Between the Poles

GITA Ontario: Mobile Solutions for Road Asset Management

I was at GITA Ontario Fall Forum yesterday near Toronto, which is an event I look forward to every year. This year was no exception, there was some exceptionally good content especially in the electric power utility area.

Every year I have a chance to catch up with some folks that are developing and deploying geospatial applications in Ontario, a province with about 10 million people.  This time I spend some time chatting with Scott MacPhee, Web Applications Engineer at Hunter GIS, which develops web-based geospatial applications for the municipal, utility, telco and resource management sectors using Autodesk MapGuide 6.5, MapGuide Open Source,  and MapGuide Enterprise.  They have developed several applications for local governments including tax parcel assessment, municipal permit tracking, development tracking, water and sewer asset management, gas infrastructure management, electrical infrastructure management, and environmental and natural resource management. One of the applications they have developed is a Road Asset Management System (RAMS), a comprehensive, web-based road asset management systems that allows municipal road departments to manage inventories and inspections, maintain an asset database including roads, bridges, culverts, signs, and lights,and help with prioritization and budgeting.  RAMS integrates with the parcel tax assessment database, automatically computes ratings, needs and resurfacing/rehabilitation costs, and allows you query the roads database for spatial analysis of road conditions.  RAMS has been in use for some time by local governments in Ontario.

I have blogged about the poor quality of network facility data in utilities and telecom, how critical up to date reliable network facility data is becoming, and how essential it is to use technology to empower field staff  to be full participants in improving the quality of asset data. What Hunter GIS has done is develop a simple online web-based application that can be used by field staff to report to report the condition of road facilities. Scott showed me a mobile extension to RAMS that provides field access to RAMS databases via a Blackberry or other wireless handheld device.  This means that field staff can view and select assets graphically, list all the assets on a street, view inspection reports on road assets, create a new inspection report, for example, report a pot hole, and attach a photograph all from a Blackberry.  Impressive. I fully expect that in the future they are going to find rapidly increasing use of handheld devices for these types of applications and proportionately less use of desktops.  Hunter GIS also have mobile solutions for municipal permit tracking and service request tracking.

Iceland: Hydrogen as a Fuel Source for Ships

Iceland has been moving toward eliminating all use of fossil fuels by 2040.  One the important technologies that Iceland has been investing in is hydrogen.  For example, Iceland is investigating switching over to hydrogen vehicles and has signed an MOU with a number of well known international automobile manufacturers. There has been a successful hydrogen bus project with EU backing.  Another project that was carried out by Icelandic Hydrogen and has been very successful and has also had EU backing is fitting the Elding, a 125 ton  whale watching ship with a hydrogen fuel cell to run its two 50kW generators.  This project was so innovative that it was awarded an Autodesk Inventor of the Month Award.

Smart Grid Communications Networks

Utilities implementing a smart grid need to be able to link customers, their equipment and data centers and often external organizations on a bidirectional communications network.  Some utilities are looking at using telephone company communications assets to do this, but many are looking at other alternatives including laying their own fibre network.  In the case of electric power utilities serving largely rural areas technologies being considered include broadband over powerlines and wireless technology. 

A wireless technology that I frequently hear about from utilities is WiMAX.  A major manufacturer of power utility equipment manufactures WiMAX-based smart meters. Among the companies that have been looking at or testing WiMAX technology include Australia-based SP AusNet, Energy Australia, American Electric Power, Consumers Energy,  Centerpoint, National Grid, San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E), Southern California Edison (SCE), and Hydro One.  A major reason for using WiMAX for the smart grid is high bandwidth which means that WiMAX could be used with major assets like substations to collect large volumes of data from video monitoring units, phasor units which collect information like voltage, current and frequency in real time, and other smart devices. WiMAX could also be used to support mobile work force applications including mapping, digital imagery and video.  WiMAX is an open standard, which differentiates it from proprietary smart grid network technology often found in North America and which the European smart grid initiative is trying to avoid. (Image Hydro One)

Autodesk University Bloggers Social 2009

The date and time for the second annual Autodesk University Bloggers Social is Monday November 30th, 2009 from 6:30PM to 8PM at the Mandalay Bay "Border Grill".  To be considered for an invite, please complete the form linked below.   There will be a flock of bloggers and Autodesk employees attending as well as some speakers in a casual social networking environment to place names to faces.

Autodesk University 2009 Blogger Social Signup Form

Smart Grid: A View from the Inside "It's All about Data"

I’ve invited Kevin Miller, who has many years experience in the electric power utility industry and who now works for Autodesk advising utilities on design information management challenges and solutions, to give his perspective on what the smart grid will mean for electric power utilities.

I have worked in the utility industry for the past 24 years.  I worked at a major electric utility in several capacities in the Transmission & Distribution organization, but for the majority of the time, I was involved in the implementation and support of Distribution systems including GIS, Outage Management System (OMS), Work Management, and Design.  During this time I have seen the concept of smart grid develop and take shape.

How we design, operate and maintain today’s electrical grid  for the most part hasn’t changed in the past 75 years.  Over the years, devices and equipment have evolved slowly (the level of R&D investment in the electric power industry is one of the lowest of any major industry),  but there really haven’t been major changes in how the grid functions.  Of course there was a massive investment in building out the grid to provide universal electrical power under the impetus, for example, of the Rural Electrification Act, which provided federal funds for installation of electric power in rural areas of the United States. 

But, in the 90’s, there was a major change when deregulation and decoupling deflected capital investment from the grid.  The “gold-plate” that had been lavished on the grid in the proceeding decades now was used to finance preparations for freer markets with the result that the technical evolution of the grid stagnated.  In the last two years, stimulus monies, green initiatives, and energy conservation are combining to create significant pressures to quickly catch up, to make the grid smarter to address today’s pressing problems, including reliability, security, customer empowerment, and global climate change.

The systems used to design, capture, maintain, and analyze the grid in use today are partial automations of 75 year old procedures.  The business processes for the design, construction, operation, and maintenance of the grid are carried out by different teams within utilities, for example, engineering design, construction, records, outage management, operations, and billing. Over the years the different functional teams have evolved procedures that support their own specific missions and informational and operational needs.  What has been missing is a holistic view of the entire business process for managing the life cycle of network assets.  Individual teams optimize their own sub-processes, but the optimized sub-processes do not take into consideration the “production and capture” business process  to capture and manage the digital data required to operate and maintain the grid.  The focus on sub-processes and not looking at the bigger picture of the overall business processes and information flows has resulted in enterprise data bases with stale, incomplete, and error laden data and network models.

In the past with the existing grid, we have been able to scrape by with out-of-date and inaccurate data.  Smart grid changes all that.  From a data perspective, smart grid is ultimately just much, much more data, much of it real time.  Getting the value (operational efficiencies and improved operating metrics such as fewer and shorter outages) out of smart grid investment relies on being able to utilize the digital data collected from smart devices to monitor, analyze and simulate the electrical grid in real time.  If your current digital model of your company's electric power network is based on inaccurate, out-of-date, and incomplete data because your business processes for managing the information flow across the organization are archaic and inefficient, it is going to get much, much worse with the smart grid. 

Systems optimized over the years at the sub-process level may have appropriate technology to utilize and analyze network data, but I find that utilities fall down significantly in their ability to “produce and capture” accurate and timely information to feed these systems. I am continually surprised at how bad a job utilities are doing at maintaining their network facilities data.  When companies are inundated by a sea of unreliable information and experience the difficulty in making operational decisions based on this information, they will quickly realize that they have to fix their business processes’ “produce and capture” problems.  But I expect that when that realization happens it will be too late.

Utilities need to address these looming problems now.   It is critical for forward looking organizations to assess the quality of their network facilities data and review their business processes from the perspective of operational efficiency, optimizing business processes and information flows for data quality, and making sure that they have the appropriate supporting technology.  Redundant data and inefficient data and work hand-offs are prime symptoms of an organization focusing on sub-process optimization and ignoring the big picture.  Reviewing your overall business process from soup to nuts with a perspective above the sub-processes (team level) is critical.  As well it is essential to develop a technology architecture that enables automating the overall business process in addition to supporting and optimizing the productivity of each operational team.  

Department of Energy ARRA Stimulus Smart Grid Grant Awards

A list of the DoE $3.4 billion grant awards is available.  The awards are matched so that the total value of the projects is $8.1 billion according to DoE.  Apparently only about a quarter of the 400 applicants under this program won funds. The DOE said the process was very competitive.

Stagnating Productivity in the Electric Power Utility Industry

Productivity has become a critical issue in the utility and telecom industries as a result of the aging and shrinking workforce.  Organizations are losing experienced designers to retirement faster than they can replace them with younger inexperienced workers.  This means that they are not only facing reduced headcount, but also fewer experienced workers.

I blogged previously about the challenge of an aging workforce in Europe.  Europe’s work force will begin shrinking in the coming years and is expected to become 15% smaller within five decades, according to the OECD.

This has long been recognized as a problem in North America as well.  In the US a Conference Board study Managing the Mature Workforce predicted that by 2010, the number of workers aged 35 to 44 will decline by 19%.  A study from the American Public Power Association (APPA) called Work Force Planning for the Public Power Utilities: Ensuring Resources to Meet Projected Needs reports that the loss of critical knowledge and the inability to find replacements with utility-specific skills are the two biggest challenges facing the industry.   In the utility industry as many as 60 percent of experienced utility workers will have retired by 2010. A Booz Allen Hamilton study predicted a 20% decline in productivity in the US power industry.

I collected some statistics from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics to compare productivity in the electric power industry to non farm industrial productivity.  The results, which are shown in the attached graph, show that productivity in the electric power industry increased more rapidly than non farm industrial productivity through 1998, but that since 1998 productivity in the electric power industry has stagnated. This confirms that the electric power utility industry is facing a serious productivity problem, which could not be happening at a worse time.  Green energy and smart grid initiatives mean that utilities have more on their plate than at any other time in recent memory.  Retiring workers are leaving faster than younger replacements can be hired and trained. Workers who are retiring have many years experience and are being replaced with younger, inexperienced workers.  And utilities are having a difficult time retaining younger workers.

Vint Cerf Supports Net Neutrality in Letter to FCC

Vint Cerf, Stephen Crocker, David Reed, Lauren Weinstein and Daniel Lynch, some of the early names in the development of the Internet, sent a letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, supporting the FCC's proposed stronger Web access rules and arguing that they would lead to competition and innovation.  Vint Cerf is currently employed as VP and Chief Internet Evangelist by Google, which together with other Internet companies recently sent a letter to the FCC supporting net neutrality.

"We believe that the existing Internet access landscape in the U.S. provides inadequate choices to discipline the market through facilities-based competition alone. Your network neutrality proposals will help protect U.S. Internet users' choices for and freedom to access all available Internet services, worldwide, while still providing for responsible network operation and management practices, including appropriate privacy-preserving protections against denial of service and other attacks.

"One persistent myth is that "network neutrality" somehow requires that all packets be treated identically, that no prioritization or quality of service is permitted under such a framework, and that network neutrality would forbid charging users higher fees for faster speed circuits. To the contrary, we believe such features are permitted within a "network neutral" framework, so long they are not applied in an anti-competitive fashion.

"We believe that the vast numbers of innovative Internet applications over the last decade are a direct consequence of an open and freely accessible Internet. Many now-successful companies have deployed their services on the Internet without the need to negotiate special arrangements with Internet Service Providers, and it's crucial that future innovators have the same opportunity. We are advocates for "permissionless innovation" that does not impede entrepreneurial enterprise.

"We commend your initiative to protect and maintain the Internet's unique openness, and support the FCC process for considering the adoption of your proposed nondiscrimination and transparency principles."

AutoCAD Map3D 2010 Now Supports Point Clouds

Autodesk has announced the release of the Autodesk Subscription Advantage Pack for AutoCAD® Map 3D 2010, which adds support for using and visualizing point clouds, captured with laser scanners and LiDAR.  Point cloud functionality includes import and 3D visualization of large sets of point cloud data sets with millions of points in LAS and ASCII file formats, filtering point data by spatial extent and LAS classification, elevation, or intensity, point extraction to create surface models, snapping to points in the point cloud using standard AutoCAD software tools, and export of digital elevation models.

The subscription advantage pack also includes Autodesk ImageModeler 2009, which is pretty cool because it allows you to create 3D models from images captured with your digital camera.

Latest Release of the FDO Toolbox v0.8.8 Available

The latest release of the FDO Toolbox is now available.