New Daedalus

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?

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….

It’s been a few years since I peeked in at AEX, the developing XML-based data exchange standard for specification and procurement of mechanical equipment. At the time, they were launching a proof of concept project for exchanging pump information, and I was rubbing my eyes to stay awake.

This time, AEX was discussing implementation now. The community has run the test cases. They have proved the concepts. At this meeting, people were discussing how to move into procurement using the AEX standards.

AEX has moved into the open in several ways. AEX now develops its schemas on SourceForge. This is radical stuff for standards groups. All posting and all revisions are placed in an open forum, freely available for anonymous download. Anyone in the world can make and submit revisions.

The pump description interoperability work is more exciting than it sounds. The committee has demonstrated an integrated data flow from the conceptual design through preliminary design to design review by the manufacturers. The manufacturers responded with AEX of their own actual products, including proposed changes to the specification that each of those products would require. During project estimation, engineers could review on a common format all the differences between the request and the proposals. This greatly speeds the purchase of materials and the accuracy of designs while providing information that can be used for maintenance during the lifetime of the project.

Of more interest to regular readers, General Motors has been trying to drive AEX data exchanges into their new plants, with a special focus on HVAC. GM has decided not to wait for vendors to provide AEX-compliant information. GM supplies an applet to its equipment suppliers for new plants and requires that they enter the information. This is wrong in every way but the most important one: it works today with the market conditions we have today.

The power industry was in raucous attendance. We are about to see historic levels of plant building, and the industry would like to see some stands of design and interoperability. The power industry has some very large databases of reliability and operating experience. It sounded like the industry has committed to delivering its metadata (their data structures, not their proprietary information) to the AEX process.

This is very exciting. The benefits of consistent early specification of performance and reliability are far greater than they are for detailed procurement documents. Sustainable design must be service oriented design, and service oriented design begins with performance and reliability. Perhaps we can harvest the AEX performance and reliability to describe the larger systems that are comprised of AEX-specifiable components.

Everywhere we look, we see more higher-level, almost cognitive functions being incorporated into low-level products. Cameras are internalizing much of the craft of photography. GPS systems are comparing notes with their peers to provide up to the minute routing choices. Cars tune themselves on the fly, adjusting carburetion and suspension in real time to respond to driving style. Systems are becoming autonomous, competition is moving from commodity functions to service, and markets are starting to turn around interactions and integration.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (see link below) described FotoNation and the software that it provides for many brands of digital cameras. I knew about anti-red-eye electronics. I thought it was a neat trick for the camera to automatically focus on faces in the foreground rather than the between them in the center of the view. I was amused at the camera that would alert the picture taker that someone blinked. The camera that delayed the shutter until everyone was smiling was pretty neat.

The ability of a camera to recognize particular faces in the crowd, and make sure that they, if no one else are in focus was different from the rest. Simply take several pictures of your family and friends, and notify the camera. Thereafter if six mothers, standing in the same place each snap a picture at the third grade play, the six cameras will make different decisions and each mother will find her own little Billy in perfect focus.

We now have consumer electronics with complex learning behavior that it applies to its canned pattern recognition tricks. This is customization far beyond the last generation of, say, a car remembering driver preferences for mirror, steering wheel, and seat.

Consumer systems now cover for the amateurish efforts of their operators to produce first class results. Harried amateur photographers get assistance to achieve professional results. Drivers can get performance out of their cars that previously would have required long practice. Trip planning now acquired the knowledge of a local and an instant awareness of traffic conditions.

Building systems face the same issues and are moving in the same direction. Not only are they often operated by amateurs, but the may be maintained by the insufficiently trained—following their installation by the low bidder. Traditionally, systems have been oversized and over-built, to cover these predictable problems. This leaves a lot of energy and operating dollars on the table. The best systems will move instead to make their systems resilient, as are the camera and the car, and self operating.

This will change the tasks asked of control systems, and how they are integrated. Self tuning systems do not need to share low-level details with those far away. Low level protocols will be confined inside autonomous systems, and only higher-level services exposed. These interfaces will be the basis for next generation integration.

Systems will use these newer interfaces to negotiate service provisioning with each other. Although each system should work alone, they should be able to discover resources that each other makes available. Imagine systems advertising their waste heat as a resource, and then the heat source broadcasting when it needs to shut down. These interfaces will be developed as agents; they know their missions, they defend their missions, they act independently.

Integration will come to assume autonomy, for the new interactions will rely on each system doing what it says, and meeting its contracts. Contract-based integration will increase the value of cognitive performance, as they become the only competitive edge in a world of commodity electronics and unpredictable installations.

And systems that expect to be told what to do, rather than simply meeting their contracts? Well, as now, no one will want to do business with such agents.

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.