Toby, Francois ( or any member of the
committee)
I’m working on the smart grid standard
Energy Interoperation (and its profiled twin OpenADR). The
normal mode in which this operates is that a [home, commercial
building] is a Resource. A Resource may choose to respond to
economic signals from the grid and use less energy. Service /
Results / end of story. We call this the Energy Services
Interface (ESI).
A complicating factor is that in many parts
of the country, pure economic signals are not allowed. In
these, to get rewards, there must be some level of
not-quite-direct control of Devices inside a Resource. We call
these Assets. Think of an Asset as a virtual device that’s a
good place to start. An Asset may be a toaster, a water
heater, or an entire production line in a factory. What
matters is that a contract allows it to be exposed and its
function “directly” monitored.
A potentially interesting spin on Assets is
Distributed Energy Resources (DER). A home solar panel, or a
roof-top wind turbine, or a grid integrated thermal storage
system might all be Assets. In any case, Assets need only a
constrained set of interactions (On, off, half speed, set
thermostat to 76, is it running now, charge up, discharge, how
much electricity is it generating now). Limited metadata is
expected as well, largely to let Transmission operators deal
with covarying Assets. 500 solar panels on the south side of
town might be covarying Assets as the same clouds might take
them all out at the same time.
Today, of course, Assets are covered by
Tariffs, and this is all closely regulated. In the future,
Assets may be offered to the market as tenders, contracted,
and exposed.
I am considering how I would incorporate
WS-DD and WS-DP into the ESI. The model is the secure proxy
discovery of remote devices already incorporated into WS-DD,
i.e., the ESI can choose which Assets to expose, and when to
expose them. The ESI would them “take Assets off line” when
they are not available for “direct” interaction. In this case,
Direct is still mediated application exposing the ESI.
I think there are a limited number of
profiles (less than 10) to define all possible Assets. An
essential part of the profile is the potential Energy effects
of the Asset. (Can respond in 10 minutes, and free up 15 KW of
power, but cannot be called upon for more than 3 consecutive
hours). These Energy Profiles are already largely defined
within the EMIX work on Energy Market Resources.
There is similar work going on inside
ASHRAE SPC 201, discussing the energy information that would
be exposed by Systems in Industrial Sites, Commercial
Buildings, and Homes. If we can make this work for Energy
Interoperation, we can imagine a [home] energy manager that
discovers the energy profiles of all systems in the house.
Some of those Assets are later exposed for secure remote
access.
I guess this all assumes that Devices might
have more than one service, say an Operation Service, as a
Printer exposes to me, or an Energy Service, which exposes how
it uses Energy.
Toby, can you, or any member of the
committee, spare me some time to discuss how this might work,
and give me pointers into approaching the WS-DD work for this
purpose. (Of course, I may be talking DPWS).
Thanks in advance
tc
"If something is not worth doing, it`s not
worth doing well"
Peter Drucker