern equipment is already DC. We all convert power from AC (Alternating Current) to DC again and again in our homes and offices. Every frustratingly unique power cord, every rectangular wall wart with its glowing green eye is a transformer producing DC power.

Larger appliances, such as televisions and computers, perform the same conversion. The transformers in these devices are hidden inside the cabinet, but the process is the same. There are some exceptions, such as the washer and refrigerator, but certain characteristics of DC motors might push them in to DC in time; already their control consoles are moving to DC. Surely, we already live in DC homes and work in DC offices.

This plethora of AC/DC transformers is a problem. It is easy to get them lost or confused. Each manufacturer selects a transformer as cheap as he can get away with; power, too much power, is lost in every one. That lost power is released in the home and office as heat. In the worst cases, the power used is too much the same whether the device is on, off, or even detached. These transformers have become a significant part of the power use in every building.

If power in buildings was distributed by DC, all these transformers could be eliminated. Better, more efficient, building-scale transformers would convert power from AC to DC more efficiently. Even efficient transformation from DC to AC loses energy, and that energy is lost as heat. In a building-scale transformer, all that heat would be concentrated in one location. In one collection it can be captured and recycled for new use.

Zero net energy buildings come closer fast if we have DC buildings. Solar, wind, and other local power generation technologies produce DC power. Today, that DC power is subject to an AC tax. All DC power must be converted to AC, distributed, and then converted back to DC. This tax may consume as much as 30% of the power available. Even batteries, which store DC power, are subject to this tax. Without the AC tax, every battery that loses just too much energy during storage, is now effectively 30% better without waiting for new technology.

Yeah but...

But buildings are wired for AC. Everything I own today plugs into AC. Even if I could afford to re-wire my building, I cannot afford to replace all the equipment inside. Where would a landlord find someone willing to move into such a building? You can’t get there from here.

I have seen technology that changes all that. Technology that is almost a product enables cost effective installation of a hybrid AC/DC power system in the existing office building. The system uses DC to immediately reduce lighting and networking costs. The solution provides a means to reduce the costs of all building systems that rely on networking. The system can make each room in a building more responsive to the tenant. And the tenant can continue to use his existing equipment as the market matures.

It is time to move DC buildings from the category Yeah But to the category Usable. Migration from AC to DC in commercial space will soon be simple, cost effective, and uncontroversial.

A recent editorial in Baseline used today’s electrical grid as the model for future computing. The article suggested because of the rise of Software as a Service (SaaS), local computing would disappear just as local generation did. Just as the rise of AC allowed generation to move a long way away, the article claimed that SaaS will push all computing off site. Models for computing and generating are converging, but the mode of that confluence is considerably more interesting.

Computing is actually become local. Microwaves and DVD players are not leaving the building. Service oriented computing is moving computing power into building systems and cell phones as well as into the remote data center. Service oriented computing also means that we can now choose the data center that hosts our services, by price, or by reliability, or by security, or even by social conscience as we please.

Today’s electrical grid is more akin to mainframe computing. End users have little choice as to hosting or to distribution, and local options are limited, often by government policy. (DEC originally named their devices programmable data processors, [PDP], to get around federal grant restrictions on buying computers). In the same way. On-site generation is crippled, poor economic information blocks the development of storage technologies, and in so many way, await the “internet revolution” in power.

Ameliorating this, energy is finally about to take advantage of pervasive computing. Electrical power is just beginning to go through the most radical transformation since is became a regulated natural monopoly 100 years ago. Back then, there was no way to measure power usage except by aggregate use between meter readings. All communication was one way by mail (Here is your bill – pay it!). Autonomous systems that can manage power, that can track consumption, that can manage generation are just arriving in the home and office. Today, groups are just sketching out how to use SOA to re-invent the grid; AMI is starting to provide the most critical first service.

Building systems are becoming safely accessible by enterprise programmers using oBIX and other WS-[building systems] variants. The service oriented building is just beginning to be sketched out with telecommuting, hotelling, and carpooling interacting with access control, building ventilation, and tenant QOS agreements. Building access control services feed carpooling recommendations. Worker hotelling reservations inform heating and ventilation strategies. Policy-based security using SCA is extending from IT to building security.

At the same time, the unregulated power providers are starting to define the service oriented grid. Two way communication centered around the new digital meters make time of day pricing and billing possible. Peak shaving standards such as California’s OpenADR (Automated Demand Response) are teaching the regulated electricity providers to exchange web services with the buildings.

On the table are direct purchases from your power provider of choice over the grid. SOA negotiations for pricing and delivery let enterprises opt for power that is cheap, or reliable, or green. Green will be whatever attributes the buyer wants, creating a “Whole Foods” market in generated power.

Service Oriented buildings will be able to remain provably green rather than ostensibly green on the day of delivery. Self commissioning buildings will become perpetual commissioning systems run by autonomous agents, for participants in and scheduled by enterprise operations. SensusMI uses web services to perform remote diagnostics and building analytics to let the building owner understand his costs and control his maintenance decisions. Componentized access control and intrusion detection are being cast through SCA into policy-based physical security, part of the IT security infrastructure. New markets in Service Oriented Buildings are arriving.

TheGreenGrid.org puts the data center in the middle of this transition. Power cost and reliability are factored through web services into the WSDM-based operations console. Building cooling and capacity and electrical distribution capacity are brought in the same way. SaaS combined with prices enable sun-downing, wherein virtual computing follows cheap time of day power prices around the world. Demand/Response, wherein pre-brownout price signals request load shedding, will soon automate the same type of load shifting.

SOA is freeing up power markets to unleash what Fred Krupp has described as “the mother of all venture markets”. SOB meets SOG in a free-for-all of innovation and high-tech investment. It’s all small today, but watch for it to get big soon. Real big. Real soon.

Peter Carbone, Vice President of SOA for Nortel, gave a nice high level talk on the challenges facing a company that grew up with rigid account control and vertical integration in a regulated environment learning to dance in the world of SOA and mash-ups. As markets for building systems are still characterized by rigid account control and vertical integration, and the power grid is still vertically integrated, regulated, and almost complete account control, there are some useful lessons.

Infrastructure convergence was the enabling and driving change for telecommunications. Provisioning telecommunications was long the most difficult task. Over the last decade, the diverse communication infrastructure converged to a single packet-based infrastructure with resulting dramatic simplification of security and reliability. The questions move from “What low level communications do you need” to “What interactive services do you need?”

This evolution changed how Nortel had to think about and market their services. Before the change, Nortel sold vertically integrated applications that were inflexible. As the core technologies converged, Nortel was forced to decompose advanced services into core functions and then plug them back into the new architecture.

Fortunately, decomposing integrated services into core functions looks a lot like defining a service for service oriented architecture. Fundamental telecommunications functions can now be built into enterprise applications without requiring exotic skills are deep domain knowledge.

Skills-based routing and deployment was one example. Peter discussed a SAP integration with critical system causing expensive downtime, emergency part ordering, and synchronizing communication with an outside expert so that the repair personnel, the piece of equipment, and, via telecommunications and real-time identification of the expert on call, the expert’s telepresence were synchronized.

In a similar vein, he discussed abstracting the GPS function from the cell phone to block access in the security system when the phone was in a forbidden zone. Peter gave many more examples and you can find his slides on the OASIS conference site.

So what can building systems and the power grid learn from this?

Well, the owners expect the systems to just run, and are annoyed whenever someone says words like BACnet or LON (or any other control protocol) in their presence. We need to decompose advanced services to discover the core functions, from the owner’s and the tenant’s perspective, and present them as interfaces that can be plugged back into the enterprise.

As Peter summed up the C-Level response: “I just spent $100 Million fixing my processes, you had better be compatible.”

Building services that can present themselves as that can interact with SAP, or with PeopleSoft will have an advantage. The services that know how to display themselves on Google Earth will know how to request the nearest technician.

Likewise, Grid requests that present themselves to ERP services will find faster acceptance. Grid requests that describe grid pricing as shapes that can be pinned to Google Earth will enable the enterprise to come up with multi-site responses that may be different from any single site.

No one cares about the old vertical applications. Enterprise interactions are everything.