Between the Poles

Germany's PV solar sources generate half of national power demand

2012-05-27T15:47:55-04:00

Germany's photovoltaic (PV) solar power generating sources produced power at a rate of 22 GW, meeting almost half of national electricity demand at midday on Saturday, May 26. This level of power generation would meet a third of demand on a workday. Currently Germany gets about 20 percent of its total annual power from renewable sources including solar, wind, and biomass.

Germany was one of the first countries to implement a feed-in-tariff program, in which power companies are subsideized to pay higher rates for distributed renewable energy sources. According to a 2012 report by the Environment Ministry, German power consumers have about € 4 billion per year added to their electricity bills for solar power, according to a 2012 report by the Environment Ministry.

Germany added 7.5 GW of installed solar power generation capacity in 2011 and 1.8 GW more in the first quarter for a total of 26 GW capacity. Even RWE, long a hold out on solar power, has announced that it plans to invest in PV farms in southern Europe. Germany’s energy intensity, energy use per GDP, decreased by over 3% in 2011.

I remember that about two years ago on at about 5pm on Sunday May 23, 2010, renewable energy set another record, in Texas when wind generation reached about 6.7GW, about 20% of Texas' total state power demand.

Burlington Hydro's real-time smart grid for operations and analytics: Managing big data real-time

2012-05-26T11:29:07-04:00

At the Oracle Spatial User Conference in Washington DC this week, Don Guatto, COO and VP Engineering at Burlington Hydro and Geoff Cameron, EVP Intelligent Networks at AGSI gave a rivteing presentation on Burlington Hydro's (BHI) smart grid implementaton for the utility's GridSmartCity initiatives.

BHI is a utility near Toronto with 65000 meters, 32 substations and 93 employees. The GridSmartCity initiatives include

self healing networks - this initiative has reduced average outage times in BHI's service area to 20 seconds per year
smart meters - Burlington is in Ontario which has deployed smart meters and time-of-use pricing province wide
distributed generation - Ontario has a Feed-in-Tariff program which has led to the deployment of over 7000 micro-generation projects, mostly solar
electric vehicle (EV) charging stations
factory ride-through systems - enabling factories to continue functioning through outages
battery-based electric storage

Smart grid management system for operations and analytics

An independent consultant hired by BHI made a recommendation with far reaching implications for BHI. "Two of the main factors affecting GIS today are the move towards using internet technology to be able to serve GIS data to a much broader user base and efforts by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) to promote interoperability. BHI needs to implement a new GIS that will fit its technology vision and provide the benefits of today's GIS to BHI operations."

Based on this recommendation BHI determined that the foundation for their smart grid management system would be an open architecture based on open standards. This would allow them to integrate their SCADA system, 65 000 smart meters reporting power use every 15 minutes, the supporting automated meter infrastructure (AMI), intelligent devices, power line sensors, a customer information system (CIS), their ERP system, engineering analysis, and other systems. It would utilize bidirectional communications to both receive information from and control smart devices. The system would have handle much larger data volumes than BHI had ever experienced before. For example, some devices were reporting 60 times per second. And perhaps the most challenging requirement is that it also had to operate real-time, which as Geoff emphasized, is beyond the capability of today's traditional enterprise GIS systems.

Implementation

AGSI's solution uses their Go360 products which provide a scalable, geospatially-enabled solution built on an open service oriented web architecture. It uses Oracle Spatial for a shared, geospatia data repository and AutoCAD Map 3D for design and geospatial data maintenance. A web browser, either on the desktop or on a mobile device, is all that's required to access tools for asset maintenance, cable locate, asset managemet, operations, financials and drill downs, automating network pinning and work protection tagging, SCADA, schematic views, automated CAIDI, SAIDI and SAIFI reporting, an outage management system (OMS), mobile workforce automation, automated as-built management, real-time asset monitoring and analytics, and an executive dashboard.

One of the most impressive Go360 applications that Geoff demonstrated was a transformer status monitoring dashboard that not only showed a map with transformer loading in real- in the form of a heat map, but could also report on historical loading and even estimate, based on the history of oveloading on a particuler transformer, how much the lifetime of the transformer had been shortened as a result of the overloading. It also allowed the operator to reconfigure the grid in real time to reduce the load on overlloaded transformers and redistribute it to others with available capacity.

What impressed me most was to see how an open IT architecture based on open standards together with industry standard off-the-shelf components, a bidirectional communications network and real-time smart devices and sensors has enabled BHI to develop a state of the art real-time geospatially-enabled smart grid operations and management system that integrates with their existing enterprise systems and provides a common point of access to all their operational data.

BHI has plans to contnue to develop smart grud applications in the future, but I think that they have built a strong IT foundation for their future smart grid development.

IEA reports that US fossil-fuel CO2 emissions have dropped by 7.7% since 2006

2012-05-24T10:00:37-04:00

The International Energy Agency (IEA) reports that global CO2 emissions from fossil-fuel combustion reached 31.6 gigatonnes in 2011, according to its preliminary estimates. This is up 3.2% over 2010. The breakdwon for energy-related CO2 emissions by fuel-type is

coal 45%
oil 35%
natural gas 20%.

In 2011, CO2 emissions continued to rise for non-OECD countries, though the total for OECD countries actually decreased

Non-OECD 6.1% increase
OECD 0.6% reduction.

The largest emitters are, in order, China, the United States, the European Union, and India.

China

China is responsible for the largest contribution to the global increase, up 9.3%, primarily as the result of increased coal combustion. But China has dramatically improved its energy intensity, reducing the amount of CO2 emitted per unit of GDP by 15% between 2005 and 2011.

United States

CO2 emissions in the United States dropped 1.7%. The IEA ascribed the decease primarily to switching from coal to natural gas in power generation as well as a warm winter. US emissions have fallen by 430 Mt (7.7%) since 2006, the largest reduction of all countries or regions. The IEA says this is the result of

lower oil use in the transport sector (linked to efficiency improvements, higher oil prices and the economic downturn which has cut vehicle miles travelled)
substantial shift from coal to gas in the power sector.

CO2 emissions in the EU in 2011 were down by 1.9%, as the EU continues toward its 20-20-20 goals by 2020.

India

India’s emissions rose by 8.7% and it now is ahead of Russia in emissions.

Japan

The IEA reported that Japan’s 2011 emissions increased by 2.4%, which is not unexpected as for most of the time it had few nuclear reactors running, and now has none operating.

Autodesk releases Sketchbook Ink

2012-05-24T09:00:00-04:00

SketchBook Ink for the iPad, which was announced back in March at the time of the release of the new iPad, has been released and is available on iTunes.

Unlike traditional vector drawing apps, SketchBook Ink is dedicated to pen-and-ink drawing. The inking behavior gives it a distinct feel but builds on the Sketchbook Pro interface. The app supports importing images from the photo library on iPad that can be used as references or backgrounds. SketchBook Ink enables users to produce very fine detail in their artwork on the new Retina Display independent of resolution. This new technology also supports the ability to export and print large, high-quality images directly from the iPad.

Technical University of Berlin wins Oracle Spatial Excellence Award for CityGML

2012-05-23T14:16:15-04:00

Last week I blogged about an extension to the OGC CityGML standard for utilities. Today at the Oracle Spatial User Conference the Institut für Geodäsie und Geoinformationstechnik - Technische Universität Berlin, where Thomas Kolbe and his team are responsible for the CityGML specificiation, won an Oracle Spatial Excellence Award for Education and Research.

Berlin 3D City Model

I blogged about the 3D city model of Berlin before. The 3D City Database is a free 3D geo database to store, represent, and manage virtual 3D city models on top of a standard spatial relational database. The schema of the 3D City Database is based on the City Geography Markup Language (CityGML), an OGC standard for representing 3D city models. The 3D City Database was developed for the Berliner Senatsverwaltung für Wirtschaft, Technologie und Frauen and the Berlin Partner GmbH. The 3D City Database has been implemented as an Oracle Spatial relational database schema. It is shipped as a collection of SQL scripts which allow for creating and dropping instances of the 3D City Database on top of an Oracle Spatial DBMS. The 3D City Database is open source and released under the GNU Lesser General Public License v3 (LGPL).

Chrome browser exceeds IE for the first time

2012-05-22T08:00:07-04:00

According to StatCounter, Google's Chrome share of the market rose to 32.8% in the week ending May 20, while Internet Explorer's share of the market dropped to 31.9%. This is the first week that Chrome has exceeded Internet Explorer.

Project Stimulus: Mechanical simulation in the cloud

2012-05-21T09:10:23-04:00

Project Simulus is a free technology preview that suppots some innovative approaches to mechanical simulation. The project provides an intuitive simplification environment to prepare CAD models for different simulation analyses as well as using the cloud for computationally intensive computations.

Project Stimulus supports simulation analyses for Inventor, SAT and STEP based models:

Linear static stress offering a variety of contact types, loading and constraint options
Modal frequencies
Steady state thermal offering temperature, heat flux, convection and radiation type loadings
Thermal-stress coupling

The Project Simulus Technology Preview is now available as a free download and trial. The technology preview will operate until January 1, 2013. Introductory videos are available.

Standards-based intelligent modeling of urban multi-utility networks

2012-05-19T14:49:42-04:00

In a paper Semantic 3D Modeling of Multi-utility networks in Cities presented at GSDI 2012 in Quebec City, Thomas Becker; Claus Nagel and Thomas H. Kolbe have outlined how they are translating a vision of the city as an interactive system comprised of functional components, utility networks connecting components, and interdependencies between utility networks into standards-based intelligent models that can be used to analyze urban environments for a variety of purposes including

Risk- and disaster management
Energy consumption
Carbon balancing
City life-cycle management

The see ciities as being very complex, diverse and highly interrelated, that is a system of systems, buildings, utility infrastructure, transportation infrastructure, health and social, and so on. Many different players are involved in designing, building, running and maintaining a city, and each needs a different view of the city. The advantage of having a model of the city is that it provides a simplified representation of the city that provided "ontological and semantic clarity".

Thomas Kolbe and co-workers are the developers of the CityGML standard that has been adopted by the Open Geospatial Consortium. There are several Application Domain Extensions (ADEs) that have been developed to extend CityGML to other domains. In 2010 a basic extension UtilityNetworksADE was proposed for city utility networks, and at Quebec it was announced that this was being futher extended.

The intention is to model infrastructure networks both as a 3D topographic, topological and and functional network. In other words, this is not simply a compilation of network as-builts, but includes the function of each component and its relationships to other components. It knows the difference between different network topologies; water, electric power, steam, wastewater, and communications. It also knows the interdependencies between different networks. For example, in case of a flood, from the digital terrain model, it is possible to determine which electric power substations are flooded, from the electric power network topology, which feeders are no longer operative, from the relationships between the electric power and water networks, which pumping stations are no longer operating, and ultimately who is without water and power.

Functionally, every utility network ias modeled by three types of components

Distribution elements (conductors, pipes, fiber cables) − For distribution of electric power, gas, and messages.
Protection devices (fuses, relays, breakers, and ducts) − Does not actually carry electric current, water, gas, or messages, but supports the distribution system.
Functional components (man-holes, water treatment plants, substations, pumping stations and switches) − Needed for linkage, maintenance, and measurement

I like to think of these as connected elements where the connectivity between elements allows traces, from a customer experiencing an outage to a failed device such as a transformer or substation or from a failed device to all affected customers, structural elements, which support the connected elements such as poles or ducts, and devices which generate, transform, switch, and measure.

To better understand this implication of this approach,Kolbe et al have compiled a model database of 1.313,821 infrastructure elements including interdependencies between different networks. Addendum According the Thomas Kolbe (personal communication), for each utility company in Berlin involved in the SIMKAS-3D project (Vattenfall - electricity and district heating, GASAG - gas, and Berlin Water - drinking water and waste water), his team implemented a converter from the respective utility's dataset to the CityGML ADE utility model using Safe Software's FME.

National science teaching standards includes for the first time the science of human-driven climate change

2012-05-18T14:27:37-04:00

The first major update to national science teaching standards in 15 years includes for the first time the science of human-driven climate change. The standards are based on a National Academy of Sciences report and supported by Achieve, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the National Science Teachers Association and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

Autodesk University 2012: Call for proposals

2012-05-18T12:46:21-04:00

The Call for Proposals for Autodesk University 2012 in Las Vegas closes on May 22nd.

Note: The 5/22 deadline is for submissions for AU in Las Vegas. Submissions for AU Virtual 2012 will open in late June.