New Daedalus

Even with today’s rising energy costs, most things do not cost very much. This is a good thing. Food, as a percentage of income, is still at historic lows. In real dollars, gasoline is just where it was at the birth of the modern car in 1908. For most people, switching to a more fuel efficient car will not pay back the initial capital outlay in the next five years. Local energy generation just doesn’t pay back its installation cost quickly enough.

A penny saved may be a penny earned, but today, everyone leaves their pennies by the cash register. Gas prices do not come down because no one wants to make a left turn against traffic to get a better deal. (See also many articles on the front page of Knowledge Problem this week. The New York Times recently indicated that a load in the washing machine might cost $0.53. Who is going to personally manage that? Who is going to miss their $4 coffee on the way to work to reset when the dishwasher runs for this type of gain?

Life cycle does more than lifestyle to determine energy usage. Homes with small children have different energy profiles than empty nesters. Life-cycle trumps life style in energy use except in the most extreme cases. Extreme energy savings are not ever going to be a mass phenomenon. People would rather get to the beach an hour earlier, and get the complaining kids out of the car and in bed on time than they would drive for greater mileage on the trip. These facts are not likely to change.

Well, if we are not going to manage our devices, our systems, and our energy, who will? There are only two answers: someone else and the systems themselves.

Few people want someone else to manage their power, because few people want to relinquish autonomy over their home to someone else. Service is a possibility here. Services like Sensus could remotely monitor my heating and cooling for peak performance, and let me know when and what maintenance is needed. If I approve it, they could even schedule the maintenance themselves, and verify post-repair performance before I pay for it.

This leaves the devices managing themselves. There are a lot of devices, with a lot of features. If we are going to let these devices manage themselves, they need an economic interface, too.

I could ask my dishwasher to run itself, and manage its own budget for the month. I could also set service standards that the dishes always be clean before dinner the next day. This leads to a relatively simple and consistent user interface.

I could tell my solar panel to sell to the grid whenever the price is above a certain amount, and to store any excess energy. The grid might consistently outbid the dishwasher—and that’s OK. If so, the dishwasher would still run only at night.

I could tell my whole-house storage system to buy power at any price until it has four hours on hand. Thereafter it might buy whenever energy is below a target price. I could even let it take bids from the household systems and devices, or from the neighbor. This system would, of course, need to charge an appropriate mark-up based upon its inefficiency of storage.

If we develop the right sort of abstract business interface between the power grid and our buildings, it can also be used between buildings, or within buildings. Most throw-away cell phones have more computing power than it took to go to the moon. Surely, our embedded systems can do a little day trading…

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?

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…

I was corresponding with someone from the algal biodiesel group the other day. Genetically modified algae is one of the more intriguing fuel strategies in the mid-term. The short version is to add some oil-production genes from some other plant to fast-growing algae, scoop out algal mats and process into fuel.

Traditionally, algae has been seen as something to grow in plants about the size and distribution of this year’s boondoggle, the corn ethanol plant. Instead of large parking areas for constant transportation of corn, large shallow vats of algae would soak up the sun. Eliminating the need to transport the raw material to the processing plant would be yet another advantage to this process.

Some have suggested that the proper place to build the facility is by a coal plant. Algae grows faster in a high CO2 environment. The CO2 would get sequestered into new biomass, and then converted to biodiesel. The CO2 would make it into the atmosphere eventually, but not until it had done double duty for electricity and transportation.

But I thought, why stop there?

All kinds of moderately complex processes are now being built into small microprocessor controlled autonomous systems. If one could automate the production of Biodiesel on the rooftop, then local diesel generators could run on site generated fuel.

I do not imagine that this process would ever provide all power for, say, a commercial office building. It could, however have a place in zero net energy buildings and in local self-reliant microgrids.

Many organizations, from the AIA to ASHRAE, from the US department of Energy to the UN Environmental program, are chasing after the Zero Net Energy Building (ZEB). The ZEB uses a variety of strategies centering around local generation, storage, and conversion of energy to limit its purchases from the power grid to when the prices are right. The ZEB will likely make use of internal DC to eliminate DA/AC/DC conversion penalties on each source of energy. The ZEB building may well have PV, ST, Wind, and generators, mixing and matching as needed.

The problem with most of these local renewable energy sources is that they are unpredictable. As has been well demonstrated by the German Kombikraftwerk effort (search the archives), you can build a reliable grid almost entirely of unreliable sources as long as they are unreliable in different ways at different times.

Why not BioDiesel generators in the building? Why not algae vats and automated fuel production in the building? I do not see such a system being able to carry the building on its own, but if called on occasionally, as diesel generators are now, perhaps the tank could be filled in the interval.

So, why not Algal Biodiesel in the Building?

One Ring to rule them all , One Ring to find them , One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them – J.R.R. Tolkien

Central control, including influences on apparently distributed systems that their owners do not anticipate, are the bane of civil society in Tolkien’s classic trilogy. Today’s models for the control of another kind of power reach deep into businesses and people’s homes, and will ultimately provoke reaction that will limit their scope and range.

Today, building systems and energy user are participants in some very bad markets. Good markets have multiple participants making value decisions to trade freely. Good markets encourage the buyers to selected products based upon value delivered, however the buyer perceives value. Good markets drive innovation and performance as sellers compete to find more profitable ways to deliver the same value, or new ways to deliver more value, to those customers. Building systems and energy are not part of such a market.

Future power systems and future buildings will be interactive at every level, from the generation of power to the provision of building-side amenities. Old centralized models of control, especially a regulated focus on cost recovery instead of value delivery, provide the organizing tenets of today’s energy markets. Energy markets that share information and decision making will achieve greater acceptance and benefits through their influence on autonomous systems than central control ever will.

Buildings are becoming complex adaptive systems that involve large numbers of distributed agents and rules governing their interactions. These agents will react to the actions of other agents and to changes in the environment. The building systems will be autonomous, so control and decision-making will be decentralized and distributed. As these agents mature and develop, they will interact with the businesses in the buildings, the lives of those in the homes, and the external environment of the power grid and environment. These autonomous systems will ultimately adapt to the changes that they themselves helped to bring about through their independent decisions.

A defining characteristic of a complex adaptive system, and thereby of well functioning markets, is that they are self-organizing; self-organization is an emergent property. Emergence simply means that a larger-scale pattern emerges out of the interaction of the smaller-scale decisions and actions of the agents.

Emergent patterns arise out of the interaction of decentralized agents acting with distributed control. Distributed control is actually self control in response to individual incentives. The most effective and innovative markets exhibit emergent order, when the larger-scale pattern that emerges is one of coordination of voluntary activity. This contrasts greatly with the ineffective and anti-innovative results that derive from the imposition of a pattern in a top-down or command-and-control manner. Even in ostensibly similar markets, the two processes of achieving order can yield dramatically different results.

This month marks the 100^th anniversary of the decision to regulate U.S. markets in energy generation and distribution. The decision was in part technical; the means to measure use were limited and control functions were primitive. A poor understanding of markets contributed to the decision. The largest factor, however, was the technocratic populism that held sway around the world for much of the century—a now discredited theory that was at the heart of most of the last century’s wars and social unrest. Markets for electricity generation, distribution, and use are among the last remnants of these failed models for organization of complex systems.

The technology props to this bad theory are no longer valid. It is time to use new technology and new models of system organization to end the 100 year experiment that wastes energy and inhibits innovation in the name of control.