Between the Poles

Infrastructure excellence competition

Infrastructure-excellence.com is hosting the second annual competition showcasing Excellence in Infrastructure— highlighting the best projects done in 2012/2013. The winners will be given over US$10,000 in prizes by the competition sponsors.  The competition is open to anyone 21 years and older who is planning, designing, building, and managing infrastructure projects.  Project types may include the following:

• Transportation (roads and highways, rail, airports, or bridges)
• Land development (commercial sites, subdivisions, public parks, or recreation)
• Water (distribution, water resources, dams and levees, or wastewater)
• Energy (electric and gas distribution, electric transmission, and substation design)
• Urban planning

Major water organizations ask Congress to ensure funding for water and wastewater infrastructure

I have blogged previously about the issues facing water/wastewater systems in the U.S. and the challenge of funding replacement of aging infrastructure and upgrading to meet the requirements of the Clean Water Act. One of the most important funding mechanisms are state revolving funds which provide low interest loans for water and wastewater infrastructure. The Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF) provides loans for water quality improvement projects including municipal wastewater facilities, estuary protection projects, and nonpoint source pollution control.  The Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF) supports loans to improve drinking water quality,

According to the ASCE, the problem is that most jurisdictions are spending between 1 and 1.5 percent on infrastructure, which is down from 5 to 6 percent spent in the 1960s and '70s.  In September 2002, an EPA Gap Analysis concluded that if there is no increase in investment, there will be a $6-billion gap between current annual capital expenditures for wastewater treatment ($13 billion annually) and projected spending needs.  The EPA has estimated that total investments of $187.9 billion for wastewater and $334.8 billion for drinking water is required over the  next 20 years.  The American Water Works Assn (AWWA) has estimated that the cost of repairing and expanding U.S. drinking water infrastructure will exceed $1 trillion in the next 25 years and $1.7 trillion over 40 years.

In late June of this year the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Interior, Environment and Related Agencies of the U.S. House of Representatives approved a FY2013 funding bill that will cut state revolving funds for water and wastewater.  The cuts are significant

• CWSRF - 53 percent cut from the $1.47 billion 2012 to $689 million in 2013
• DWSRF - 9.7 percent cut from $918 million in 2012 to $829 million in 2013.

Eight U.S. water organizations including the AWWA have just sent a letter to Congress encouraging Congress to ensure funding for the Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF) and the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF) is maintained at the Senate proposed figures of $1.47 billion and $918 million.

In addition they asked for $238 million for the Clean Water Act §106 Operating Grant program and  $190 million for the Public Water Work System Supervision Program.

GITA PNW: Reflections on GITA's role in rapid technology change in the utility industry

In 1982 a not-for-profit organization AM/FM International was chartered to provide the growing AM/FM industry with an educational forum to exchange ideas and keep up with changing technologies including the change from paper to digital mapping, called Automated Mapping/Facilities Management at the time.  In 1998, AM/FM International changed its name to the Geospatial Information & Technology Association (GITA). Since then GITA's mission has been to provide education and information exchange on the use and benefits of geospatial information and technology for the world's infrastructure, particularly in utility organizations including electric power, water and waste water and gas. 

In this time of rapid technology change in the utility industry, driven again by the renewed penetration of digital technologies into all aspects of utility operations, the need for an organization like GITA to monitor new technologies and provide education and an open forum for the exchange of ideas is greater than ever. 

But with current limited travel budgets at many utilities, regional conferences are attracting more participants than national events.  GITA has about 15 chapters in North America, and one of the most active is the Pacific Northwest Chapter (GITA PNW), which just held its annual conference.  I have been attending this event for at least five years.  This year's event was again very worthwhile and included a number of presentations on new IT technologies and their application to the utility sector, several of which I have blogged about.

Green construction and the convergence of model-based design and geospatial

Modern web portals for utilities - asynchronously updatable mashups and standards-based

A cloud-based hosted solution for small utilities

Reflections on GITA's role in technology change in the utility industry by the President of GITA PNW

The event was opened by the President of GITA PNW, Zan Strausz.  He reflected on the origins of GITA and why he thinks that the needs that drove the formation of AM/FM International and GITA are just as important today as they were in the 1980's and 1990's.  I found his talk every perceptive and relevant to anyone contemplating the massive technology changes that the utility industry is just beginning to embark on, and I have included some of his remarks here.

Before we launch into our program I want to take this opportunity to reflect on the venerable tradition you as conference attendees are a part of. I'm speaking of the long history of GITA providing a forum for education, promotion and innovation in the geospatial world. Its roots in the utility industry reflect the early adoption of geospatial technology going back 50 years. With the development of what was then known as Automated Mapping/Facilities Management, or AM/FM, utilities were pioneers in applying geospatial concepts to analysis and asset management, way before the term Geographic Information System became the ubiquitous concept it is today. It was around this technology that GITA, originally called AM/FM International, was organized. Over the years the focus of the organization has expanded beyond just the utility industry to include a more broad base of infrastructure users and service providers involved in the application of geospatial technology. But the core purpose of the organization remains to provide a forum for the dissemination and sharing of geospatial technology concepts as they relate to increasing the efficiency and value of the services our  organizations provide.  

I would like to provide one example of an issue that I have observed in my own industry which I believe can be mitigated by benefits of the forum provided by GITA. I refer to what I would term "technology inertia" by which I mean the cumulative effect of bureaucratic momentum and ingrained habits that prevent the adoption of new and particularly emerging technology. This is not necessarily a  bad thing; a responsible organization needs to wisely and considerately adapt to new technology, as  steward of their investors' or customers' interests. However, it becomes a problem when it delays the  application of technology that can definitely improve the efficiency of the organization. It is ironic that  this problem would appear in the utility industry, which has a history of innovation in the application of geospatial technology ... I'm certainly sympathetic with the conservative ethos of not changing with every shift in the winds of technology, and if something works, why change? But, often, this can retard innovation which would benefit  everyone.

Forums such as GITA provides can be an antidote to this ossified conservatism by giving us insights into emerging and successfully applied geospatial technology, provided by our peers and  industry experts; insights that we need to advance our enterprises into the future.  That future holds some immediate challenges to the utility industry in particular. The many  technologies embodied in the concept of the Smart Grid are going to need to be implemented in the  very near future if we are to meet the huge challenges of providing power, water and other basic  infrastructure in a world whose exploding demand is rapidly running up against the realities and  imperatives imposed by the finite nature of the resources of our increasingly small world. Geospatial  technology will certainly play a key role in the management of the huge amounts of data processing  and analysis that will need to be applied to provide any hope that we can we can solve the  infrastructure challenges that absolutely must be met before we can leave future generations the legacy  of a clean, prosperous and healthy world.

UK National Infrastructure Plan includes public loan guarantees for private investment

I have blogged previously about the UK National Infrastructure Plan which plans to invest about £250 billion in the next five yrs and £ 400 billion in the 10 yrs on infrastructure including high speed rail, energy (especially nuclear and wind), aviation, water and wastewater, roads and highways, and high speed broadband.  This is a considerably higher spend than in the past and focuses on economic infrastructure. The most revolutionary aspect of this plan is that 70% of the funding is intended to come from the private sector.

The government has found it diffcult to attract the level of private investment that is required, at least partially due to the adverse credit situation in Europe.  To make infrastructure investment more attractive to private investors, such as pension funds, the UK goverment has announced a £50bn loan guarantee program for private investment in infrastructure and exports.

It is estimated that up to £40 billion worth of projects could quality.  The criteria the government intends to use to assess projects are

• Nationally significant
• Ready to start construction within 12 months (similar to the U.S. ARRA's shovel-ready criterion)
• Financially credible
• Would not proceed without a loan guarantee
• Good value to the taxpayer

The loan gurantees program also includes a temporary lending programme to enable 30 public private partnership (PPP) infrastructure projects worth an estimated £6 billion to go ahead.

Autodesk releases Infrastructure Modeler 360 for the cloud

Autodesk has released a new service as part of Autodesk 360, called Autodesk BIM 360.  One of the new tools in BIM 360 is a Conceptual Design and Feasibility Evaluation service, which enables users of Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler to publish, store, and manage large models in the cloud. Users can invite other team members to access, download, and edit shared models.  If you ever used Project Galileo Online, this may look familiar.  Users can invite other team members to access, download, and edit shared models.

Introductory videos are available.

This part of Autodesk BIM 360 is a cloud-based collaboration service available to subscription customers.

Standards-based intelligent modeling of urban multi-utility networks

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

1. Distribution elements (conductors, pipes, fiber cables) − For distribution of electric power, gas, and messages.
2. Protection devices (fuses, relays, breakers, and ducts) − Does not actually carry electric current, water, gas, or messages, but supports the distribution system.
3. 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.

Government of Canada announces plan to streamline federal natural resources and environmental oversight

The Government of Canada has announced plans to streamline federal natural resources and environmental oversight.  The objective is to reduce federal oversight of natural resource development projects by restricting federal involvement to only those projects with national significance and with significant environmental effect.  The Canadian Environment Assessment Agency currently handles environmental assessments of which 94% were small projects.  Presumably oversight for most of these small projects will become the responsibility of the provinces.  There will also be a time limit on the duration of environmental reviews.  And instead of up to 40 agencies participating in environmental reviews, in the future only three agencies, Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, the National Energy Board and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission will be responsible for reviews.

Specific details as announced today are

• “One project, one review” system for reviews of major projects by recognizing provincial processes as substitutes or equivalents to federal ones as long as they meet the requirements under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act
• Time limits for hearings and assessments, namely, 24 months for panel reviews, 18 months for National Energy Board hearings and 12 months for standard environmental assessments.  Setting legally binding timelines for key regulatory permitting processes, including the Fisheries Act, the Species at Risk Act, the Navigable Waters Protection Act, the Canadian Environmental Protection Act and the Nuclear Safety and Control Act;
• Consolidating the number of organizations responsible for reviews from more than 40 to three: The Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency, the National Energy Board and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission;
• Focusing federal assessment efforts on major projects that can have significant environmental effects;
• Introducing enforceable environmental assessment decision statements under the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. The proposed penalties could range up to $400,000;
• Requiring follow-up programs after all environmental assessments to verify the accuracy of the predictions regarding potential environmental effects and to determine if mitigation measures are working as intended;
• Providing federal inspectors with the authority to examine whether or not conditions of a decision statement are met;
• Authorizing the use of administrative monetary penalties for violations of the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, the Nuclear Safety and Control Act and the National Energy Board Act.
• Providing more than $35 million over two years for marine safety. 
• Prioviding $13.5 million over two years to strengthen pipeline safety, including regulations to strengthen the tanker safety regime and increasing the number of oil and gas pipeline inspections each year by 50 percent, from 100 to 150 inspections.

Funding the UK National Infrastructure Plan

At the Global Infrastructure Leadership Forum, Geoffrey Spence, who heads up Infrastructure UK, the Treasury body that oversees the UK’s infrastructure plan, gave an overview of the National Infrastructure Plan of the UK.  The fact that Geofffrey Spence was a personal economic adviser to Chancellor Alistair Darling during the last banking crisis, gives some indication of how seiously the UK Government is treating infrastructure.

In 2011 the Government released its National Infrastructure Plan, which outlines a plan to invest about £250 billion in the next five yrs and £ 400 billion in the 10 yrs on infrastructure including high speed rail, energy (especially nuclear and wind), aviation, water and wastewater, roads and highways, and high speed broadband.  This is a considerably higher spend than in the past and signals a change in focus from social infrastructure such as hospitals and government facilities to economic infrastructure.  Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of this plan is the intention that 70% of the funding will come from the private sector.

The Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) has said that it supports the vision as expressed in the Plan and that it believes that it would enable the UK to compete in the global economy. It specifically recommended that HM Government assign a senior minister with responsibility for monitoring performance against Plan, create a simple set of performance measures for infrastructure that are independently assessed, and develop a two year pipeline of infrastructure projects to help the private sector to improve efficiency.  The ICE also suggested ways to asist the Government to attract private investment.

Geoffrey Spense said that the Government wants full transparency for the infrastructure effort, so that business will know where they should focus its efforts over the next ten years.  It intends to maintain an open pipeline of projects for the next several years so that, for example, companies specializing in tunneling will be able to see for all tunneling projects in one place, whether they are for rail, sewers, or nuclear power plants.  He said that there is a multi-ministry subcommittee that meets regularly to identify where blockages are occurring between ministries and to work colaboratively to streamline infrastructure projects where multiple ministries are involved.

The critical challenge in realizing the Plan is reducing the financial burden on government. The UK Government recognizes that traditional funding mechanisms such as bonds, traditional public-private partnerships (PPP), and long term loans from banks are not longer viable. As a first step the Government is planning to reform PPP policy, and has just completed a public consultation on this.

The second problem is that banks are charging unprecedented rates, 3-4% over Treasury rates, and it is hard to find long term loans longer than seven years.  The Government is looking at how best attract the banks and at ways of encouraging banks to take on some of the risk in the early stages of projects. The Government is also looking at different models for low cost, long term financing.  For example, in Canada pension funds have been a source of long term infrastructure funding. Another option is off-shore investors such as China.

Reducing cost of infrastructure by improving construction productivity

At the Global Infrastructure Leadership Forum, a very interesting presentation was given by two consultants from McKinsey on the major trends in global infrastructure development and some suggestions of ways to address some of the challenges they have identified.

First of all they are anticipating a massive spend on infrastructure, something on the order of $7 trillion annually.  The infrastructure spend in the developing countries market is just as large as in the developed countries market. But infrastructure spending growth is significantly higher in the developing countries market.  In many countries there is a shortage of infrastructure funding from governments, which sets the stage for greater private investment.  Complex regulations and politics together are slowing infrastructure development.  For example, in the US it can take 12-20 years to build a new transmission line.  There are significant impediments preventing private capital from playing a greater role in funding infrastructure. For example, several speakers expressed doubts about the future of private-public partnerships (PPP), suggesting that a new paradigm for private investment is required. McKinsey singled out poor construction productivity as an important factor in eroding returns on infrastructure and making infrastructure less attractive for private investment.

McKinsey says that construction productivity has stagnated or declined in many countries and gave historical construction productivity data for the European Union, Korea, Japan, and the U.S.

McKinsey suggested that governments and infrastructure investors could reduce risks and increase returns by focussing on three areas,

• Improving priductivity of existing and new assets

For example, by tuning the regulatory and market structure to improve efficiency and expand capacity.

• Making the economic model more attractive to investors

By being smarter about matching capacity expansions to demand and  finding additional sources of revenue.

• Reducing cost and risk by improving project delivery

By allowing more competition, pushing more risk on to contractors, and encouraging engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) companies to increase their build capabilities.

Several speakers reiterated that one of the major problem in the infrastructure sector is the lack of data for comparing efficiency of construction and operation across projects.

McKinsey suggested that more private sector involvement in infrastructure projects could result in an estimated 30% improvement in construction productivity over 5-10 years, resulting from the combination of 5-15% reduction in the cost of design and planning, 5-10% in engineeering, 5-10% in materials purchase and sub-contracting, 3-5% in construction, and  3-5% from organizational enablers.  They estimate that this would translate into a 20% reduction in overall infrastructure spend.

Obama says infrastructure needs investment

President Obama in his State of the Union speech specifically called out infrastructure as requiring significant investment.  He said that "our infrastructure used to be the best", and mentioned countries such as Russia, China, South Korea, and several European countries that are ahead of the US in some sector of infrastructure.  He also referred to the American Society of Civil Engineers' Intrastructure Scorecard that assigned a grade of "D" to American infrastructure.

He said that the Administration is proposiing to redouble the rebuilding efforts that were initiated over the past two years and identified attracting private funding as important for this effort.  He specifically mentioned two initiatives.

High speed rail

Within 25 years the goal is to enable 80% of Americans to have access to high speed rail.  He mentioned routes in California and the Midwest that are already underway.

High speed wireless

Within 5 years the goal is to make it possible for businesses to provide 98% of Americans with access to the next generation of high speed wireless coverage.