Testing the generic Modbus Device plugin

One of the cool plugins recently being tested for SolarNode is called "Modbus Device", it allows admins to add new hardware that supports the Modbus RTU and TCP protocols. Check out this link that describes using the Modbus Device plugin to talk to a thermopile pyranometer.  It's a pretty quick and easy process in terms of supporting a new industrial scientific instrument.

Pyranometer - measures irradiance (W/m²)

We see this device as extremely relevant to tracking solar array performance. Knowing quantitatively how a pyranometer is measuring sunlight near a PV array means that you have a metric for what you should expect from the array in terms of kilowatt-hours (kWh) generated. We expect to be able to use these irradiance figures as an input to SolarQuant (our non-linear energy data analysis engine) and then to inform admins as to whether actual performance is stacking up.  That means extracting more value from your solar array!

Automating this process is what is going to count - check back here for an update on SolarQuant development, there are more interesting developments coming up soon....

PicoGrid Energy Audit

While there is no doubt that renewable energy has the potential to be very cost-effective and a highly beneficial option for many buildings, it is important to select a reliable project partner with your best interests at heart.

Before going solar, you need to determine the right type and size of system based on your roof size location and angle and based on your electricity consumption habits.  That way you can ensure you are investing in the best possible system for your future.

A PicoGrid Energy Audit allows you to better understand this context by providing you with a personalised assessment of your energy consumption habits and the generation potential of your roof.

We believe that the best way to promote the development of renewable energy is to make renewable energy projects more business-friendly for all project partners. Indeed, the aim is not to sell you the biggest solar PV system possible at the cheapest possible price, but to help you select the most suitable solution for your building in order to maximize the financial return (ROI) and hence reduce your costs.

What you want to avoid buying is an oversized PV system that exports excessive power to the grid, with low feed-in tariffs in New Zealand, that is just wasting money.  Better to stagger the system over time to suit your needs and to invest in appropriate energy efficiency measures to improve the financial return of the project.

This is all about knowing and understanding your energy information and this is what the PicoGrid Energy Audit will do for you.  Below is an overview of the PicoGrid Energy Audit process: 

PicoGrid Energy Audit - For optimal Solar PV project design.

For more information on PicoGrid Energy Audits, please check out the PicoGrid Energy Audit website, or contact us on 0508 742 647 or via email to book an appointment.

A Distributed Electricity Company (The Future of the Modern Electricity Network) - PART 2 of 3

The volume of distributed generation is climbing (as discussed in the first post).  This trend will continue and it will ultimately reduce demand on centralised plants.  Although, due to the need for stability and continuity of supply, centralised infrastructure and plants will continue to be needed.

When combined with the need to update and renew ageing infrastructure, centralised plants have reducing revenue streams and static or increasing costs.  Hence, the cost of buying power from centralised plants must and will increase (in the US this is already happening, for a NZ context, have a look at this google search both now and in the coming years).

Net result: The price of Grid purchased electricity is going to continue to climb.

Note: I haven't talked about other drivers for electricity price increases (e.g. privatisation and the need for good profit margins), plenty of others are discussing that already.

One very good way of insulating yourself from this trend is to join the growing throng of people who generate their own electricity.

Photovoltaic (PV) panels generate electricity from sunlight

Not everyone has the financial means to purchase and install their own PV system though (even if the ongoing financial benefits make sense, you still need capital readily available to purchase the system in the first place).  This effectively creates a roadblock for many people.

There are some solutions to this conundrum.  In the next and final post in the series on Distributed Electricity I will discuss the options.

A Distributed Electricity Company (The Future of the Modern Electricity Network) - PART 1 of 3

Now that the NZ government has sold off a decent chunk of our generation assets, it's probably OK to let the cat out of the bag (releasing this cat is a double edged sword, read on for an explanation).

Mountains, water and electricity
(much of New Zealand's electricity is hydro generated).
Photo: courtesy Martin Stewart

To date, all of the arguments used to justify the sale of the assets fail logical reasoning. When it can be shown that the ROI of these assets vastly out strips the cost of money, it's hard to argue that selling these assets was a wise choice (the partial sale of these electricity generation asset has returned about 4.3 Billion dollars to the government).

Having said that, the government has left a key piece of information out of the story, a piece of information that can change this logical argument.  The fact is that the commercial value of these assets will be much less in the future (something the industry already knows). This will happen due to technology and market price changes on the horizon, changes that are already under way now.

What is happening is a slow but steadily increasing uptake of distributed renewable generation and this has a big effect on the electricity market.  An example of this can be seen in Australia, where the electricity spot market has recently gone negative in the middle of the day (yes, that means people are being paid to consume power!).

To be specific, the "Key Information" the government has left out of the public debate is: "As the cost of equipment for generating renewable energy continues to plummet, the value of the old industrial scale generation assets will drop."

From my perspective, this key information is the only "logical" way the government could internally justify the sale of these assets, because it means the country gets out while the capital value is high.  Of course there is also the ideological based reasoning that government ownership should be minimised, I don't think this simple reasoning can be considered logical though.  I'm also not sure what would hold more sway in the government caucus, ideology or logic?

Of course being honest about this information wouldn't have been a wise move from the governments perspective.  If you are trying to maximise the sale price of these assets (and your determined to sell), this is the last thing you want being discussed in the media...

In the next post, I'll be discussing how these changes will affect us all.

Context for Distributed Generation Energy Management in NZ

When you look at the rest of the world, there are a lot of solar PV installations happening out there. I’m not talking about hobbyists and niche deployments but industrial MW scale energy plants. Admittedly, it follows a boom and bust cycle that’s driven by the whims of governments who support renewable portfolios....sometimes. Looks like Australia is in for another spin on the merry-go-round with the results of the most recent election.

Powerful and renewable: Solar Energy
(PHOTO: courtesy Nasa)

Oh well. With solar, it’s always a bad idea to espouse “shortermism.”  However, when you look at the higher-quality, super durable gear - IEC 61701 certified monocrystalline modules, AS/NZS 4777 certified grid-connect inverters, AS/NZS 1170 rated roof mounting - there’s a lot of long-term value there. Everyone is talking about solar PV grid-connect at the moment, but really that’s only one aspect of energy management that companies need to think about. Other aspects are: how and when you use energy, how to intelligently conserve power, what the weather is going to be like, how much solar will deliver as a percentage of total consumption, and all the inter-related data that comes from the dynamic interaction of these daily trends. Not in abstract generalities, but for your business specifically.

While in NZ there is ample renewable power - world-leading levels in fact! - it shouldn’t stop our engineering community from developing the tools that let companies manage those energy and financial flows themselves.  Given that there’s a large contingent of “small to medium sized enterprises” in NZ (SMEs if you want to talk in biz jargon), shouldn’t there be a set of services that hand over the energy management reins to the SME’s COO? That is, not a technologist but a business focused person. Yes: the solar hardware is available today, and skilled installers are doing some great work in NZ.  In fact, there’s actually a very compelling business case to be made for quality grid-connect systems PV in NZ. But what about the business tools that let an SME manage, measure and report how their specific energy flows - and cash flows - are going. Are those tools available?

You may ask: “Why do we need them - isn’t the power bill good enough?”  Well, it’s true that the data is available each month, but what about acting on that data - as it happens? For example: say your target SME is a distributor with a large warehouse roof. Their hours of operation are standard daytime hours, which is when they use the majority of their power, lights, forklifts, computers. It would make sense for the solar energy hitting that vast roof to offset the power bills as much as possible.  With some smarts on maximizing locally-generated energy, turning things off, maximizing loads during sunny hours, you could provide empirical calculations on energy use for immediate reporting and financial forecasts.  Studies show that people who have a simple visualization of their energy use save between 5% and 15% on their power bill.  Add in intelligent solar PV self-consumption and we’re talking about active, web-based, holistic energy management.

Commercial Solar PV in New Zealand is happening, but perhaps not as fast or as broadly as you’d think, for a nation with so much sun.  This is because there’s no real assurance that the investment is going to be worth it.  And so far, not many examples of companies that have taken the step.  We see lots of smart-grid, smart-home promises for the future.  But when those solutions are coming from the labs of electricity retailers....that’s like buying Hen Management Services from Mr. Fox isn’t it? I mean, c’mon - how can we really get this in gear?

But things are changing, I’m thinking it might be more of a chicken-and-egg situation.  If there were an easy-to-implement, solid cloud-based software made available to SMEs, along with some case studies of the benefits, there would be a lot more takers of quality solar PV equipment to offset local consumption.  An SME wouldn’t have to invent something themselves, they wouldn’t have to take a risk as an early adopter.  Instead, they could quickly implement an existing proven system and tweak it for their business.  Business people - not technicians - could review the case studies of comparable firms and say “yep, this energy profile is very like ours - and hey, look at their results. We could do that.” The big picture result would be that, as a group, NZ SMEs could start using more locally-generated power. That means the local multiplier effect starts to kick in, and that leads to more local wealth. Real wealth, not the “wealth” of short-termers.  Plus, there’s the good practice of using more renewable energy in your local community. Cool! Why not collaborate here in NZ as engineers to provide those solutions for SMEs to act on their energy use - and start building some really advanced, site-specific solutions today?

One reason I say this is that there are a lot of solid technical options that are emerging to manage energy flows. Take a look at the JF2 LATA switch.  This is a reliable, affordable industrial CANbus switch that gives you switching as well as state information about each circuit.  Packaged in neat DIN rail compatible units, you can daisy-chain these devices across kilometers of warehouse, using standard CAT5 wiring.  Not only does it save AC wiring costs - because you can avoid AC runs to the switch - but it gives you intricate, durable remote control over a multitude of circuits. Control you can implement from secure cloud-based software.  And guess what? LATA is open source and made in New Zealand.

Configuring a SolarNetwork hardware compnent

But this is just the start. Here at Greenstage, we are building out that software framework, using an enterprise base, and Open Source licenses.  We talk to lots of different pieces of hardware (the LATA is just one example), in a very logical, repeatable and modular fashion - employing open standards wherever we can. Meanwhile, as computing becomes ubiquitous, powerful and inexpensive, the ability to automate the collection of energy information and provide actionable steps to enterprises is now available.  The need for energy - renewable energy especially - is only increasing as electric vehicles become available, while both petrol and grid power prices keep rising consistently over the long term. Can you see it? I believe that collectively, we can prime the pump by identifying SME’s requirements, and providing holistic solutions tailored to their business needs.  We can start doing this by building out a NZ-based toolkit that gives them actionable options on their energy information.

OK enough talking: who wants to join us on the journey?  Lets make this happen!

2009 - Optimism in the face of adversity

You can probably guess from the lack of celebratory post, that we have not had the car driving yet. We are still working with the inverter manufacturer to get this resolved. The crux of the issue is the DSP board and the software that runs on it. I hope to have more information and positive news about this situation next week.

In the mean time we are still looking at the bigger picture of what this GS750V project is about. Pre Xmas I became aware of the SolarNetwork project being lead by John Gorman. This Open Source project aims to create a network of solar nodes, where each node measures locally generated power (from PV cells or similar) and local power consumed. All this information is collected together and used to predict future generation and consumption scenarios based on weather forecasts and the future build out of solar node infrastructure.

I believe this solar node network and its associated data will become a very powerful tool to plan future business models and business expansion with respect renewable energy generation.

The other exciting opportunity John and I have discussed, is the opportunity to expand the SolarNetwork infrastructure to support V2G (vehicle to grid) functionality. The idea being that if the owner of the EV plugs the car in for a top up, indicates that they want to minimise the cost of the charge (and the impact on the environment) and that they will not need the car for another 4 hours say. This then allows the V2G system to effectively sell power from the EV battery pack during peak demand and charge the pack when demand is less and power is cheaper. The V2G system manges this process to ensure the pack is fully charged upon the owners return. Of course the owner also has the option to tell the V2G system to just charge the pack as quickly as possible and keep it that way until they return if thats what they desire.

This may sound like a magical fairy tale, but from a software engineering point of view this fits into the category of a very doable medium scale project. The bigger challenge is with the physical infrastructure. This is where the beauty of attacking it with an Open Source project comes in. It will allow the basic concept to be developed to a working stage with one specific type of infrastructure (e.g a specific charger and/or inverter combination). The capability can then be expanded by adding additional functionality to the control algorithms and by adding support for other brands and models of infrastructure (i.e. other manufactures charges and inverters).

Greenstage has already ordered a solar node and hopes to be on the SolarNetwork in the next couple of months. If you would like a solar node, or to get involved with the development, please contact John and let him know how great his project is.

Why wait for the world to change? Lets just do what needs to be done!