Between the Poles

Improved GeoREST Documentation

The documentation for the open source GeoREST project has been expanded and now includes most of what you need to know to install GeoREST and develop applications.

• Welcome
• Installation
• Configuration
• Renderers
• API (TBD)

Installation documentation includes

• Overview
• GeoRestHttpServer
• IIS7 (Vista and Windows Server 2008)
• IIS5.1 and IIS6 (Windows XP, Windows Server 2003)
• CGI (Apache, or as FastCGI)

There's also a GeoREST configuration guide with configuration examples.

And there's documentation for the GeoREST Renderer, which enables rendering of geodata in different representations such as XML, JSON, HTML, KML, and PNG and also provides examples of Atom templates .

Cool Things Happening with MapGuide Maestro

As I blogged about last month, Jackie Ng has taken over as lead developer for MapGuide Maestro.  Already there are some major advances underway.

MapGuide API support

Support in Maestro for the offical MapGuide API (LocalNativeConnection) means that when Maestro starts you have a choice of connecting to MapGuide server via

• http using a web server
• connecting via local tcp/ip connection without using a web server.

This is experimental at this point.

Linux binaries closer

The only way to get MapGuide on Linux has been building MapGuide from source, which is a challenge.  Wouldn't it be nice to be able to have Linux binaries available so all you need to do is to run

sudo apt-get install mapguideopensource

As I blogged about, a MapGuide LiveDVD is being developed for FOSS4G 2010 in Barcelona. Thanks to Trevor Wekel (OTX Systems), who has been leading this initiative, it will include Ubuntu packaging for MapGuide, Maestro, and a subset of FDO Providers. The entire package set will also be available from the OSGeo download site. 

Maestro 2.5

The list of new capabilities and enhancements that Jackie has planned for Maestro 2.5 is impressive.

• Major API overhaul
• Re-vamped main UI
• Support for connecting to multiple repositories in a single session.
• Re-usable resource editors (for use outside Maestro)
• Per-version resource editors.
• Resource upgrading.
• IronPython? scripting engine.
• Silverlight API compatibility

Electric Power in Brazil

Brazil's economic expansion over the past few years has been impressive.  in 2010 91 million Brazilians, nearly half the population, are now are part of the middle class.  In 2003, the Brazilian middle class totalled 64.1 million people (37% population).  Over the next few years Brazil will be getting even more international attention because Brazil will be hosting the FIFA World Cup in 2014 and the summer Olympics in 2016.

Electric Power Industry in Brazil

One of the most important infrastructure sectors that has enabled Brazil's very rapid economic development is electric power.  Among major industrial powers, Brazil is unique in that most of its electric power generation is from clean energy sources. 72% of Brazil's electric energy capacity (74GW) is hydroelectric generation.  A by-product of the production process of the world’s most successful alternative fuel, sugar cane ethanol, contributes 3% of Brazil’s electric power generation. Over 25% of Brazil's electric power comes from one hydroelectric plant, the 14 GW Itaipu dam, located between Brazil and Paraguay on the Paraná River.  Additional very large hydroelectric power projects are underway for  a total additional potential capacity of 31 GW. The largest is the 11 GW Belo Monte Dam in the state of Pará. 

The national regulator is ANEEL, which is responsible for regulating generation, transmission and distribution of power. ONS is the national electric system operator and is responsible to ANEEL. Something like 98% of the Brazilian electric power system is part of a single grid, the National Interconnected System (SIN). 

There are 49 utilities with distribution networks, and about 64% of of the distribution network is controlled by private sector companies.  About 10 % of generation is private including foreign owned capacity.  For example, Duke Energy has about 1.5 GW of generation capacity in Brazil  Transmission is mostly public.

Challenges Facing the Electric Power Industry in Brazil

Yesterday I had a chance to spend some time at ANEEL and was able to get a feel for some of the challenges facing the Brazilian power industry.

Rapidly Increasing demand - Electric power demand has been increasing in Brazil at a rate above the average world rate.  Between 1980 and 2000, Brazil's electricity demand increased on average by 5.4 % per year. 

Nontechnical losses - It has been estimated that up to 30-40% of Brazil's electric power consumption is ascribable to what is termed nontechnical losses.  This challenge is motivating the beginning of intelligent network capability.  A project is underway by Ampla, the power utility of the State of Rio de Janeiro reponsible for power outside of the the city of Rio de Janeiro to install monitoring capacity to attempt to identify and control nontechnical losses.

Manpower shortage - Similarly to North America and Western Europe, the Brazilian electric power industry is facing a manpower shortage but in Brazil the problem is exacerbated by the rate of economic expansion.  Utilities are finding it difficult to find and attract younger workers and to retain them.

Asset record data quality - Data quality of asset records is a major problem in Brazil as it is in North America.  It is generally accepted that the smart grid will require much higher data quality than is currently the case for most utilities' asset databases and smart grid initiatives, which are in the planning stage or underway in most utilities in North America, are motivating a focus on improving the data quality of asset records. In Brazil one of the major initiatives instituted by ANEEL is targeted on improving the quality of asset records.

New Record for Wind Power in Texas

The wind output in ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) set a new record at 5:16 PM CT on May 23 of 6,721 MW.  This is roughly 20% of the state's power at that time.

These numbers are only for ERCOT and do not include the panhandle which is on SPP's (Southwestern Power Pool) grid.  Texas is the leader among the 50 states in installed wind generation capacity at 9.5 GW. Last year Texas got 6.2 percent of its electricity from wind.

SaaS for Infrastructure GIS Applications in the Cloud

Last October, Gartner announced its top 10 strategic technology list for 2010.  Cloud computing was Gartner's number one choice.  Cloud computing involves server-based applications that expose services, called software-as-a-service (SaaS), that interact with a variety of clients over the web or on a private network.

At the GITA annual conference in Phoenix several weeks ago, Geovane Magalhães of CPqD, gave a very interesting presentation on the potential for software-as-a-service (SaaS) in the area of infrastructure GIS.  I blogged earlier about Project Butterfly, which is an Autodesk Labs project for enabling AutoCAD as a SaaS application over the web.

From Geovane's perspective, infrastructure GIS involves a mix of engineering design (CAD) and geospatial (GIS) activities that involve short, medium and long duration transactions and that support a variety of infrastructure-related activities in a utility or telecommunications organization including marketing, planning, Sales, engineering, construction and operations.  The planning-design-construction cycle never ends.  Existing plant has to be maintained and operated, while at the same time new infrastructure is being developed and brought on line. Typical activities include underground infrastructure locate (call-before-you-dig), maintaining network infrastructure records, designing new infrastructure for residential or commercial developments, network load forecasting and planning, financial estimation, preparing maps for and overseeing construction, managing as-builts, and preparing maps and drawings for operations people in the field.  Much of this work, and especially for large companies, is done by contractors who do the work in the field or at their own premises.  Geovane believes that SaaS is well suited for infrastructure GIS, because SaaS reduces complexity for the end user, offers very low system start up costs, supports device independence, and can provide scalability.  For these reasons, Geovane sees SaaS as well suited not only for small utility companies who may have very limited IT capacity, but also for large utilities and telcos who rely on contractors for much of their design and field work.

Geovane outlined a solution architecture that involves a database centric application based on open standards integrated in an N-tier architecture to optimize server usage and scalability.  It uses secure web services to exchange data between the SaaS server and client applications.  The server side requires enhanced performance logic to minimize network latency and optimize communications bandwidth so that client performance is similar to locally hosted infrastructure GIS applications. The application platform needs to support an industry-standard CAD/GIS front end for design such as AutoCAD Map3D as well as browser-based web clients.

Australian Government Plans Renewable Energy Future Fund

According to Smart Grid Australia, the Government of Australia will include a AU$652 Renewable Energy Future Fund as part of its 2010-11 Federal Budget.  Besides supporting the development and deployment of renewable energy projects, it is intended to encourage industrial, commercial and residential energy efficiency.  It is expected that smart grid technologies will play an important role in increasing the efficiency of electric power usage in Australia as well as enabling the integration of intermittent renewable energy sources. Besides empowering the consumer to manage electric power usage, the smart grid provides improved control over network operations, improving reliability and reducing peak load.  Last year Smart Grid Australia received AU$100 million from the Australian Government for a National Energy Efficiency Initiative to develop a demonstration smart-grid energy network which combines intelligent grid technology including residential smart meters to enable integration of renewable energy sources.

Geospatially-enabled Asset Management for Electrical Distribution

Last week at GITA Ontario'a Spring Educational Session, one of the presentations was given by Kevin Miller, who has had over 24 years in the electric utility industry, most of that time with First Energy where he worked on design, GIS, and work management solutions for distribution and transmission.  Kevin talked about geospatially-enabled asset management, what the business drivers are and guidelines for designing and implementing asset management solutions at power utilities

Business Drivers

The electrical equipment you find running down the street, either underground or aerial includes poles, transformers, conductors, and other outside electrical equipment, all of which have geographical locations.  There are several important business drivers that motivate the development of geospatially-enabled asset management systems for outside equipment.  A location aware asset management system allows you to frame a geospatial query, for example, find which assets are contained in a specific area, which may be defined by city limits, county or state/provincial boundaries, or a tax district, and compute financial information (dollars) about these assets.  Some examples where this information is important,  even critical, are

• Rate case - Utilities have to prepare and submit rate cases to the regulator (public utility commission) to justify rate increases.  Showing a sustained pattern of investment in electrical infrastructure maintenance, replacement or expansion in a jurisdiction can help support a rate case.
• Taxation - Utilities are typically taxed based on the total value of their assets in a given tax district.
• Reducing costs - Utilities are increasingly looking to condition-based maintenance to reduce their maintenance costs.  Knowing where assets are and their value helps prioritize inspections and maintenance.
• Smart grid - Smart grid initiatives are driving a trend toward more reliable and comprehensive information about assets to improve reliability and service levels, drive down costs, and empower the customer.

Business Challenges

There are several business challenges that make it difficult to develop, and even more critically, maintain a location-aware asset management system.  First of all, business processes in utilities are complex making tracking how information flows through the organization a challenge.  Secondly, business processes are often not designed to optimize data quality and, more often than not, actually inhibit data quality.

In the top diagram, each bar represents a group or division within a typical utility, engineering, records, operations, and so on. The interesting part is to trace how information flows through these groups, for example, engineering designs start in the Engineering group then go to Construction, come back to Records as as-builts. Records maintains the as-builts which are used to prepare maps for operations and planning.

Typically, business processes are characterized by paper and many manual data hand-offs that degrade the quality and currency of data.  In addition, often it is not clear who the data owner or custodian is, which can mean no accountability.  The net result is that unreliable, out of date data makes it difficult to translate data into actionable information.  If nine different groups are maintaining data about poles, for example, there is the potential for nine different assessments on the state of the company's pole assets.  To quote Dave Sonnen, "That is a solid illustration of the data integrity challenges that organizational structure necessarily causes. Data gets tweaked every time it crosses one of the bars."

Guidelines for Designing an Asset Management System

The most important first step is to understand your business processes and to be able to map how information flows through your organization.  Identifying the data requirements of each group and then working backwards to identify the sources of the data used by each group allows you to define a single source of truth. A single source of truth doesn't necessarily mean a single, centralized database, but rather identifying or defining a data owner or custodian, which may be an operational system, for each data element. Virtual data stores based on separate, operational databases can then provide actionable information to internal and external users, such as mapping asset performance metrics identifying poorly performing assets.

First Offshore Wind Farm in US Approved

The US's first offshore wind farm proposed by Cape Wind for Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound will be comprised of 130 wind turbines with the capacity to produce 420 MW.  It is estimated that with prevailing winds the project can provide three quarters of the electricity needs of Cape Cod and nearby islands.  The project will also reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 734,000 tons per year.  The project has received the final step in the approval process, from the FAA.

City of Hamilton Infrastructure Report Card

Last week GITA Ontario Chapter held a Spring Educational Session with a focus on asset management.  One of the presentations was given by John Murray, who is responsible for asset management in the public works department of the City of Hamilton, Ontario.  The City of Hamilton has focussed on asset management as a priority.  One of the unique things Hamilton has done is create a single multi-disciplinary group responsible for asset management for all assets including sanitary and storm sewers, water, roads and traffic, trees,cemeteries, and a few other things.  In Hamilton the asset management group is focussed on tracking the condition of and value of city assets.  They do not own or maintain city infrastructure.

One of the really unique things the asset management group has done is put together an infrastructure report card similar to the well-known ASCE Report Card which assigns a grade of A through F to each category of infrastructure.  The city has also assigned a trend (improving, flat, or downward) to each type of infrastructure. 

The asset management team has conducted an investment gap analysis where they have estimated the annual investment required to maintain each type of infrastructure at an acceptable level (average lifecycle capital investment), compared it to the actual level of investment for a particular year and then computed the surplus or deficit.  Of the total $145 million deficit, the class of infrastructure with the largest deficit is roads and traffic, followed by wastewater.

The asset management team has also estimated the total replacement value of all city-owned assets, about $14 billion, and the value per property or parcel, about $92,000. 

One of the most interesting things the asset management group has done is to estimate the current daily household investment in city infrastructure and the investment that would be required to maintain infrastructure at an acceptable level and to compared it to daily household costs for things like transit, electricity, telephone, cable TV, gas and coffee.  It's a very enlightening comparison.  According to this analysis, in 2008 the average household paid less per day for maintaining roads and traffic ($2.50) than for coffee ($3.00).

Autodesk University - Vote!

Autodesk University  2010 will be held from November 30 through December 2 at The Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas. AU Virtual is scheduled for November 30 through December 1, 2010. 

If you are planning to attend AU, this is your opportunity to help decide which classes will be offered this year. You can vote for the sessions that you want to see and hear at the AU web site. Friday (May 21) is the last day.