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.

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.

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…

Energy blogger and economist Lynne Kiesling writes at the site “Knowledge Problem”, presumably a reference to Hayek’s observation that individuals are filled with limited and mostly erroneous knowledge. This knowledge problem makes it impossible for centrally planned economies, or for anything other than markets, to collect or filter the knowledge necessary to answer questions of production and distribution.

Markets for autonomous building systems, and therefore energy markets, suffer from another kind of knowledge problem, one that damages the market and prevents its development. In this market, the gap between what we know building systems can do, and what owners and operators are aware that they can ask for is immense. Their intermediaries, the sales forces of non-innovative systems, seem bound to keeping them uninformed, to support account control. In the middle stand the public utilities commissions (PUCs), effectively willful in their populist Luddism. The architects and building engineers seem as little informed as their customers, or perhaps merely uninterested in spending and time in this low margin, low bid portion of their projects.

These are strong words, and strong accusations, but they were bolstered by my recent time at FIATECH. At FIATECH, those companies with the most intense process oriented facilities work with the best engineers and the best construction companies to address inefficiencies caused by lost information in capital projects. In this forum, the engineers who design the largest chemical plants meet with sophisticated owner / operators of those same plants. And yet, even here, a strong dichotomy of knowledge was obvious.

The best engineers, and the owners of the best construction companies did not blink an eye when I talked of autonomous agent-based systems, each defending their system-based mission, and responding to economic choreography from the business enterprise. They readily acknowledged as almost too obvious to speak of that immense improvements in efficiency heightened amenities were readily available for the taking. They were well aware that 60% of the energy flowing over the power grid was supplying operations that could see their energy use cut in half almost overnight.

This group thought, though, that markets based upon economic responsiveness would never develop. The PUCs would never act in any way that would reduce their own power. The power companies would continue to market just enough “green campaigns” to keep the unsophisticated non-technical populace happy—and not disturb their iron grip on existing franchises. Building owners will never demand performance and interactivity and so there is no use developing it.

Building owners and operators have opposing prejudices. They can readily imagine participating in energy markets. They readily leap to tell me the services they would like to be able to get from their buildings. They are eager to get some transparent access to high-level information on building maintenance and operations to control costs and be able to audit their own operations.

Building owners, however, are sure that the technology is not developed. They report that their suppliers are unwilling or unable to provide these services. I have often been told that we don’t know how to do this yet. Last fall, at a charrette on intelligent buildings, it was the consensus of the consulting engineers in the room that we did not know enough to make building systems autonomous and responsive.

So there we have a different knowledge problem. The most technically sophisticated, with deepest knowledge of the current state of the art know that although the technology is already available, that pure politics would never allow the market to develop. Those able to make purchasing decisions are willing to buy, but know that the technology is far away. The knowledge problem for building systems is getting the best engineers and the forward looking owners to know what the other knows.

So how do building systems fit together in the future? I have some pretty solid ideas about what it will look like, but it is hard to project the time sequence, or the time scale. Here’s what I see.

Building designers will come to recognize the importance of data stewardship. Building systems will deliver information back to the designers and owners on actual building performance. This information will guide future programming, design, construction, and operations. Similar informational interfaces will support the business and regulatory environment of the building.

Buildings will be designed and constructed to be an integrated system of intelligent systems. These intelligent systems will use the information from self monitoring equipment and systems to continuously optimize conditions and performance. Intelligent buildings will actively support business operations. Facilities owners, operators, and service providers will all be able to access the same systems information in real time. They will use this information to respond to changes in business and environmental requirements to ensure that the facility will continue to support each intended use, old or new.

Each building system will stand alone yet interact with others as the higher level of a business service. Each system will gather data from its sensors and manage its actuators to support and defend the service it provides. Each building system will hide its internal operations, exposing accurate actionable information for continuous decision support.

Within each class of service, systems will compete to deliver the most economical or highest quality service through standards based interfaces. Each system will analyze its own operations to flag problems and make recommendations for external intervention. Each system will share information transparently with other systems, without requiring deep integration with other systems. Building owners will take advantage of informational interoperability to select systems based upon the quality of information and of the underlying operations without regard to the specific technologies used within each system.

Resilient systems of systems will ensure optimal facility utilization and operation even during crises. Each systems will attain situation awareness through communications with its peer systems and with systems external to the building. Examples of external communications include weather stations, demand/response requests from the power company, and emergency (CAP) alerts from homeland security.

One mission of each system in the buildings is to support the effective and efficient performance of the business functions within that facility. The facilities operations of an intelligent building are energy efficient, environmentally correct, and sustainable while leaving a minimal [carbon] footprint.

Building systems will interact to requests in support of business operations and tenants using communications protocols and interaction patterns familiar to enterprise programmers. Because each system defends its mission and exposes only informational interfaces, these interactions will be safe and secure.

Facilities operations will define system performance by the provision of business services, not the operations of process and inputs. Examples of business systems expressed as services include healthful work environment, alert students, regulatory compliance and system metrics will align themselves with these measures. Landlords offering such services will experience lower vacancies and be able to charge higher rents as they are able to document the Quality of Services (QOS) they offer.