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Flexible Power Alliance develops open source software and standard for smart grid demand management

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We have been talking here on GreenMonk about energy demand management since early 2008, and our take on it has always been that for demand management to work, it will need to be automated. Unfortunately, finding a decent automated demand management solution has proven elusive. In part, the recent rise of the Internet of Things technologies has helped spur more interest and developments in this area.

Last week, for example, we attended the European Utility Week in Vienna, and amongst the many fascinating stands that were there, I came across the Flexible Power Alliance on CGI‘s stand.

The Flexible Power Alliance is an open source software alliance comprised of software companies (CGI, and Accenture), Utilities (Alliander and Stedin), and research organisations (such as TNO). This Alliance has developed a standard called FAN which is a communication layer between devices and energy services, and open source software called PowerMatcher, which helps to match the supply and demand of electricity on a grid.

The software developed with Java and OSGI, is Apache 2.0 licensed, and is available to download (or fork) on Github.

And in the video above, we talk to Alliander DevOps Consultant Alexander Krstulovic, and he demonstrates the software in action on a small microgrid. The software turns up and down the consumption of a bank of LED lights, and changes the price of electricity depending on the realtime availability of energy on the virtual market created by the software.

It is worth pointing out that Alliander has trialled this software in the real world, and are now in the process of commercialising it.

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GreenWave Reality’s new Energy Management Platform

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GreenWave Reality portal screen shot

GreenWave Reality are an energy management company who came out of stealth last week to announce they had just landed an $11m equity round and to announce its new Energy Management Platform (although EMP is an unfortunate acronym in this context!).

The company’s executive team is made up mostly of former execs of Cisco’s Consumer Business Group – so not only have they worked closely, successfully in the past, they also have experience producing consumer electronics and its advisory board reads like a who’s who of the CE industry.

So what does GreenWave Reality’s Energy Management Platform actually consist of?

GreenWave Reality Power Node

GreenWave Reality Power Node

Well, at its most simple, it is a home area network containing:

  • smart plugs (power nodes) which are accessible wirelessly
  • a gateway which communicates wirelessly with the power nodes (and in time with smart LEDs, EV’s, etc.), with your utility, and with GreenWave’s data center and
  • a highly configurable wireless display which not just reports on energy consumption, but can also control connected devices in the home

GreenWave see utility companies as the customers for their platform, with the utilities distributing the products to their residential consumers. With retail utility companies under increasing pressure to reduce their emissions, products like this are bound to pique their interest.

The fact that the data from GreenWave’s Gateway product is transmitted back to GreenWave’s data center enables GreenWave to provide access to a home energy portal for consumers via the Internet. In this way, connected appliances are controllable, not just from the in-home wireless display, but from anywhere with Internet access, even a smart phone. Perfect for those times when you are out and wondering if you remembered to turn off the lights/TV/whatever!

On the flipside, this raises obvious privacy issues I’d like to see addressed via a Privacy Policy page on the GreenWave site, at the very least.

This will also enable home-owners to compare their energy use with the average use for others in their area to see whether they are energy hogs, or Greener than their average neighbour.

GreenWave is going the standards only route (ZigBee, ZWave, etc) so if consumers have already invested in (or are thinking of buying) devices which use these protocols, they’ll be readily accessible on the platform.

Finally, Speaking to GreenMonk ahead of the company?s launch GreenWave told us that they are launching a Smart dimmable LED light later this year which as well as being extremely energy efficient, will have a built-in transceiver so that it can be fully controlled by the company’s Energy Management Platform.

I have to say, having spoken to the guys in GreenWave, it does seem like these guys have their ducks in a row. I’m looking forward to seeing how this one plays out.

You should follow me on twitter here.

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Introducing the NegaWatt!

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Feather in the sky
Photo Credit Sarey*

Yes, you read the title correctly and no, NegaWatt is not one of my normal typos!

What then is a NegaWatt? A NegaWatt, is a MegaWatt of electricity that you don’t use! Huh?

Think of it like this, suppose a utility company has 100MW to supply.
Now let’s say their typical demand is 90MW.
If a potential customer contacts them looking for 20MW, they have a problem.

They can either try to build new generation of 20MW (expensive) or, try to get their existing customers to reduce their demand by 20MW. The reduced demand is typically done through efficiencies and the required reduction, when achieved, is 20 NegaWatts – 20 MW of virtually generated electricity.

Now, take the concept of a NegaWatt a little further. If you could ‘generate’ a lot of NegaWatts it should be possible to sell these demand side units back to the utilities. They are just as useful to the utilities for meeting demand as actual MegaWatts. More useful when demand for electricity is high and supply is low.

This is not some fictional futurescape. It is actually happening now to a limited extent in some parts of the US and will be rolled out far more widely in the coming years as energy markets and smart grids become more sophisticated.

How might someone create NegaWatts? Well, have a look at some of the posts we have written here about Energy Demand Management for some ideas.

A lot of the work in this area currently is looking at things like changing settings on thermostats (think aircon, refrigeration and water heating), bringing diesel generators online, and time-shifting of consumption (think storage heaters and pre-cooling buildings early in the day when demand is lower).

Companies like Comverge, EnerNoc and Echelon are making devices and systems that let consumer monitor and adjust their electricity use in real time.

This is a whole new market which is about to open up. There are massive opportunities there for people to write software to manage this, to build the hardware to do this, and to aggregate NegaWatts for sale to utility companies.

This all feeds back into the read/write grid we have discussed here previously. With the rise of the NegaWatt, electricity becomes a far more two-way tradeable commodity and the implications for the uptake of renewables on the grid are enormous.

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What if electricity were like the Internet?

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Power Lines
Photo Credit Bob Fornal

So, Nick Carr writes regularly about cloud computing and how the Internet is heading more and more towards the same model as the utilities. And he’s right. And this is a good thing.

Now let’s turn that on its head.

When will the utilities start to become more like the Internet? Specifically, when will disparate, disconnected electrical grids join up to give us one global electricity super-grid?

Can you imagine the resilience of a massively connected super-grid? One which can route around problems.

Then think about how much more stable the super-grid would be if the excess energy produced by, for instance, Scandanavian wind farms on windy nights could simply be sold to meet capacity shortages in the US as people arrive home from work, or in Japan as they start to wake up.

What if the grid were smart, publishing prices in real-time, based on supply and demand fluctuations?

And further, what if smart meters in homes and businesses could adjust appliances based on the real-time pricing (thermostats up/down, devices on/off, etc.)?

And what if, again like the Internet, the super-grid were read/write i.e. if you could be a producer as well as a consumer? Think plug-in hybrid vehicles, for example. In times of more abundant electrical supply when energy is cheap or negatively priced (sun shining on Spanish PhotoVoltaic arrays and/or wind blowing on Northern European wind farms), plug-in hybrids could suck in electricity and act as a distributed electrical storage mechanism. Several hours later, if the wind dies down, or the sun sets electricity prices jump and the smart meters realise it is now financially advantageous for plug-in hybrids to sell electricity back to the grid. So they do.

What if most of the technologies to make this happen already existed? How long will it be before the utilities embrace the Internet model in the same way the Internet is jumping on the utility model?

UPDATE: Simon Wardley writes that:

According to wikipedia, “the concept of an interconnected global grid linked to renewable resources was first suggested by Buckminster Fuller” in the 1970s.

There are even organisations such as the Global Energy Network Institute (GENI) who apparently have been working on the “viability of the interconnection of electric power networks between nations”.

This subject deserves a higher profile.

It seems I am in august company!

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Energy Demand Management trials

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Nissan Pathfinder Dash
Creative Commons License photo credit: navets

Energy Demand Management is a topic we have covered a few times on this blog already because we believe it will be a vital component in helping us better manage our energy resources in the future.

It is great then when you start to see utilities running successful trials of early EDM technologies. According to Francis Logan, Minister for Energy; Resources; Industry and Enterprise in Western Australia, the local energy company Western Power has run a successful EDM trial.

What Western Power did was to test the efficacy of one form of EDM called Peak Shaving where you lower the electrical requirements at times of maximum demand to reduce the ceiling load on the grid. They did so by running a summer trial where domestic air-conditioners were remotely switched off for a few minutes on hot days, resulting in a 27 per cent reduction in peak power use, without any significant loss of comfort for the home owners.

From the government statement:

“The results show that customers reduced their peak power use by 3.5kW when their device was activated,” Mr Logan said.

“This is the equivalent of using four microwaves or two pool pumps, it is a substantial saving.”

The Minister said it was the first time such a trial had been conducted in Western Australia.

“Providing non-intrusive ways of reducing energy consumption is a key to managing peak demand,” he said.

“WA’s peak energy use is primarily driven by air-conditioners, of which WA has a very high number.

In this test a switching device was installed in their refrigerative or reverse-cycle air-conditioners to allow Western Power to remotely turn off the compressor, but not the fan, for short periods of time on hot days. Switching was done six times during the trial, on days when the temperature reached 36C and usually between 3pm and 5pm.

This is a very positive outcome to the test but did not involve the deployment of smart meters as the switching was done by the utility.

Obviously a better long term solution will include easily programmable smart meters capable of controlling devices in the home based on dynamic energy pricing information coming from the grid and instructions given by the homeowner (if energy is cheap -> heat water, chill fridge, turn on dryer; if energy is expensive -> turn off dryer, turn off immersion, turn off fridge compressor).

However, rolling out a system like this will take time and money. Jeff Lee, IBM’s Asia Pacific lead for Intelligent Networks, speaking about a smart meter trial in New South Wales, said that a national rollout of a system similar to that being trialled, would require investments in infrastructure of as much as AU$100 billion dollars.

“You can’t replace the investment in electro-mechanical devices overnight. Gradually, substations will get changed to become IT-enabled. But then you have to build the communication infrastructure to do that. We’re talking about installing sensors on every light pole and on every transformer,” said Lee.

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The Wrong People Are Getting The Bill

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In his wrap up to EnergyCamp last month, David Berlind said something which struck me strongly enough I am still thinking about it.

“The main thing I have learned today is that the wrong people are paying the bill.”

David made the statement in the context that he figures we’re due a 15 year shakeout before we really get a handle on the complexity of carbon and energy consumption and production, so that we can accurately calculate costs and move beyond simplistic economics to better understand the impacts of the decisions we make.

For every believer in food miles and local sourcing there is a New Zealand meat farmer that will argue NZ is a better source of eco-friendly meat because it doesn’t use petrochemical fertilizer on fields sheep graze. Yesterday morning my friend Oliver ribbed Gregor, who was carrying a heavy bag, for using an elevator to go down one floor. Quick as a flash Gregor turned around and said: no its greener to use the lift, because he wouldn’t need to have a shower straight away…  (it was a hot Berlin day).

The current commonly cited example in the IT industry of the wrong people paying the bill is facilities management (FM) versus IT. IT doesn’t pay for its electricity. No, seriously, go to your FM manager or IT manager and ask who pays to power your IT properties. The vast majority of IT systems get a free ride on electricity bills, which is one reason its taken so long to fully consider IT carbon costs.

David’s point about the wrong people paying the bill also has a wider context which cuts into issues of sustainability and social responsibility. I was deeply disappointed when the UK Government recently announced the Climate Change aid fund its building to help emerging nations mitigate problems such as rising sea levels, or increased strong weather effects, will actually be loans rather than grants. Who is paying the bill for what here?

The current high costs of food globally, at least partly driven by the new fetish for biofuels, is bound to hurt those those that can least afford it.

Corporate budgeting and planning is generally designed to make costs external. If someone else is paying the bill that helps the bottom line. Pollute a river, and let someone else pay the cleanup costs, is “just good business”. If you think I am just being cynical I would advise you to read or watch a cold-eyed look at the icy hearted sociopath we commonly know as The Corporation. 

Economists and company leaders like nothing better than what they call “externalities” -basically costs that someone else has to deal with. Chewing gum is a brilliant example of externalities in action.. It costs 3p a stick, but an esimated 10p to clean it off a city street.

Another way of talking about a less simple economics is to consider Post-Autistic Economics. Autistic economics looks only at the “facts” without understanding social consequences. More heterodox thinking is now entering the mainstreal through, for example, the triple bottom line concept or broader sustainability narratives from major corporations.

The final way I want to think about the wrong people paying the bill concerns our children. The more damage we do right now, the more resources we consume, the more mess we make, the higher the clean up costs will be for the next generation. Even if you believe we can innovate our way out of trouble, large scale clean terraforming is not going to come cheap. We’re externalising the costs of our current lifestyles pretty blithely, and the wrong people are going to get the bill. Economics is many things but simple isn’t one of them. The facilities manager, people living in low lying areas such as Bangladesh, our kids: the wrong people are getting the bill.

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Note to SAP: Finding A Cheaper Travel Option isn’t Innovation

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SAP is doing some interesting work around environmental sustainability, working on issues such as carbon accounting and environmental monitoring and compliance. For now SAP is working with partners such as OSIsoft and Technidata to help flesh out its offerings.

But in keynote land environmental sustainability doesn’t seem to have become a top bullet point item (which is a bit surprising given SAP is a European company). My ears had pricked up when SAP co-CEO Henning Kagermann started talking about rising travel costs in his pitch yesterday. So what business process innovation did SAP suggest, based on integration of its Business Objects and ERP software? To establish a new business process to find and pre-qualify new transport suppliers… That’s what SAP came up with for risk management in an environment where we ‘re entering the era of the $200 over a barrel innovation challenge?

So much for energy demand management. I think we’ll tag that “could do better”. I appreciate this was just a simple demo in a keynote, but if SAP wants to be seen as innovative, and enabling business process breakthroughs, it would have been nice to see the company provide an approach that would help customers reduce their travel bill by reducing their travel, rather than just trying to get the cheapest supplier. Maybe I am just being grumpy, like Eddy, who yesterday asked whether from an environmental perspective we should be going to conferences at all.

In this morning’s keynote SAP’s other co-CEO Leo Apotheker also talked to rising energy prices, but kept banging the Flat Earth drum. In my opinion the Earth was Flat for about five minutes, until Friedman was proved wrong by rising energy prices. Kind of like the End of History seemed right for about a year or so…

Ending on a positive note I am going to try and join a session here at Sapphire 2008 later about Reducing Carbon Emissions using wind power, on which more later. In the meantime check out this cool job, working as an SAP admin at a windfarm. Want to feel good about your employer? How about this for environmental impacts (or lack of them):

• No Air Pollution
• No Water Pollution
• No Global Warming Pollution
• No Waste
• No Fuel usage verse mining or drilling
• No Water use

SAP is a client. They paid my travel and expenses. I flew to Berlin. I wish firms would more events in Brussels or Paris so we could travel from London by train.

Photo courtesy of SAP press office.

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IPv6: Towards a Greener Internet

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As you probably know by now, we’re very interested in the idea of what might constitute a green API or protocol, so I was very interested when I received a link via twitter from @Straxus (Ryan Slobojan).

The Aon Scéal? (That’s Any News in Gaelic) blog by Alastrain McKinstry points to this piece by Yves Poppe which argues that IPv6 could save 300 Megawatts.

Easy to forget that most mobile devices used by Time Square revelers were behind IPv4 NAT’s and that always on applications such as Instant Messaging, Push e-mail, VoIP or location based services tend to be electricity guzzlers. It so happens that applications that we want always to be reachable have to keep sending periodic keepalive messages to keep the NAT state active. Why is that so? The NAT has an inactivity timer whereby, if no data is sent from your mobile for a certain time interval, the public port will be assigned to another device.

You cannot blame the NAT for this inconvenience, after all, its role in live is to redistribute the same public addresses over and over; if it detects you stopped using the connection for a little while, too bad, you lose the routable address and it goes to someone else. And when a next burst of data communication comes, guess what? It doesn’t find you anymore. Just think of a situation we would loose our cell phone number every time it is not in use and get a new one reassigned each time.

Nokia carried out the original study. Good work Nokia researcher guys! Another way of looking at the saved energy, which I think we’d all vote for, is potentially longer battery life of our mobile access devices. I am sure the folks at Nortel, who are so enthusiastically driving the green agenda for competitive advantage, would be interested in this research, and quite honestly its one of the first arguments I have heard that makes me think ah yes IPv6 lets pull the trigger. There are some good skeptical arguments in the comments here, but on balance I can definitely see the value of the initial research. Its surely worth further study.

While writing this article I also came across the rather excellent Green IT/Broadband blog. The author Bill St. Arnaud clearly believes in our Bit Miles concept, even if he doesn’t call it that.

Governments around the world are wrestling with the challenge of how to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The current preferred approaches are to impose “carbon” taxes and implement various forms of cap and trade or carbon offset systems. However another approach to help reduce carbon emission is to “reward” those who reduce their carbon footprint rather than imposing draconian taxes or dubious cap and trade systems. It is estimated that consumers control or influence over 60% of all CO2 emissions. As such, one possible reward system of trading “bits and bandwidth for carbon” is to provide homeowners with free fiber to the home or free wireless products and other electronic services such as ebooks and eMovies if they agree to pay a premium on their energy consumption which will encourage them to reduce emissions by turning down the thermostat or using public transportation. Not only does the consumer benefit, but this business model also provides new revenue opportunities for network operators, optical equipment manufacturers, and eCommerce application providers.

European IPv6 Day, hosted by the EU is on the 30th May. Come to think about it the guy I should talk to about green IP is Vint Cerf of Google.

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Energy Demand Management on TV!

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Well, TechWebTV! I was over in Las Vegas this week attending EnergyCamp and InterOp.

I spoke about Energy Demand Management (EDM) at EnergyCamp and was pleasantly surprised at the level of interest in this topic. In fact there was so much interest that TechWebTV asked if I would go on camera to discuss EDM with Fritz Nelson!

It is a very brief discussion of quite a complex concept. We never really got into discussing the industrial implications of demand stimulation, for example. What will you do when energy prices fluctuate based on supply and demand? When electricity is extremely cheap or even negatively priced would it make sense to create hydrogen, only to burn it for power later when electricity prices go back up?

Or how about governments and/or utilities? Shouldn’t they be massively subsidizing plug-in hybrids so they can act as distributed storage (a nationwide battery) sucking in power when there is an excess and selling it back to the grid when supply starts falling off?

Discuss.

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Energy Demand Management II – the sequel!

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SANY0030
Creative Commons License photo credit: owlhere

The post I wrote about energy demand management (EDM) last week certainly stimulated some discussion and got people thinking – always good.

It appears it was a timely post too as I came across two announcements which seem to indicate that the big utilities are looking very seriously at smart grids and EDM.

The first news came out of SAP’s recently formed AMI Lighthouse Council when they announced the integration of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) with Enterprise technology.

The AMI lighthouse consists of SAP, CenterPoint Energy, CLP Power Hong Kong Limited, Consumers Energy, Energy East, Florida Power & Light, Oklahoma Gas & Electric and Public Service Electric & Gas as well as several strategic vendors like eMeter, Itron and OSIsoft.

AMI short for Advanced Metering Infrastructure refers to systems that measure, collect and analyse energy usage, from smart electricity meters on request or on a pre-defined schedule.

From Wikipedia

This infrastructure includes hardware, software, communications, customer associated systems and meter data management software.
The network between the measurement devices and business systems allows collection and distribution of information to customers, suppliers, utility companies and service providers. This enables these businesses to either participate in, or provide, demand response solutions, products and services.

The idea is that the AMI Lighthouse Council are working towards the integration of SAP® solutions with AMI solutions for business processes, including customer relationship and billing and enterprise asset management. All vital to making EDM a reality.

The second announcement which caught my eye is that IBM is working with Country Energy (a utility co. which owns and operates Australia’s largest energy supply network) to develop a smart grid in Australia. From the announcement:

Country Energy is pursuing the Intelligent Network concept to improve reliability, support the growth of renewables like solar and wind, and make energy efficiency simpler for customers.

When you see tech companies like SAP, and IBM betting heavily on the smart grid concept and utilities like Country Energy, CenterPoint Energy and CLP Power Hong Kong Limited coming on board to make it happen you know that smart grids are coming.

This next generation of smart grids will be able to absorb far more energy from unpredictable (destabilising) renewable energy sources without compromising grid stability which is in all our best interests.