Between the Poles

German employment up and energy consumption down in 2011

Employment up

The German Federal Statistical Office and the Federal Employment Agency have announced that 41.61 million German residents were employed in November 2011, up 521,000 from November 2010.  The number of registered unemployed stood at 2.780 million in December 2011, down by 231,000 from the previous December. For 2011 as a whole, employment rose by 541,000 over the previous year to 41.09 million.  Unemployment dropped to 2.98 million - the lowest level of unemplyment since 1991.  From an employment perspective 2011 was by far the most successful year since the reunification of Germany. In addition to employment, the level of earnings per employee increased significantly.  But as I blogged previously, demand for labour in Germany is outstripping supply.

Energy consumption down

According to the AGEB ("Arbeitsgemeinschaft Energiebilanzen"), energy consumption in Germany in 2011 fell in spite of an increase in production.  Energy consumption was 13,411 petajoules, 4.8 percent below the level of the previous year and the lowest level since 1990.  Warmer weather in 2011 was responsible for a strong decrease in the consumption of energies for heating.

As part of the EU 20-20-20 initiative, Germany has committed to reducing energy consumption by 20 percent by 2020 compared to 2008 levels. In 2011, energy consumption was some 5 percent below the reference value, even when weather effects are discounted. Energy efficiency has improved during this period by 2.5 percent per year (or by 2.1 percent per year adjusted for weather effects).

Germany has already announced that it is on track for the other parts of 20-20-20, 20% reduction in carbon emissions and 20% renewable energy by 2020.

Predictions for the electric power utility sector for 2012

IDC Energy Insights is one of the top research firms in the energy sector.  Annually it publishes its top 10 predictions for the North American energy and utility sector.  Jesse Berst, well known smart grid consultant and founder of Smart Grid News, has reviewed the IDC predictions, prepared his own top 9 predictions, which in some cases agree with IDC and in others disagree.  It is interesting to see where the two overlap.

Agree

• Distribution automation spending will continue to accelerate.
• Smart building technology will become more important to utilities.
• Utilities will invest in analytics to manage big data.
• More electric vehicles will be sold in 2012.
• Lithium ion large format batteries will become much cheaper by year-end.
• Solar PV growth will continue at 25% or more in spite of the government grant programs expiring.

Different perspectives

• Jesse sees municipals and rural coops driving new AMI deployments, where IDC expects smart meter deployment to peak in 2012, and demand response becoming increasingly important.

Disagreement about top priorities

• Jesse sees utility mergers accelerating.
• Jesse predicts that electric power demand will flatten or even fall.
• IDC sees IT spending by North American utilities increasing by 4.5% over the next four years.
• IDC sees increasing budgets for security and risk management.
• IDC sees commercial PV operations investing in micro-inverters or DC optimizers.

Below are listings of the top energy and utility priorities from the two sources.

IDC Energy Insights top 10 predictions for energy and utilities

#1 – Smart meters will peak in 2012, propelling demand response, but spending tempered for now

#2 – Distribution automation will lead smart grid control investments with 13% CAGR

#3 – Smart building technology investments will gain more traction with utilities

#4 – 120,000 plug-in electric vehicles will be sold in North America in 2012

#5 – Lithium-Ion large format batteries will reach $600 per kWh by the end of the year

#6 – Despite the 1603 Treasury Grant expiring in 2011, PV installations will grow by >25% in 2012

#7 – >60 MW of commercial PV installations will incorporate micro-inverters or DC optimizers in 2012

#8 – Security and risk will continue to grab decision maker’s attention, leading to increased budgets

#9 – Utilities will invest in analytics in anticipation of big data

#10 – IT spending by North American utilities will increase by 4.5% % over the next four years

Jesse Berst's top nine

1. Utility mergers will accelerate.
 
2. Demand will flatten or even fall. After decades of sure, steady growth, consumption growth in North America has flattened and may begin to fall after 2012. This could force a difficult adjustment in an industry that has come to expect growth in consumption.
 
3. Municipals and co-ops will drive new AMI deployments. Their focus will be communications networks that can handle next territories (urban and rural). And that can handle multiple applications for multi-utilities (electric, gas, water).
 
4. Distribution automation spending will continue to accelerate thanks in part to short payback periods (18 to 36 months typically).
 
5. Utilities will invest heavily in analytics to manage Big Data. Utilities are getting large volumes of data from smart meters. Now they're trying to figure out how to get business value from that information. And how to use it for "real-time" trading and "real-time" operations.

6. Smart buildings will become important to utilities. 25 states have energy efficiency standards or targets. Smart buildings can help meet such goals. The building energy analytics market will double between 2012 and 2015, jumping from $193 billion to $402 billion.
 
7. 2012 is the make or break year for electric vehicles. That is when we will be able to see whether they will go mainstream anytime soon.
 
8. Grid-scale lithium-ion battery prices will plunge. Prices are not cheap yet, but they are already half what they were two years ago, with further big drops on the way.
 
9 Solar PV growth will moderate, falling to roughly 25% per year. It appears current grant programs will be allowed to expire, reducing the incentives to install solar PV.

Combined sewer overflows: South Bend agrees to $500 million EPA consent decree

I've blogged previously about EPA consent decrees designed to reduce the discharge of untreated sewage into surface waters with Cleveland, Akron, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Chicago.  These have imposed legally binding investments of between half a billion to multi-billions of dollars on these cities, for many of which this represents a huge financial burden.

The EPA has just annouced an agreement with the City of South Bend, Indiana which requires the City to make an estimated $509.5 million worth of improvements to its combined sewer system to significantly reduce overflows of raw sewage to the St. Joseph River, which among other things is used for kayaking compeititions (which I hope never occur after it rains).

South Bend's combined sewer system collects storm water, sanitary sewage, and other pollutants which it conveys to South Bend's wastewater treatment plant (WWTP).  During wet weather events, and during some dry weather time periods, a portion of the sewage that flows through the combined sewers is not conveyed all the way to the WWTP; instead the raw sewage is discharged into the St. Joseph River.  Currently, on average South Bend discharges over 2 billion gallons of untreated sewage resulting from 80 combined sewer overflow (CSO) events annually.  With the improvements required by the consent decree, South Bend will reduce the number of raw sewage discharge events by 95 percent to only four during a typical year of rainfall. The reduced discharges will result in preventing over 700,000 pounds of pollutants from entering the St. Joseph River each year.

Finacial burden

These settlements impose siginficant financial obligations on cities which in many cases have very limited funds.  Recently the EPA has announced a new integrated planning process which is designed to help local governments deal with difficult financial conditions and to identify ways to achieve clean water by controlling and managing releases of wastewater and stormwater runoff more efficiently and cost effectively.  According to the EPA an integrated approach allows communities to prioritize their investments to address the most serious water issues first and provides flexibility to use innovative, cost-effective storm- and wastewater management solutions including green infrastructure.

Interesting predictions for the geospatial sector in 2012

There are some interesting predictions for the geospatial sector that I've come across that identify some important trends for 2012 (not in any particular order). 

• The next great GIS isn’t a “GIS”–but rather...and here Brian Timoney goes on to talk about analytic and visualization tools that we will need in 2012 to deal with the "tides of Big Data, the sensor web, and the Internet of Things”.

Brian's predictions reminded me of the talk that Robert W. Burkhardt, the Army Geospatial Information Officer (GIO), gave at a DLT event in June of 2010 in which he said that for the Army, at that time with access to more and better data sources than ther rest of us, in the past the lack of data was a problem, now the challenge is increasingly being able to integrate and analyze in order to extract information from the huge volumes of data that are now available.  His words were "extracting actionable information by exposing patterns from the huge, chaotic volume of data pouring out of many stovepipes." 

• Open source geospatial - Joe Francica predicts that open source gets its act together, specifically, Joe says that the "Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) needs to transition itself from a movement of programmers to a cohesive group of businesses that can leverage the movement."  Joe predicts that "open source companies [will] step out of the shadows and become a marketing force. Either OSGeo takes the lead in supporting the group or individual companies will seek other professional support."

Adena Schutzberg in her predictions goes a step further and predicts that "OpenGeo will do the hard work of building credibility (and support) for enterprise use of open source. It will do for open source GIS what Esri did for GIS. The company has and will continue to take the baton from OSGeo to get the software into wider spread use. (And it will make money doing so.)"

By way of background the open source geospatial movement started coalescing around 2005, the OSGeo was founded in 2006, and the movement and OSGeo have grown rapidly since then.  The annual OSGeo event, FOSS4G has been happening in various parts of the world since then.  Last year in Denver FOSS4G attracted about 900 attendees.

• Enterprise Geospatial - Joe Francica mentions three specific areas, cloud, big data analytics (echoing Brian Timoney's prediction), and social business and mobile computing.

Cloud: Joe says that geospatial companies need to offer solution-based cloud services.  "Google has Google Earth Builder; Esri has ArcGIS.com and the others better get on the band wagon or die." He also sees geospatial data and software being offered by integrated companies, for example, "GeoEye buying a company like PCI Geomatics or DigitalGlobe buying or merging with Exelis VIS."  Adena Schutzberg predicts that in 2012 the biggest impact that cloud computing will have will be on education.  "Educators can and will teach introductory courses using 100% Web resources by the end of 2012."

Big data analytics – Joe predicts that "location intelligence will move in this direction and lead big data analytics."

Social Business & Mobile Computing – Joe sees "a movement toward location-based business (LBB): taking all the aspects of Internet socialization and combining this with the mobile ecosphere.  Salesforce.com is doing it and you see just about every enterprise software company coming out with some form of mobile business application. The element of location-based business will be huge."

European energy roadmap through 2050

The European Commission (EC) has adopted the Communication "Energy Roadmap 2050". which looks at different alternative scenarios reducing greenhouse gas emissions 80-95% below 1990 levels by 2050, which is a committment of the European Union (EU).  In addition to reducing carbon emissions, the objective of the roadmap is ensuring security of energy supply and developing a competitive pan-European energy market.

The German Federal Minister of Economics and Technology said that the EC going in a similar direction to Germany's perspective that a sustainable restructuring of the energy supply requires a solid economic foundation and one that ensures that EU industry continues to be competitive.  In particular he identified the importance of the development of a pan-European network (grid).

The next step is for the the 2050 Energy Roadmap to be analysed in detail. The EU President plans to have the Council conclusions on the 2050 Energy Roadmap adopted by the Energy Ministerial Council in June 2012.

Energy policy for 2020 through 2050

In 2007 the European Council adopted the Energy 2020 policy, which commits the EU by 2020 to

• at least 20 % reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to 1990 (30% if international conditions are right),
• saving of 20 % of EU energy consumption compared to projections for 2020;
• 20 % share of renewable energies in EU energy consumption and 10% share in transport.

The measures taken to achieve the 2020 goals will reduce emissions by about 40% by 2050 and are insuffcient to achieve the EU's 2050 carbon emissions goals.  The objective of the Energy Roadmap 2050 is to explore alternative routes toward the 2050 carbon reduction objectives and to develop a long-term European technology-neutral framework in which national, regional, and local carbon reduction efforts can operate effectively.

Scenarios

Energy Roadmap 2050 looks at several different scenarios

• Reference - includes current trends and policies already in place, and assumes no new policy initiatives.
• Current Policy Initiatives (CPI) - adds new policy initiatives whihc are in the process of being adopted
• High Energy Efficiency - decrease in energy demand of 41% by 2050 through more stringent energy conservation measures
• Diversified supply technologies - competive energy market where all energy sources can
  compete in the market basis including nuclear and Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS).
• High Renewable energy (RES) - strong policy support for renewable energy with 97% of electric power coming from renewable energy by 2050
• Delayed CCS - like the Diversified supply technologies scenario but with delayed CCS, and accelerated nuclear
• Low nuclear - like the Diversified supply technologies scenario but with no new nuclear plants beyond what is currently under construction and accelerated CCS

Conclusions

Based on these scenarios the report draws interesting conclusions.

1. Decarbonisation is possible - Energy in a lower carbon economy can be less costly than current policies in the long-run.
2. Higher capital expenditure and lower fuel costs - All decarbonisation scenarios show a transition from today's system, with high fuel and operational costs, to an energy system based on higher capital expenditure and lower fuel costs.
3. Electricity plays an increasing role - All scenarios show electricity will have to play a much greater role than now (almost doubling its share in final energy demand to 36-39% in 2050) and will have to contribute to the decarbonisation of transport and heating/cooling.
4. Electricity prices rise until 2030 and then decline - Most scenarios suggest that electricity prices will rise to 2030, but fall thereafter. The largest share of these increases is already happening in the reference scenario.
5. Household expenditure will increase - In all scenarios including the Reference scenario expenditure on energy and energy-related products is likely to become a more important element in household
   expenditure, rising to around 16% in 2030, and decreasing thereafter to above 15% in 2050.
6. Energy conservation is crucial - Very significant energy savings is needed in all decarbonisation scenarios. Primary energy demand need to drop by 32% to 41% by 2050 as compared to peaks in 2005-2006.
7. Renewables share rises substantially - The share of renewable energy rises substantially in all scenarios, reacjhing 55% in gross final energy consumption in 2050. The share of RES in electricity consumption reaches 64% to 97%.
8. Carbon capture and storage is crucial - CCS will have to contribute significantly in most scenarios, implying that coal will likely continue to play an important role.
9. Nuclear energy provides an important contribution - Nuclear energy need to provide a significant contribution in the energy because it remains a key source of low cost, low carbon electricity generation.
10. Decentralization and centralized systems increasingly interact - Decentralization of the power system and increasing heat generation will result from more renewable generation, but intermittent renewable generation requires a centralized large-scale system to provide power when local renewable generation is inadequate to meet local demand.