Between the Poles

IEEE PES Smart Grid Technologies: The next challenges in grid modernization

At the IEEE PES Conference on Innovative Smart Grid Technologies in Washington DC,  Patricia Hoffman, Asst Secretary Department of Energy, Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, gave the  keynote address. 

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts

In the past the focus for the Department of Energy and for utiltiies has tended to be on individual technologies such as smart meters and AMI, self-healng networks, synchrophasars, substation automation, and so on.  Ms Hoffman's message is that we need to start focussing on the smart grid as a whole and in particular we need to focus on grid resiliency.  Things will happen, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes, derechos and other natural and man-made problems.  We need to ensure that the grid is resilient so that we can recover from disasters quickly.  The example she gacve was one that I have blogged about,  Southern Co.'s use of  smart meters to track outages caused by tornadoes in April, 2011 and then help with restoration. 

Ms Hoffman then discussed specific areas where there are opportunities to make the grid more resilient.

Transmission operations

There is a lot of data that is becoming available, primarily because about 1000 synchrophasars have been deployed over the national transmission grids.  What are needed are improved interoperability, analytic, and visualization to better manage the transmission grid.  For example, it took almost a year to analyze the data and determine the cause of the 2003 Northeast blackout.  The 2011 San Diego blackout  required about 3-4 months, so fault analysis is getting better, but we need to be able to use the available data to predict the state of the transmission grid in real-time.

Distribution operations

In the area of electricity distribution, Ms Hoffman singled out peak load reduction as the area where there are the greatest econimic and environmental benefits.  Reducing peak load means that the construction of new power plants (peakers) that may only be used a hundred hours a year can be avoided.  The other areas she identified include distribution automation, especially automated self-healing networks using devices such as intelliRupters,  improved outage management, using predictive analytics to replace equipment before it fails, and microgrids.

Customer empowerment

Areas that directly impact the customer are residential diagnostics to help the customer understand how power is being used in the home and ways that it can be used more effectively, at lower cost, and as much as possible moved to off-peak.  Photovoltaic cells and plug-in electric vehicles are becoming much more prevalent and utlities need to be prepared for these.  Improving reliability and resiliency directly impacts customers by reducing the number and duration of outages.  An area that is getting a lot attention is rate structures, for example, pricing electric power to motivate shifting load from peak to off peak.  A new technology that is being investigated by DoE is transactive control signals.  This is a  smart grid signaling approach that communicates prices and other information, such as expected future prices, to encourage the customer to change his/her electric power usage.

Energy infrastructure cyber protection

Ms Hoffman's message on cyber protection is that it needs to be dynamic and multi-dimensional.  Infrastructure is complex and changing and new vulnerabilities are detected every day.  In addition multiple organizations are responsible for the grid.  Effective cyber security management has to deal with a dynamic landscape of control and information systems.  There are a broad range of threats and motivations including unintentional, natural phenomena, and those with malicious intent including theft, revenge, and national security.  It is also important to recognize the interdependencies among critical infrastructure.  A gas explosion can affect the telecommunications and electric power networks.  Loss of electric power can affect many other networks including water and telecommunications.  Disruption of communications, for example, severing a fiber optic cable can directly affect the electric power grid.

To address these challenges cybersecurity solutions need to be mutli-dimensional.including cyber-physical, wide area monitoring and protection, cryptography, anti-tamper devices and advanced architectures. 

One of the most serious challenges that Ms Hoffman singled out specifically is developing the cybersecurity workforce that is going to be responsible for implementing these measures.

Where are we headed ?

The next major challenge is turning the smart grid into a driver of economic development.  The example Ms. Hoffman used was Chatanooga.  The Electric Power Board (EPB) saw the smart grid as not only benefiting the utility and improving the quality of life of its cusomers, but also as a driver of economic development.  The city’s decision to deploy one of the country’s highest capacity fiber-optic networks not only improved power quality, reliability, customer service and energy efficiency but also made Chananooga more attractive to business.  For instance, because bandwidth is virtually unlimited, EPB is able to offer its customers Internet upload and download speeds of up to one gigabit/sec, making Chattanooga very attractive for businesses that rely on the internet for critical aspects of their operations.

Open Modeling Framework for modeling the smartgrid including cost/benefit analysis

At the NRECA TechAdvantage conference in New Orleans Craig Miller and David Pinney of the Cooperative Research Network (CRN) gave an overview of a joint project between the Depatrment of Energy (DoE), NRECA, several electric power coops, Oakridge National Lab (ORNL), National Renewable Energy Laboratory (LREL), and Pacific Northwest National Lab (PNNL), that has important implications for all utilities that are attempting to prioritize future smart grid investments in their distribution networks.

Background

About four years ago DoE invested $33.9 million in a smart grid demonstration project  or more accuratelu a portfolio of projects conducted by CRN.  The research projects focused on distribution automation and demand response.  One of the things that CRN did as part of this demonstration project was to survey National Rural Electric Coop Assn (NRECA) members to determine what they saw as the most important barriers to implementing a smart grid.  The barriers that were reported by the respondents were, in rank order,

1. Customer resistance
2. Data volume and computational complexity (analytics) - utiltiies were facing 100K to 200K times as much as data that they were currently managing
3. Communications - moving the data
4.  Interoperability - many incompatible systems
5. Cybersecurity
6. Cost/benefit - at that time there was little data on the costs and expected benefits of various SG technologies to help prioritize investment

Recently the membership has been resurveyed.  After four years it was found that the perception of the relarive importance of the barriers has changed.  In the most recent survey respondents identified cost/benefit as the highest priority barrier to smart grid adoption and CRN has developed a project to specifically address cost/benefit. 

As a first step the project researchers looked at the cost/benefit models being used by vendors of smart grid product and services.  What they found was such a wide range of models with different assumptions, different data, different grid models, and different ways of estimating costs and benefts, that it was impossible to compare different smart grid investment options and vendors.  As Craig Miller put it, it was not even a question of comparing apples and oranges, it was more like attempting to compare apples, oranges, and '57 chevies. 

Open Modeling Framework (OMF)

This led to a joint project between DoE, CRN, ORNL, and PNNL to develop a common framework for modeling distribution grids and estimating the costs and benefits of alternative investment decisions that woudl allow comparison of different options  The framework would provide standardized data sets, for example, NOAA weather data, and computational modules including modules for modeling grid physics, such as GridLAB-D™, but would allow different data sets and computational modules to be used.  The framework would incorporate a monetization and visualization component that would perform financial analyses that could be compared across different smart grid investment options.  The most important features were

• common data
• common outputs
• multiple solvers (computatuional grid modules)
• run mgmt

All of these components can be customized, but the frameowrk is designed to make the outputs and the subsequent analysis comparable.

OMF is comprised of open source components and runs in the cloud.  PNNL is working on the solvers (grid modeling software), with a particular focus of improving performance.  ORNL is working on the monetization and visualization component.  Currently OMF takes Milsoft grid topology for input, but in the future the Intention is to support other vendors as well as the MultiSpeak and CIM standards.

OMF live demonstration

During the presentation OMF was actually demonstrated.  We were shown how to setup and run a scenario that involved conservation voltage reduction (CVR).  The grid configuration (feeders) were brought in from Milsoft.  Various ways of visualizing network topology were demonstrated (surprisingly none include a geospatial representation though GIS is on the roadmap apparently).   Different ways of modeling demand were shown.  For exmaple, there is a residential demand model that simulates appliances and other sources of domestic demand.  There is a feeder model and ultimately they intend to incoporate vendor specific equipment models, for example for Cooper or Schneider Electric transformers.  For this CVR simulation, they introduced a generalized volt/var controller. 

A network with CVR and without CVR was simulated for a location in California over a period of three months.  Using the output from the grid simulation, financial analyses were performed for the two cases, with CVR and without, and the cost and benefit of the CVR option computed.

It was possible to look at physical parameters, for example, to determine if CVR was effective in shaving peak loads.  It was found that in some cases CVR reduced peak load, but not always.  The financial analysis determined that there was a net benefit from CVR, and that the payback was estimated to be about 2.3 years.

Since the monetization analysis runs using the ouptut from the grid simulation, it can be rerun with different financial assumptions without having to rerun the grid simulation.

The power of OMF is that it can be used to compare different smart grid investment options, for example, residential solar with batteries,  utility solar with batteries, CVR, and wind generation.

Criag Miller said that OMF will be formally released this summer and will be open to all utilities.

Smart grid interoperability standards transitioning from government to the private sector

At the  IEEE PES Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference (ISGT2013) in Washington, I had the opportunity to attend a tutorial on the status of smart grid interoperability standards presented by several people (Mladen Kezunovic, Texas A&M University, Steve Widergren, Pacific Northwest National Lab, and Marty Burns, NIST, and David Wollman, Hypertek for NIST) who are associated with the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel, or SGIP 2.0 Inc, as it is now known in its new incarnation as a private, non-profit.

Background

The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 (EISA) directed National Institute of Standtards and Technology (NIST) to coordinate a framework for the smart grid in the United States.  Based on this mandate three years ago NIST created SGIP with a number of responsibilities, the primary one being to faciliate the development of standards for the the smart grid.  It is important to understand that SGIP was not mandated to create standards but to create an open, big tent where stakeholders could come together and participate in an inclusive, consensus buidling process that balanced the persepctives of all the stakeholders including regulators, investor-owned, cooperative, and municipal utilities, vendors of electric power products and services, consumers, and government.  In its first incarnation SGIP membership included 800 organizations, 1900 individual participants, and 22 stakeholder categories.  In addition, SGIP collaborated with 22 different standards organizations.

In the past three years SGIP has been busy.  The Catalog of Standards, a list of standards identified by SGIP as relevant to the smart grid, now includes 56 different standards.  10 of the 17 or so Priority Action Plans (PAPs) that SGIP initially targeted have been completed and closed.  Other acomplishments include a reference model for the smart grid, a cybersecurity framework (NISTIR 7628),  and the Interoperability Process Refernence Manual.  SGIP has played an important role in facilitating  the adoption of the Green Button (energy usage), OpenADR (energy schedule, common price, and demand response signals), and SEP 2 (electric vehicle information) standards.

But after three years it was felt that it is time for the private sector to take over the leadership role.   Hence SGIP has become SGIP 2.0 Inc.  SGIP 2.0 is a brand new international, private, non-profit.  It's new Executive Director since about a week ago is Patrick Gannon and its new legal name is SGIP 2.0 Inc. To date SGIP 2.0 has signed up over a hundred members.  At the IEEE PES tutorial Patrick Gannon said that new members are joining every day.

SGIP 2.0 is quite a different animal from the first generation SGIP.  It is intended to be funded primarily by its members.  There are now membership dues, where it used to be free.  Its organization structure involves a large board of directors representing 22 different  stakeholder groups.  It has an Executive Director, several standing committees, PAP teams, working groups, international liaisons with Korea, Japan, the EU, Columbia and Ecuador, and government agencies NIST, FERC, and DoE.  The Working Groups include a broad range of interests including buildings, electric vehicles, gas infrastructure, renewable energy, energy storage, and consumers.

SGIP's unique role

SGIP has a unique role to play because it takes a high level perspective on interoperability looking not only at the technical level, the domain of most electrical standards, but also at the aplication level, and most importantly the business process level.

Case study: synchrophasors

Synchrophasors provide an interestng example.  At the present time it is not possible to build a complete synchrophasor solution with products from a single vendor.  Many standards have been developed  to alow diferent deivices to talk to each other, to enable, for example, synchrophasors to talk to aggregators.  But as was discovered during the blackout of 2003, and subseqently during the recemt San Diego blackout, taken all together they do not provide a foundation for solving a basic business problem, fault analysis.  It took many months to piece together the data that allowed investigators to determine exaclty what happened in 2003 and in San Diego.  Mladen Kezunovic's team developed an application built on existing devices to do this, but it required a lot of expensive customization and does not represent a cost effective industry solution. 

An interesting aspect of fault analysis is identifying the grographic location of the fault which required integration with a GIS.

Green Button program

Another example is the Green Button  program.  I was at the Gridweek conference in September 2011 when Aneesh Chopra, then Federal CTO, challenged the electric utility industry to follow the example of the Veterans Affairs Blue Button program and  implement a Green Button program to provide one click consumer access to their own electric power usage data. When it was finally rolled out, Green Button was an overnight success, but the standardization work than enabled it to be rolled out across the nation was years in the making and SGIP was directly involved in facililitating the development of the Green Button standard.

In response to this chalenge SGIP looked at two high level use cases.  Frst, the case where the consumer downloads their own usage data.  The second is even more important from an innovation perspective and addresses how the consumer can authorize third party access to their usage data on an ongoing basis for analysis.  Based on this type of access,  the third party can analyze their uage data and provide tools to help them to reduce their power usage.  By looking at these use cases the SGIP team was able to identify gaps in the existing standards being developed by several groups including OpenADE, NAESB, and others.  SGIP brought these groups together and joinfly arrived at the Green Button standard that is managed by NAESB.  The Green Button standard was subsequenty rolled out and consumers now not only have access to their usage data for download, but can also authorize third party access to their usage data. 

Green Button is dramatically changing the consumer's relationship with the power utility.  Perhaps even more importantly from an economic point of view it is encouraging innovation in technology and applications to help consumers use power better.  DoE estimates that currently 16 million consumers have access to  their electric power usage data via a Green Button service provided by their power utility.  DoE expects that a further 30+ million will be getting Green Button access soon.  One of the very successful programs that DoE ran recently was the Apps for Energy competition.  DoE offered $100,000 to software developers for the best new apps that help utility customers make the most of their Green Button electricity usage data.  You can see the 56 winners listed here.

NRECA TechAdvantage: Local power company responds to growing competition from clean energy companies

When Judge Green broke up AT&T in 1984, the intention was to introduce competition into the long distance telecom industry. In the end it unleashed new technologies such as wireless, optical fiber, RF/coax, and satellite that made the telecommunications market highly competitive.  Subsequently these new technologies have made the old copper telephone system (POTS) legacy.  Maybe a similar thing is happening to the electric power industry.  In this case the first new technology is renewable energy.

At the NRECA TechAdvantage conference in New Orleans, Rod Nikula,  VP Power Supply at Wright-Hennepin Cooperative Electric Assn (WH) in Minnesota hit on a very sensitive topic among cooperative power utilities (and among municipal and investor-owned power utilties as well).

Increasing interest in renewables

Currenly there is 13 MW of solar PV capacity in Minnesota and thisis growing rapidly.  A cold climate with sun like Minnesota is better for solar PV than a warm one.  One speaker reported that a  PV array in Minnesota produces more electricity than the same size PV array in North Carolina.  

WH is finding a growing interest in solar PV among its membership.  A year or two ago a local broadcaster forecasted that in 10 years, 50% of the average home's power demand could be satisfied by solar PV.  That pronouncement got the attention of WH, because it would dramatically affect their revenue stream.  A survey by WH of its memberhsip found that while only about 10% of homes had some self generation capacity,  30% of homeowners said they were  interested in renewable energy.

Solar City

Looming on the horizon are companies like Solar City, a full service solar PV energy company that can offer a very attractive solar package that doee not involve the local power utility once the power rate from the local utility reached 14 cents/kWh or above.  Solar City offers a unique leasing plan that requires no money down.  It offers a flat rate for 20 years, and payments are made against savings from the monthly utility bill.  According to Rod Nikula, Solar City is taking 600 homes off the California power grid every month.  Mark Vogt, CEO of WH, put two and two together and concludes that "We better find a way to be in the home generation business,"  or face a serious drop in revenue.

WH is concerned that schemes like Solar City will affect rural areas more than urban, which would mean coops would be affected more than other power utilities.  Any coop with rates approaching 14 cents/kWh is at risk.  And with new EPA rules shutting down coal fired plants, whch are the primary source of power in Minnesota, rates are expected to go up.

Pilot community solar project

WH decided to pilot a Community Solar Project with partners such as Clean Energy Collective.  It provided a way for members who were interested in solar PV at a very low upfront cost (not quite as attractuve as Solar City's package) and in a way that was fully funded by members and required no investment from WH, except for hosting the PV arrays on their property.

The technical solution involved PV panels and batteries.  The batteries were an important part of the solution because they allowed WH to store solar generated power long enough to reduce the peak at 6 pm which effectively determines the rate that WH pays for the power it distributes.

The project involved 171 panels at 190 watts/panel,  The panels cost members $869/panel (after the Federal clean energy tax credit of 30%).  Members could buy several panels up to a maximum equivalent to their annual energy demand.  WH controls charging/discharging of batteries.

The pilot project was fully subscribed so the project clearly appealed to the membership.  But the downside is that WH doesn't generate any revenue from the pilot project. 

WH is planning a follow-on project which it hopes will be a win-win for the membership and for WH.  From WH's perspective it needs to find substitute revenue for the lost revenue due to the members' solar PV generation.  It is considering selling, installing, servicing, and financing solar PV equipment, offering a battery storage service, and other revenue generating options.

China plans to introduce a carbon tax

According to Xinhua, China intends to introduce a tax on carbon dioxide emissions.  The local taxation authority rather than the environmental protection department will collect the taxes.  The government is also looking into taxing energy-intensive products such as batteries, as well as luxury goods such as aircraft that are not used for public transportation.  The government is also planning a tax reforms to tax coal based on prices instead of sales volume, as well as raising coal taxes. A resource tax will also be levied on water.

Australia's carbon tax came into effect July 1, 2012.  Much of Australia's coal production is exported to China. If China introduces a carbon tax, it will mean that emissions from virtually all of Australian coal will be taxed.  It will be interesting to see how China's tax rate will compare to Australia's.

NRECA TechAdvantage: MultiSpeak, where it is and where it is going

At the NRECA TechAdvantage conference in New Orleans Gary McNaughton, MultiSpeak Techical Coordinator gave a comprehensive overview of where the MultiSpeak interoperability standard is and where it is headed.  If you're not familiar with MultiSpeak, it has been developed under the auspices of NRECA and is intended as an industry-wide standard for the exchange of information for electricity distribution utilities and all vertically-integrated segments except power marketing and generation.  It is used by more than 725 electric coops, investor-owned, and municipal utilities in 19 countries and is widely recognized and supported by North American software vendors.

Cybersecurity

In light of President Obama's recent Executive Order on cybersecurity for critical infrastructure, security has become even more critical and Gary's message is that utilities need to get very serious about it.  To support this a new security standard for MultiSpeak was released in January 2013.  It goes beyond secure sockets (SSL) and transport layer security (TLS) and implements message-level security.  The standard requires that vendors support four security options, which they have agreed to do.

1. None (for debugging)
2. SSL or TLS
3. Message-level - by message
4. Message-level - by session

It is up to the utility to decide which of these it needs to implement.  There is a Cooperative Research Network (CRN) security policy template that is designed to help utilities to choose the appropriate option.  The standard has been submitted to Smart Grid Interoprability Panel (SGIP) for inclusion in the Catalog of Standards for the smart grid.

Use cases

The MultiSpeak team has developed over 300 use cases for specific business processes such as connecting a customer.  They cover business processes for demand response, meter data management, meter prepayment, outage management, and asset management.  So far they do not include GIS-related use cases (MultiSpeak has supported geospatial data types for years.)

Harmonization with CIM

MultiSpeak and the Common Information Model (CIM) have been converging in many ways over the years.  But according to Gary, at this point there is no plan to harmonize the two models in Version 5.  And it is not clear if they will ever be harmonized.

MultiSpeak 3

The big news is that there will be no further bug fixes and enhancements for Version 3, which is the most widely used version of MultiSpeak.  Gary said there was no reason for utilities to stop using Version 3, which is 10 years old now, unless the additional functionality in later versions is required.

MultiSpeak 4

Versions 4.1.5 and 4.1.6 have been released, with enhancements specifically to support the MultiSpeak Regional Demonstration project. It is expected that vendors will begin implementing support for this Version 4.1 in the next few months.  The big advantages of 4.1 are a more consistent data model and support for AMI, DR, MDM, AVL, and work management.  A nice thing about. MultiSpeak's web services implementation is that it means that a utility can run several versions of MultiSpeak concurrently.

MultiSpeak 5

Work has begun on a new version which will include work management enhancements and, most importantly, modernized web services support.  A prerelease will be available in May 2013.

Enterprise Service Bus

Gary made a persuasive case for using Multispeak in all but the simplest implementations with an enterprise service bus because it eliminates some of the problems associated with point to point messaging over TCP/IP.  For example, TCP/IP does not guarantee that a message is received or that several messages will be received in the expected chronological order.

President Obama signs Executive Order on cybersecurity for critical infrastructure

IPrior to the President's State of the Union Address, President Obama signed an Executive Order on cybersecurity. This has  important implications for the electric power industry and is a wakeup call for utilties that have not yet developed or updated their cybersecurity policy.

Michael Daniel, Special Assistant to the President and Cybersecurity Coordinator, on the White House Blog, hs given an overview of the Executive Order including the motivation for it and its key provisions.

According to Mr Daniel, the government’s senior-most civilian, military, and intelligence professionals all agree that inadequate cybersecurity within the nation's 18 critical infrastructure areas poses a threat to the security of the United States.  Because of the seriousness of the threats, the President issued an Executive Order directing federal departments and agencies to use their existing authorities to provide better cybersecurity for the Nation.  The Administration received input from a broad range of stakeholders in industry, the public sector, the legislative branch, and the advocacy community including over 30 organizations representing all 18 critical infrastructure sectors.

The Executive Order focusses on the three areas, information sharing, a framework of core security practices based on existing standards, and privacy protections.

Information sharing

The Order makes it is a national priority to increase the cyber threat information shared with authorized individuals and companies.  In particular, it aims to improve information sharing between the private sector and all levels of government.  It expands the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Enhanced Cybersecurity Services program to provide near real-time sharing of information on cyber threats with critical infrastructure companies and state and local governments.

Cybersecurity framework

The Executive Order directs the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to lead the development of a framework to reduce cyber risks to critical infrastructure. NIST is directed tol work with industry to identify existing voluntary consensus standards and industry best practices to incorporate into the framework.  The Order puts private-sector cyber leaders in critical infrastructure sectors at the core of  the development of voluntary best practices for the framework.  The DHS Secretary is directed tol establish a voluntary program to support the adoption of the Cybersecurity Framework by owners and operators of critical infrastructure.  This has direct and immediate implications for utilities.

Privacy

The Executive Order directs departments and agencies to incorporate privacy and civil liberties protections into cybersecurity activities based upon widely-accepted Fair Information Practice Principles as well as other applicable privacy polices.

The difference between energy conservation and energy efficiency

There's a fascinating post on the Sustainable Buildings Centre blog that outlines how the world energy community has tended to stop using "energy conservation" and to use "energy efficiency" instead.

According to the blog post, after the 1970s oil crisis, in the framework of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) the International Energy Agency (IEA) was established by the International Energy Program agreement, which was amended in September 2008. Neither the original agreement or the later revison  mention “energy efficiency”, but fo refer to “energy conservation” and the goal of reducing the growth of energy consumption:

exchange of national experiences and information on energy conservation; ways and means for reducing the growth of energy consumption through conservation.

The author of the post then did some research on Google and compiled some fascinating statistics on the number of mentions of the two terms in books indexed by Google.  The results showed that the use of "energy conservation" in books increased exponentially in the 1970s, but then dramatically dropped in the early 1980s. "Energy efficiency" on the other hand had a much slower rise in the 1970s, but surpassed "energy conservation" by the middle of the 1980s.

After further research, it turned up that the Shared Goals of the IEA adopted at the IEA Ministers meeting in Paris in June 1993, was the first official mention of “energy efficiency” in the context of the IEA.

Improved energy efficiency can promote both environmental protection and energy security in a cost-effective manner. There are significant opportunities for greater energy efficiency at all stages of the energy cycle from production to consumption. Strong efforts by governments and all energy users are needed to realise these opportunities.

The author of the post notes that ”reducing the growth of energy consumption” disappeared along with "energy conservation".  Apparently, the energy community decided to replace the concept of “energy conservation” with “energy efficiency” which as the the author of the post points out is not the same thing.  Energy efficiency is the ratio between the energy service delivered and the energy consumed to deliver said service. In other words, doing the same with less.  Energy conservation involves reducing overall energy consumption in addition to improving energy efficiency.

This may have to do with the different emissions goals of the developed world and the developing world, principally China, but also India, Brazil, and others, in reducing emissons.  China's goal is to reduce its energy intensity, the amount of energy required to produce a unit of GDP, because China will not agree to halt its economic development (China's per capita emissions are much less than the United States) and so its emissions will continue to grow, but not as rapidly. The developed world, especially the EU, has tended to set goals to reduce the absolute level of emissions.

NRECA TechAdvantage: Modeling is the key to grid resilience

The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (NRECA) is comprised of more than 900 electric coops in the U.S.  This is more than just an organization representing electric coops at the national level.  It also supports a very active technology research arm called the Cooperative Research Network (CRN) that supports collaborative research with the Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, National Labs and others.

At the NRECA TechAdvantage conderence in New Orleans today, Dr Craig Miller, Project Manager at CRN gave a scintillating and inspiring presentation on the future of the U.S. power grid over the next two decades.

Four years ago when DoE received a large amount of ARRA funding, the focus was on the smart grid and the technology required to support it.  Now every utility has done something using smart grid technology.  The new focus is on resiliency, how to make the grid agile.  This is a lot more complicated today with our full quiver of smart devices. 

The foundation of the smart grid are sensors.  All electrical devices these days are smart and are able to report their status ranging from several times a microsecond to every 15 minutes.  The result is that utilities are faced with 100'000 times as much data as they've dealt with in the past.  The challenge is the analytics to make sense of all this data.

In the old days, when you had a fault, you dispatched a crew and a few hours or days later, the fault was fixed and people got power again.  Now the network can be reconfigured in subseconds.  But there are a lot more things to worry about.  When you reconfigure the network, you have to worry about whether the new configuration can support the load.  If it can't there a number of options you have that weren't available with the old grid.  You may be able to tap battery storage, autpmatically startup backup generators at industrial customers and take them off the grid, disconnect less critical customers, automatically shut down some devices for customers on demand response programs, reduce voltage, or even isolate some parts of the grid, so-called microgrids.  With the new grid, there are tools to manage load, generation, and storage dynamically, and since the grid is a balancing act, all of this has to happen at subsecond speeds.

Modeiing the power grid is the key to the engineering challenge of the 21st Century

Dr Miller's most important point is that the key to all of this is models of the power grid.  Being able to model the  network and predict what it will do faster than the network itself is seen as the key to the next generation "agile" grid, which Dr Miller predicts will be the greatest engineering achievement of the 21st C, much as the old grid was called the greatest engineering achievement of the 20th C.  Dr Miller pulled no punches when he said that our current models of the grid are all bad.  They are only able to be used for planning purposes, not for operations. 

Modeling the grid is a very complex problem.  Even our existing "simple" models are incredibly complex.  This problem will require the best of our current super computers, and will probably require another decade for this level of computing power to become affordable for utilities.  For example, a project that CRN is working on with DoE to improve modeling of the electric grid will use Titan, at 21 petaflops, the fastest super computer in the world today.  This is indeed a "challenge to light up our lives", especially the lives of the next generation of electric power engineers.

RICS BIM: Using COBie to extend the benefits of BIM to building operations and maintenance

Nick Nisbet, Director at AEC3 UK Ltd and buildingSMART, gave an overview of the role of COBie UK 2012 and its relationship to BIM.  In the UK BIM has been mandated for central government buiding construction projects in the UK starting in 2016.  COBie-UK-2012 defines the UK use of COBie 2.4, which was developed initially in the United States by the Army Corps of Engineers.  COBie-UK-2012 is intended for buildings, infrastructure and landscape; new, reburbished and existing structures; and for both small and large projects.  Unlike BIM it is not a legal requirement, but contractual.   Standard UK government construction contracts will have a built-in requirement for COBIe starting in 2016.

COBie, which stands for Construction and Operation information exchange, is a means of sharing structured information, especially with clients (customers).  It is simple enough to be represented as a  spreadsheet, but detailed enough for many client (customer) purposes.  It is not intended to be used as a way of sharing detailed design information among architects and engineers, however.  it was defined jointly by the buildingSMART Alliance and buildingSMART UK and is a subset of  Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) standard.

COBie is a standard way of classifying the spaces and components of a building.   In general a COBie facility is comprised of zones, floors/sectors, types (of equipment), and systems.  For equipment, it includes such information as replacement cost, expected life, warranty details, manufacturer and and model.  It also includes impact information which includes cost; energy, water and other resources requirements; emissions, pollution and other environmental impacts.  The COBIe specification even includes options for coordinates (location) and connections.  The latter allows connectivtity or associations between pieces of equipment to be recorded.  To facilitate maintenance COBie includes fields for summary instructions for use of equipment, contact information (email addresses and telephone numbers), and issue tracking.  Since the classifications are standardized, they enable comparison of different buildings to enable better building practices to be indentified and benefits quantified.

COBIe and BIM

COBie is designed to be used at all stages of the design, build, and operate and maintain lifecycle, but is especially useful at the handover stage, on completion of construction when the building is handed over to the client, and the operate and maintain (O&M) stage of the building's lifecycle begins.

When a building is comissioned and the client takes over responsibility from the architects, engineers,and contractors who designed and built the structure, the people responsible for operating and maintaining the building require information about the building; its facilities, spaces, HVAC, plumbing, fire and systems, and its equipment in order to be able to operate and maintain it.  Compiling this information has been a challenge and COBIe is intended as a vehicle for conveying structured information about the facility and its equpment captured during the design and build stages to the client as part of the handover.  Since BIM models will be mandatory for all buildings from 2016 on, the idea is that all of the data relevant to O&M would be collected in the BIM model(s) during the design and build stage.   COBie is seen as a way of conveying the structured data stored in BIM model(s) to the computerized facilities management (CAFM) systems used for operating and maintaining the building and is intended to provide all the information that is required by facilities management (FM) for operate and maintain the building. 

Automation

Furthermore the process of creating COBie data is designed tobe automated.  COBie data is intended to be machine generated and machine checked.