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Subject: Notes from DC Meeting, Septermber 29, 30
A somewhat testy meeting convened outside DC on September 29, 30 for a
hastily convened review of the customer oriented standards development plans.
To one side, the plans developed at the August Standards Development
Organization (SDO) was putting critical ongoing deployments of billions of
dollars infrastructure upgrades at risk, and throwing long term plans into
disarray (Team A). The other side saw keeping the August plans intact necessary
to enable new investment and new participation in distributed energy, and to
break the iron grip of dinosaur twentieth century processes and organizations
that impede new energy (Team B). There was little common ground. The NIST smart grid process identified a number of Priority Action Plans
(PAPs). Four of these defined the border between energy supplier and buyer in
the smart grid. These communications occur between utility and end node,
whether that node is house, or commercial building or industry. These standards
are for Price and Product communication (PAP03), Calendar and Schedule
communication (PAP04), Energy Usage information (PAP10), and communications for
Demand Response and Distributed Energy Resources (PAP09). The first morning passed with quiet platitudes, until Dr. David Wolman,
technical lead for NIST on its smart grid project, called for "blood on
the floor" during the afternoon session. The participants complied with
enthusiasm, and the conversations became more interesting and more revealing. Power system engineering standards are developed in the IEC TC 57, the
overarching technical committee (TC) defining standards for power management.
TC 57 has defined a common information model (CIM); and utilities are striving
to rationalize their world by using only elements defined in “The
CIM.” Some of the suspicion with which building systems technologists
regard the CIM is due to a historic tendency to fit all building operations
into the TC 57 CIM Representatives from the end nodes, particularly commercial buildings and
the business enterprise, do not see their world as an extension of the power
grid. These areas have their own information models and find the phrase
“The CIM” mysterious and unhelpful. Financial services use a CIM
defined by ISO 20022. Building systems have information models defined within
the divers building control system communities. Enterprise operations beginning
to define their interactions using information models from defined by EBXML
(electronic business XML) or UBL (Universal Business Language). The first key agreement of the two days of meetings was to respect the
multiple information models on these inter-domain interfaces. For elements and
communications that are purely power management related, everyone agreed to use
to use the TC 57 CIM. When the communication element involved business
transactions, or schedules, or some other area, the communication would use the
informational models from that domain. A common understanding on semantic models, including when to use such models
from outside the domain of power management, was important to bringing the
divers interests together. One of the underlying issues was the conflict of business models. This can
be resolved, but only by talking clearly about the purposes and motivations
behind each model. A good first start would be to give them good names. I favor something looking like pure market interactions. I believe that we
all use a standard abstract presentation for scarcity and value, for risk and
for reliability. We call this abstraction money. As Stephanie Hamilton opined
when she still worked at Southern California Edison (SCE), every brown-out is a
pricing failure. Because I come from the perspective of building integrators, I have great
faith in the ability of building automation systems to manage change, They are
usually poorly maintained, and poorly understood by their owners, but they keep
running. They adjust naturally to the conditions around them, and to their own
operations, and are getting better at autonomous action and tuning. I want to
give them clear price signals, not only now, but for the future. UI want to
give them clearer information about weather and environment. And then I want to
leave them alone. But such systems can cost thousands of dollars to install. In part this is
because without standards, they are all custom work. Still, there must be a
less expensive solution. Early smart grid deployments are aimed at the smallest, cheapest systems
that can fit easily into appliances and home thermostats. They must not change
the price of appliances materially, especially as social equity concerns
mandate that low income consumer have access to the benefits of smart energy.
Consumers want reliable systems; it is hard to convince them to pay more for
systems that can be turned off by someone else. Utilities often refer to this group as the Residential option, When pressed,
they may call it ZigBee, because that trade association is the primary
technology used to install these low end systems. They may call it the OpenHAN
(Home Area Network) approach, although the information and interactions are
indistinguishable from those of ZigBee. Sometimes this approach is used I small
commercial buildings as well. Rather than call them the OASIS or C&I (Commercial & Industrial)
approach and the ZigBee or Residential approach, I think we should name them
according to their business models. I propose that we call them Collaborative
Energy and Managed Energy. There, without out of the way, I can summarize succinctly the business model
agreement from the customer-oriented standards development meeting. We agreed that we would apply the semantic models coming out of NAESB to
parallel processes for Collaborative and Managed energy, and that we would keep
the semantics aligned when we could. tc "Energy
and persistence conquer all things." -- Benjamin Franklin
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