Between the Poles

Rising PC Shipments Driven by Mobile

 According to an IDC report, PC shipments are expected to grow by 12.6% year-over-year and double-digit growth will continue through 2014.  Portable PCs are expected to account for 70% of the global market by 2012.  Growth in shipments of netbooks and low-end mini-laptops slowed while other laptop categories increased 22% increase year-over-year.  In the second half of 2009 global shipments were up 2.9% year-over-year. In the United States, PC shipments were up 6.7%.  Consumer PC purchases were the sole driver of the market last year increasing 38.5% year-over-year.  Commercial shipments were flat until the end of the year when there was a slight increase.

Gartner, in its preliminary 2010 forecast earlier this month, predicted that that global PC shipments would increase 19.7% year-over-year. Gartner expects mobile PCs to account for 90 percent of PC growth over the next three years.   In 2009, mobile PCs accounted for 55 percent of all PC shipments and Gartner expects that by 2012, mobile PCs will be responsible for nearly 70 percent of shipments.

Gartner expects that the worldwide market for touchscreen mobile devices in 2010 will increase 96.8 percent increase over 2009.  Gartner predicts that by 2013, touchscreen mobile devices will account for 58 percent of mobile device sales worldwide and, incredibly, more than 80 percent in North America and Western Europe.

America's 2020 Broadband Vision Plan Executive Summary Released by the FCC

A National Broadband Plan was mandated by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act a year ago.  After an open consultation process, the Executive Summary of the Plan was released today.  The full Plan will be released tomorrow.  Some of the Plan’s recommendations will be implemented by the FCC, while others require government legislation or executive orders from various levels of government.

The broad goals of the Plan over the next decade include

• Connect 100 million households to affordable 100-megabits-per-second service
• Provide affordable access in every American community to ultra-high-speed broadband of at least 1 gigabit per second at institutions such as schools, hospitals, and military installations
• Open 500 megahertz of spectrum for licensed and unlicensed wireless broadband use
• Move the US broadband adoption rate from 65 percent to more than 90 per cent
• Make affordable broadband available to rural communities, schools, libraries, and vulnerable populations by transitioning existing Universal Service Fund support from voice to IP
• Ensure greater transparency, fewer barriers to entry, and market-based analysis with quality data on price, speed, and availability ( the FCC has introduced an application for testing broadband bandwidth )
• Provide every first responder with access to a nationwide, wireless, interoperable public safety network.

OSGEO Continue to Grow

I am quite amazed at how rapidly OSGEO continues to grow.  The total number of projects is now over 20, eight of which are in incubation.  Among the major project additions are PostGIS, GeoServer and MapFish. 

There are about two dozen chapters around the world including India, US, UK, Canada, Japan, Korea, Poland, France, China and Italy. 

The Ordnance Survey of the UK has just become a Supporting Sponsor. Autodesk, INPE and Ingres are also Supporting Sponsors.

The total lines of code for all OSGEO projects is now over 12 million.  The total number of committers has reached 635, of which 298 or almost half have been active in the past 12 months.  For comparison, the last time I looked over two years ago Apache had about a thousand committers.

Second South Atlantic Tropical Storm in Recorded History Reported by NASA

NASA has detected the second tropical storm, called 90Q, in the South Atlantic in recorded history about 325 miles east of Puerto Alegre, Brazil. The first tropical cyclone ever seen in recorded history in the South Atlantic occurred in March, 2004 and was called Catarina or 1-T Alfa.  TRMM satellite data showed thunderstorm tops near the center of the storm reaching to heights above 12.5 km.  NASA reports that Tropical Storm 90Q will continue moving in a general easterly direction away from the Brazilian coast.

Canadian Water Consumption Rated "Excessive"

The Conference Board of Canada estimates that the global market for water and wastewater is in excess of $450 billion (2008), with annual growth of 8% to 15%.

Water consumption in Canada is excessive because of the lack of widespread water conservation practices and because of water pricing that does not promote efficiency.

• In 2000 Canada ranked 15th out of 16 peer OECD countries
• Canada’s water consumption is more than double that of the 16-country average

Over a decade ago, Environment Canada warned that without increasing the price of water consumption, delivery infrastructure was at risk of deteriorating beyond usability.  Water revenues are not sufficient to cover operational, repair, upgrading, or expansion costs. The cost of maintaining municipal water supply and sewage systems is estimated at $23 billion over the next 10 years.

In 2000 Canadians used over 300 litres of water per person per day. Canada’s water consumption per capita was over nine times greater than the U.K..  Only the U.S. consumed more water per person.

Industry is Canada’s largest water user, using 68 per cent of the total water used in Canada in 2000. Of the industrial water users, thermal-electric power producers withdraw almost 80 per cent. Manufacturing industries use just over 19 per cent.  Domestic water use accounted for 20 per cent of total water use in Canada.  Agricultural water use accounted for 12 per cent of total water consumption in Canada.  While many countries in the OECD have decreased water consumption, Canada’s water usage has increased considerably. Between 1980 and 1997, overall water use in Canada increased by 26 per cent, five times more than the overall OECD increase of 5 per cent.

Only 57 per cent of Canada’s urban population was metered in 1999.  Furthermore, municipal water rates in Canada are a fraction of those in other countries and among the lowest in the OECD.  Consequently, a significant proportion of Canadians have little economic incentive to use water efficiently.

MapGuide Maestro 2.0 Released

Kenneth Skovhede has announced the release of MapGuide Maestro 2.0 after over a year of development.  Maestro is an open source MapGuide authoring tool.  Jason Birch has been using the pre-release for several months and has identified his top 10 new features in Maestro 2.0.

1. Theming with ColorBrewer Support
2. Expression Editor
3. Resource Validation
4. Improved XML Editor
5. Profiling
6. Package Management
7. Custom Resource Templates
8. Duplicating a Resource
9. Colour-Coded Resource Tree
10. General Usability

State of US Infrastructure Summed Up

I have blogged on several occasions about the American Society for Civil Engineers (ASCE) infrastructure Report Card which accesses 15 types of infrastructure.  Since the last ASCE Report Card in 2005, the grades have not improved. US Infrastructure still gets a grade of D, but the estimated cost of upgrading it to an acceptable standard has now risen to $2.2 trillion.

Rachel Maddow sums it all up neatly in a short video. Thanks to Dan Shannon for pointing me to this.

 

National Broadband Plan to be Announced by FCC March 16

The FCC will announce its National Broadband Plan (NBP) next week.  The objective of the NBP is to provide universal broadband access as well as encourage governments and industry to use broadband in health care, education and energy efficiency programs.  The FCC has provided enough information over the past year that there appears to be a consensus on what is expected.

Wire Broadband

The goal is likely to be to deliver 100 Mbps to 100 million households by 2020.  Providers relying on DSL and copper for the last mile will probably have to make a significant investment to achieve 100 Mbps.

Universal Service (USF) reform

The NBP will have to include a way to fund rural broadband access. Currently the Universal Service Fund (USF) is an $8 billion program targeted on voice communication. The NBP is likely to include a 10 year transition that will gradually shift USF from voice to IP-based services.

Wireless Broadband

As I blogged previously, the NBP will likely ask the government to free up 500 MHz of spectrum by asking television spectrum holders to voluntarily sell spectrum to mobile broadband operators.

Adoption

The NBP will provide someway of providing broadband access for the poor.

National Purposes

The NBP will provide the basis for universal access for services such as health care, education, smart energy management and government programs.

To be implemented, the NBP recommendations will require congressional action as well as formal guidelines and directives from the FCC.

Autodesk Announces Software Download To Replace DVDs and CDs

Autodesk has announced that starting this month, software download will replace CDs and DVDs as the default method of delivering software upgrades to most subscription customers worldwide.  If you would prefer DVDs or CDs, you can choose this option at no extra cost.  Software download is more immediate, assuming you have broadband, and is a more sustainable option.

Additional information and a FAQ can be found on the Autodesk Subscription web site.

Transmission Summit: Intermittent Energy Sources Drive Transmission Buildout

Renewable Energy Drives Investment in Transmission

At the Transmission Summit in Washington DC last week, John Caldwell from the Edison Electric Institute referred to an Edison sponsored 2008 research report Transforming America's Power Industry, The Investment Challenge 2010-2030 by the Brattle Group (I blogged about this previously) that examines the total investment that would be required to respond to increased energy demand and make US power generation more environmentally gentle by taking advantage of energy efficiency (EE) and demand response (DR) programs.

Brattle's most likely scenario is based on the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration's (EIA) Annual Energy Outlook (AEO) forecast with the addition of realistically achievable EE and DR programs, but without any new federal carbon policy.  It is based on a forecast of likely customer behavior and takes into account existing market, financial, political, and regulatory barriers that are likely to limit the amount of savings that might be achievable through EE and DR programs.  Brattle projected that implementation of realistically achievable EE and DR programs by electric utilities would reduce the need for new generation capacity significantly, dropping the AEO-based forecast from 214 GW to 133 GW (38 percent), with an estimated investment cost of $505 billion for 2010-2030.

To this will require an investment in transmission and distribution that exceeds the generation investment. Brattle estimated a $298 billion investment for transmission and $582 billion for distribution. These investments will enable the electric power industry to integrate 39 GW of renewable energy mandated under state renewable portfolio standards (RPS) programs and continue the installation of a smart grid.  These estimates include at least part of the $160 billion cost of the smart grid (originally called "intelligrid") as envisaged by EPRI.

For example, NREL and AEP have proposed a massive national transmission network to bring wind generated power to population centres. The network would mean 19,000 miles of new 765 kV
transmission lines which includes existing
765 kV project proposals. The estimated total cost of this proposal is $60 billion.

Balkanization

Unlike the EU and China where there are strong national goals for renewable generation, in the US weaker state RPS programs are the driving force behind programs to increase the share of renewable generation.  The result was described as balkanization by several speakers because each state is developing its own approach to renewable energy, which may not be the lowest cost option.  The single biggest issue that I heard over and over again is cost allocation, how the cost of new (interstate) transmission lines is going to be spread among all the stakeholders.  However, the Electric Power Act of 2005 requires the Department of Energy to designate National Interest Electric Transmission Corridors where there are significant transmission limitations adversely affecting the public. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission may authorize federal permits for transmission projects in these regions.  To date this has been done in the Northeast and the Southwest.

AC Grids

Phil Harris of Tres Amigas, who gave the opening keynote, focused on the issues associated with large AC grids.  Some of the major disadvantages of the existing AC grids he mentioned are

• changing anything affects everything else
• they are dumb, for example, with the existing grid, it can take from 6 months to a year to analyze a blackout to determine what happened.
  
• they have to be run below capacity (called "N-1") to prevent the kind of cascading blackout that occurred in the Northeast in 2003.  

New Technology

Power Electronics

Power electronics such as synchrophasors (or PMUs) and other devices enables power system automation or the smart grid. Together these devices enable the real-time monitoring of power flows, situational awareness and control, and the self-managing grid.

HVDC Superconducting Cables

The Eastern Interconnection is the largest alternating current power grid in North America and arguably in the world with about 580 GW or 640 GW including Central Canada (in 2007) of generating capacity.  It stretches from Central Canada to the US Atlantic coast (excluding Québec), South to Florida, and West to the Rocky Mountains. (excluding Texas).  The other two major AC grids in the US are the Western Interconnection and the Texas Interconnection.  Last year the Tres Amigas Project was announced with the intention of interconnecting the Eastern, Western and Texas Interconnections.  The technology that is being proposed to do this is underground high voltage direct current (HVDC) superconducting cables each with a capacity of 5 GW.  Superconducting HVDC cables can carry high volumes of power over long distances with low loss, approximately 2% for refrigeration that is independent of load and distance.  Currently superconducting HVDC cables must be run underground, and as a rule of thumb underground can be up to 10 times more expensive than aerial.

3D Visualization

Many speakers emphasized that the single biggest challenge in developing a new transmission line is permitting, getting the necessary approvals from government organizations including state regulators and local permitting agencies.  This is so critical and essential that It is difficult to arrange financing until the necessary approvals are in place.  The second major challenge is right of way (ROW), which involves negotiating with all of the landowners in the proposed right of way.  The speakers emphasized that communication is the most effective way to overcome these hurdles.  Truescape, who were present at the conference, provide 3D visualization technology for wind, solar and transmission projects that is designed to involve stakeholders in the design process. Precision 3D simulations reduce doubt and conjecture, help share information about complex projects among the project team and external stakeholders and promote transparency and trust among government regulators and permitting agencies.