Between the Poles

Conservative proposal for a revenue-neutral carbon tax on energy in the U.S.

A 2009 study identified the subsidies including direct spending and tax relief for different sectors of the US energy market to the energy industry for the period 2002 to 2008.  Most of these are in the form of tax breaks for the fossil fuel sector.

Tax        Direct  Total     

$0.3b     $2b   $2.3b    CCS

$6.2b     $6b  $12.2b   Renewables

$11b      $5b  $16.8b    Corn ethanol

$53.9b $16.3b $70.2b Fossil fuels

In a very interesting op-ed in the Wall Street Journal "Why We Support a Revenue-Neutral Carbon Tax", George P. Schultz (Former Treasury Secretary and Secretary of State in Nixon and Reagan administrations) and Gary Becker (University of Chicago, Department of Economics, 1992  Nobel Prize in Economics), both associated with the Hoover Institution, a conservative American public policy think tank at Stanford University,  argue for reducing government involvement in the energy sector by replacing the many subsidies with a revenue-neutral tax on carbon.

• "We should seek out the many forms of subsidy that run through the entire energy enterprise and eliminate them.
• :In their place we propose a measure that could go a long way toward leveling the playing field: a revenue-neutral tax on carbon, a major pollutant. A carbon tax would encourage producers and consumers to shift toward energy sources that emit less carbon—such as toward gas-fired power plants and away from coal-fired plants—and generate greater demand for electric and flex-fuel cars and lesser demand for conventional gasoline-powered cars.
• We argue for revenue neutrality on the grounds that this tax should be exclusively for the purpose of leveling the playing field, not for financing some other government programs or for expanding the government sector. And revenue neutrality means that it will not have fiscal drag on economic growth."

Schulz and Becker suggest that the tax could be imposed at the point of consumption such as gasoline stations and electricity bills or on production facilities.  THey suggest it could be administered by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) or the Social Security Administration.

They make the case that the tax should be revenue neutral, meaning that it generates no net revenue for the government.   The proceeds from the tax would be redistributed to the citizenry as a "carbon dividend."

NASA announces Landsat 8 data available for download

NASA has announced that the Landsat Data Continuity Mission's on-orbit checkout is complete, and it has been renamed Landsat 8 with the hand-off of operations to the USGS!

Starting at 1 pm CT on May 30 data collected by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) and the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS) on the satellite is available for download from EarthExplorer and the LandsatLook Viewer. Data is available on GloVis since 2 pm CT

The satellite orbits the Earth every 99 minutes.   Landsat 8 images the entire Earth every 16 days in the same orbit used by Landsat 5. The data is available within 12 hours of reception.

OLI and TIRS data from Landsat 8 is processed to be consistent with the already archived Landsat 1 through 7 data products.   The OLI sensor includes refined heritage bands, along with two new band files, and a new Quality Assurance band file. The TIRS sensor provides two thermal bands. Band names, wavelengths and resolution for each sensor are listed.

A comparison of Landsat 8 and Landsat 7 band file combinations and wavelength values is available.

Resolution:

OLI multispectral bands 1-7,9: 30-meters
OLI panchromatic band 8: 15-meters
TIRS bands 10-11: collected at 100 meters but resampled
to 30 meters to match OLI multispectral bands

Format:          

GeoTIFF data format

Electricity and Gas User Forum at Geospatial World Forum 2013

I chaired the Electricity and Gas User Forum at the Geospatial World Forum 2013 conference.  There were very interesting presentations from Africa, Europe, Middle East, India and Canada touching a range of topics relating to the application of geospatial  in the gas and electricity sector.

Lead speaker: Geoff Zeiss, Editor-Buildings and Energy, Geospatial Media and Comms

Growing population, increasing urbanization and environmental concerns are putting a strain on existing infrastructure including electricity and other energy networks, water and wastewater, road and rail, airports and seaports.  It is estimated that an investment in infrastructure of between $24 to 53 trillion will be required worldwide over the next two decades.  Governments are increasingly devoting their limited resources to services, so much of this investment will have to come from the provate sector which will drive increased returns on investment (ROI) if infrastructure is going to attract the private investors it requires.  This will focus the construction industry, designers, engineers, architects, and construction contractors on improved productivity in an industry where productivity has stagnated in the US, EU, Japan and Korea over the past decades.  The convergence of building information modeling (BIM), new geospatial data and technology such as LiDAR, and 3D visualization is changing how we design, buld and operate and maintain buildings and infrastructure and is resulting in increased efficiency and reduced risk.  Not only is this trend leading to improved efficiency in the $7 trillion construction industry, but by enabling modeling entire cities it is leading to a more holistic approach to the challenges of increased population and urbanization.

Jan van Gelder, Information Manager, Alliander, The Netherlands

Jan van Gelser gave an overview of how Alliander successfully consolidated four different GIS database and software environments including Smallworld, GFIS, Oracle and DB2 into a single web-based geoservices environment for managing Alliander's gas and electricity networks. Alliander took a data-centric approach that focused on three types of data, thematic, reference, and asset data and made all of these accessible over the web via OGC standards-based (WMS, WFS, KML) geoservices.

Phil Mannell, Director, Enbridge Gas Distribution, Canada

Phil Mannell outlined how Canada's largest gas distribution company Enbridge evolved geospatial technology from mylar plates in 1998.  Enbridge first focussed on core GIS in the early 2000s, he moved to enterprise gis in the late 2000s, and is now treating GIS as a platform, which enables Enbridge to identify new business units/groups and their common tasks that can benefit from a map-based application.  With GIS as a platform Enbridge found that they can rapidly develop lightweight, focused maps and apps to support business processes including conducting proof of concepts and pilots to establish the business benefits.  This results in less risk and shorter implementation durations with from 10 to 15 weeks turnaround time for new applications.

Brian Soliday, Senior Vice President, ikeGPS, UK

Brian Soliday showed how a handheld device incoportating a GPS with earth station support, a laser range finder, a digital camaera and a notepad can transform field surveys resulting in field staff productivity improvement of up to 125 % and dramatically reduced risk through improved safety. Brian enlightened the audience that the mysterious "ike" stands for "I know everything", which is approporiate for this multiple input device.

Harsh Sharma, Vice President, BSES Yamuna Power Ltd, India

Harsh Sharma discussed how GIS is used by a large electric power utility with about 1.23 million customers in Delhi.  BSES Yamuna has leveraged a number of information technologies including GIS to improve the flow of information and implement analytics to create an effective decision support system.  One of India's biggest challenges is the 30% of India's power generation that is lost to aggregate technical and commercial (AT&C) losses.  The most impressive result of BSES Yamuna's investment in geospatial and other IT technologies is that they have reduced their AT&C losses by 45% over 10 years.  Geospatial technologies enables them to identify and track specifically where non-technical losses are occurrring.  This represents about 4.5 % reduction per year, significantly better than the 0.8% per year average for the entire Indian electric power industry.

Andrew Evans, Topcon, UK

Andrew Evans showed how vehicle-based data capture technologies can automate the field work that used to require field workers to laboriously walk pole lines.  For example, the traditional approach to pole inventorying used to achieve about 65 poles/person/day.  With mobile data capture technology Up to 800 poles/hour can be processed.  The type of data that can be captured in this way includes Utility Pole location, Vegetation encroachment, Splices, joint Use, pole heights, clearances, and sag.  Andrew presented results that showed that mobile data capture automation can result in 26% cost savings and more importantly in this age of the aging workforce 55% less time.

Dr Ioannis Manakos, Chairman, EARSel, Greece

Dr Ioannis discussed opportunities for EARSel's (European Association of Remote Sensing Laboratories) earth Observation products in the Energy sector.  He outlined a number of earth observation products including land cover, land features, and sea features.  There are many wasy that data is being captured these days including land surface and sea surface platforms for in situ ground and ground truth information, spectroradiometers and imaging spectrometers which acquire reflectance from various surface targets, and both active and passive sensing.  Unmanned airborne vehicles offer a multifold range of solutions.  They offer finer spatial and spectral resolution that can be used to bridge laboratory and in situ methods with with space-borne, wide coverage data.  In the area of space-born sensors, there are a plethora of sensors deployed in various spatial, spectral, and angular ranges.  EARSel offers sophisticated information extraction techniques ranging from simple regression analysis to complicated ray following models. Classification algorithms are available for land cover mapping needs for almost all possible targets and biogeographical zones. Change detection is another important application where the analytical tools are becoming much more sophisticated.  During the last decade about 14 % of all papers in major EO journals address change detection.  Renewable energy is another areas where earth observation data and technology is becoming critical in identifying optimum locations and assisting in forecasting wind and solar power generation.

Eng. Atif A Karrani, Managing Director, E;ectricity and Water Authority, UAE

Eng. Atif Karrani's presentation focussed on the implementation of enterprise GIS by the Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority(SEWA).  SEWA supplies electricity, Water and natural gas to the population of the Sharjah Emirate, with more than 360,000 customers.  The enterprise GIS system is used for managing electricity, water, natural gas, communications (FOC), and street light networkd.  SEWA's goal was to enable all SEWA Departments to use GIS technology effectively for improving services to the citizen and responses to citizen’s request.  This translated into a development objective to convert and integrate all available data into a standard format in a centralized data store accessible to all relevant departments. SEWA recognized that implementing enterprise GIS requires planning.  In particular it is necssary to be prepared to identify and overcome organizational and technological barriers.  But their successful implementation of enterprise GIS has resulted in GIS being recognized as an essential building block in SEWA’s application landscape.

Jennifer Oduor, Property Department, Kenya Electricity Generating Co, Kenya

Kenya Electricity Generating Company (KenGen) is the leading electric power generation company in Kenya, producing about 80 percent of electricity consumed in the country. Jennifer Oduor outlines some of the ways that geospatial data and technology are used by KenGen. These include geothermal field potential assessment to reduce the risk of expensive, unproductive geothermal wells; geothermal infrastructure planning to optimize the design and location of power stations, wells, steam pipe networks, and other infrastructure; management and monitoring of environmental impacts; conflict prediction and management with local communities to identify, in advance, the areas of possible conflict between the company and local communities due its operations and to plan for ways of mitigating the effects; and land acquisition to aid in providing information for purposes of zoning the land to facilitate purchase negotiation decisions. KenGen found that an important benefit of GIS is the ability to integrate data from a wide range of company sources using location as a common point of reference.

Jasper Roes, Project Manager, Geological Survey, of the Netherlands (TNO), The Netherlands

Jasper Roes described a project called CERISE-SG, which is a public-private partnership (PPP) to develop a foundation for efficient information exchange between different domains relating to smart grid.  The project will focus on several use cases.  The first use case is a smart grid information broker, a tool for mapping information relating to smart grid across domains.  The simplest case involves transformations where there is a straightforward mapping between different terms in different domains, for example, kWh  to Joules. The more common and more complicated case involves transformations with unequal semantics where it will be necessary to develop ontologies to provide a basis for mapping terminologies between domains.

Jene van der Heide and Martinus Vranken, Project Managers, Cadastre, The Netherlands

Martinus Vranken and Jene van der Heide of the Dutch Kadaster, the land registry and geospatial agency in the Netherlands,  described a project to model a square kilometer of downtown The Hague with the objective of reducing and stabilizing energy usage and costs for the entire area. In the study area the buildings are large and mostly owned by the national and municipal governments. The Dutch Kadaster has assembled land registry information like ownership, monument status; building information such as year of completion, surface area, energy labels, energy indices; information on underground networks like heat networks, gas and electricity grids; together with government information on heat pump facilities, energy consumption of buildings, and available building facade area suited for solar panels.  Combining this information provides a tool that the Ministry of the Interior is using to develop the busness case for a new form of energy supply that is reliable, clean, and affordable. The two main challenges have been to translate this information to fit the domain perspective of the Ministry of the Interior and structuring the information so that it can be reused for similar projects in the future.  More about this project can be found here.

Cybersecurity vulnerability of the U.S. power grid underscored in new report

A report on grid cybersecurity released last week by US Representatives Ed Markey and Henry Waxman makes for fascinating reading.

Background

The U.S. bulk power system is relied on by 300 million people and is comprised of 200,000 miles of transmission lines and about a thousand gigawatts (GW) of generating capacity.  It is valued at over $1 trillion.  Most of the bulk power grid is owned and operated by private companies, municipally- and coop-owned utiltiies.

The components of the grid are highly interdependent.   An outage in one area can lead to cascading outages in other areas.  The classic example occurred in 2003 when four high voltage power lines in northern Ohio brushed trees and shut down. A computer system error caused a cascade of failures that left 50 million people without power for two days across the United States and Canada.  The largest blackout in North American history cost the economy an estimated $6 billion.

Vulnerabilities

This report makes the case that grid vulnerabilities pose substantial risks to U.S. national security.  It cites a 2008 report by theTask Force on Department of Defense (DOD) Energy Strategy that said that  “critical missions . . . are almost entirely dependent on the national transmission grid."  About 85% of the energy infrastructure upon which DOD depends is commercially owned, and 99% of the electricity DOD consumes originates outside of DOD. In most cases, neither the grid nor on-base backup power provides sufficient reliability to ensure continuity of critical national priority functions and oversight of strategic missions in the face of a long term (several months) outage. An October 2009 report by the Government Accountability Office said that 31 of DOD’s 34 most critical global assets rely on commercially operated electricity grids for their primary source of electricity.

I remember a startling statistic in an Energy Information Adminstration (EIA) publication that the failure of 4% of U.S. substations would result in 60% of the U.S. losing power. The Markey and Waxman report also cites a declassified National Academy of Sciences report declassified that found that physical damage to large transformers could disrupt power to large regions of the country and take months to repair.

Very recently, the Department of Homeland Security testified that it had processed 68% more cyber-incidents in 2012, involving Federal agencies, critical infrastructure, and other select industrial entities, than in 2011.

Cybersecurity regulation

Measures to protect the U.S. electric grid from cyber-attack include mandatory reliability standards developed by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) plus voluntary actions recommended by NERC.

In 2010, bipartisan cyber-security legislation called the GRID Act passed the House of Representatives.  This legislation would have provided the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) with the authority to require necessary actions to protect the grid. However, this legislation did not pass the Senate.

Cybersecurity survey of U.S. utiltiies

In January of this year, Representatives Markey and Waxman requested information from more than 150 investor-owned utilities (IOUs), municipally-owned utilities, rural electric cooperatives, and federal entities.  More than 60% of the entities have responded including

• 54 investor-owned utilities
• 47 municipally-owned utilities and rural electric cooperatives
• 12 federal entities

The Markey and Waxman report is based upon those responses.

Findings

The electric grid is the target of numerous and daily cyber-attacks.

More than a dozen utilities reported “daily,” “constant,” or “frequent” attempted cyber-attacks ranging from phishing to malware infection to unfriendly probes.

One utility reported that it was the target of approximately 10,000 attempted cyber-attacks each month. More than one public power provider reported being under a “constant state of ‘attack’ from malware and entities seeking to gain access to internal systems." A Northeastern power provider said that it was “under constant cyber attack from cyber criminals including malware and the general threat from the Internet...”  A Midwestern power provider said that it was “subject to ongoing malicious cyber and physical activity. For example, we see probes on our network to look for vulnerabilities in our systems and applications on a daily basis. Much of  this activity is automated and dynamic in nature – able to adapt to what is discovered during its probing process.”

Most utilities only comply with mandatory cyber-security standards, and have not implemented voluntary NERC recommendations. 

Almost all utilities cited compliance with mandatory NERC standards. Of those that responded to a question of how many voluntary cyber-security measures recommended by NERC had been implemented, most indicated that they had not implemented any of these measures.

For example, NERC has established both mandatory standards and voluntary measures to protect against the computer worm known as Stuxnet. Of those that responded, 91% of IOUs, 83% of municipally- or cooperatively-owned utilities, and 80% of federal entities that own major pieces of the bulk power system reported compliance with the Stuxnet mandatory standards. By contrast, of those that responded to a separate question regarding compliance with voluntary Stuxnet measures, only 21% of IOUs, 44% of municipally- or cooperatively-owned utilities, and 62.5% of federal entities reported compliance.

Most utilities have not taken concrete steps to reduce the vulnerability of the grid to geomagnetic storms and it is unclear whether the number of available spare transformers is adequate.

Only 12 of 36 (33%) responding IOUs, 5 of 25 (20%) responding municipally- or cooperatively-owned utilities, and 2 of 8 (25%) responding federal entities stated that they have taken specific mitigation measures to protect against or respond to geomagnetic storms.

Most utilities do not own spare transformers. Only twenty IOUs, six municipally- or coop-owned utilities, and eight federal entities reported owning spare transformers. While other utilities reported participation in various mutual assistance agreements or industry equipment sharing programs, none knew how many other utilities would claim contractual access to the same equipment in the event of a large-scale outage.

Convergence of geospatial and building information modeling (BIM) accelerates

About a decade ago Dave Sonnen, Global Analyst for Spatial Information at IDC, projected that the locationaware market for geospatial services would exceed the traditional GIS market in 2005/2006. The release of Google Earth in June 2005 transformed the geospatial services ecosystem. Today, location-aware technologies have blown past the traditional GIS space in terms of number of users and number of deployed apps.

In sectors such as construction, transportation, utilities and municipal infrastructure, geospatial services are playing an increasingly important role even though it is often not obvious. At a recent Distributech conference, the largest electric power distribution conference in North America, of the 400-plus presentations, only a handful mentioned GIS or geospatial in their title or abstract. But of the 18 companies that we interacted with, only two said they were not using geospatial technology in the organisation. Even those that said they weren't using GIS, were in all probability using Google Maps for market analysis, recruitment or other applications.

To put this in context, the annual global construction spend is estimated to be $7 trillion, about 10% of world GDP. Of this, transportation construction accounts for $1 trillion, utilities $2 trillion, and buildings $2.5 trillion. It has been estimated that between 2013 and 2030, $57 trillion in infrastructure investment will be required simply to keep up with projected global GDP growth. Th is includes investment required for transport (road, rail, ports, airports), power, water, and telecommunications. This is nearly 60% more than the $36 trillion spent globally on infrastructure over the past 18 years.

Over half of the world's 7-billion population lives in cities and this is expected to increase as we move toward 9 billion by 2050. In the future, it is projected that there will be many more and larger mega cities like Tokyo, Mumbai, Mexico City, and Moscow. Cities around the world are beginning to realise that the power that lights up their homes and offi ces comes from the convergence of modern information technology, including BIM, geospatial/ GIS, intelligent (connected) network models for electric power, telecommunications, water and wastewater, transportation, and other infrastructure, real-time data management systems, and 3D visualisation.

Buildings use about 40% of global energy, 25% of global water, 40% of global resources, and they emit approximately one-third of global GHG emissions. Faced with rising environmental issues, many governments are mandating energy conservation measures, especially targeting near-zero energy buildings, an industry that is projected to grow by 43% per year to reach $690 billion by 2020.

Building information modeling (BIM) and geospatial technology have central roles to play in improving the energy efficiency of buildings. Several years ago, in an awardwinning paper at a conference organised by Britain’s Association for Geographic Information (AGI), Ann Kemp, then head of GIS at Atkins Global, the design and engineering firm, asked the question ‘BIM isn’t geospatial — or is it?’ and then argued that integration of geospatial and BIM was essential to address the challenges of the 21st century.  The need to integrate geospatial and BIM has been gaining traction for some time now and government mandated energy efficiency for buildings is a major driver of BIM/geospatial convergence.

Construction, power, transportation and municipal infrastructure are important sectors of the world economy. Over the next two decades these will see a massive infusion of investment, motivated by economic development and environmental concerns. In addition, as governments find they have less and less money for capital infrastructure projects, a greater proportion of the investment in infrastructure will come from the private sector, which will drive an increased focus on productivity to improve returns on investment. Th at in turn is driving a transformation of the construction industry which is reflected in accelerating adoption of integrated BIM, geospatial, and 3D visualisation, geospatially enabled data management, and vertical applications based on these technologies.

Excerpted from a recent article. 

Graphics courtesy of e7 Architecture Studio and VNT Consulting.

Electric power generation from coal and gas: US and China

Some very cool interactive infographic on energy from the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Natural Gas- and Coal-Fired Power Generation Production in US and China

I-5 bridge classified as Functionally Obsolete in the National Bridge Inventory

Transportation for America has put the National Bridge Inventory of 604,474 bridges on line with Google Maps so you can zoom to any area in the U.S. and see which bridges are structurally deficient and the daily traffic on them.  In this example I've zoomed to the I-5 bridge near Mt Vernon that collapsed this morning.

It is interesting that Google Maps no longer shows the bridge.  The bridge is classified as Functionally Obsolete.  It was built in 1955 and handles 70,526 cars a day. 

Status

Deck 6 (Equal to present minimum criteria)
Superstructure 5 (Somewhat better than minimum adequacy to tolerate being left in place as is)
Substructure 6 (Equal to present minimum criteria)

It is supposed to be inspected every two years.  It was last inspected nearly 3 years ago.

"Functionally obsolete" means that the design of a bridge is not suitable for its current use, such as lack of safety shoulders or the inability to handle current traffic volume, speed, size, or weight.

I-5 bridge collapse: Is private capital the solution for the sad state of American infrastructure ?

In 2009 Blaine Leonard, of the Utah Department of Transportation and the then President-elect of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), gave the opening keynote at GITA 2009.  His talk focussed on the 2009 ASCE Scorecard on American infrastructure and what the stimulus means for addressing some of the infrastructure challenges that the ASCE has successfully attracted public attention to.

 Mr. Leonard presented a breakdown of the part of the ARRA spend that the ASCE believes is going to infrastructure, something over $70 billion, and then discussed the short fall for several of the items.

The key takeway I left with is that the stimulus is making a significant dent, but by itself it is insufficient to resolve the problem.  Of the $2.2 trillion the ASCE estimates is required to bring American infrastructure up to an acceptable level, meaning B- or C+, the money currently allocated by all levels of government is about 45% of what is necessary.

In 2010  a bipartisan report was released that calls for “a fundamental overhaul of America’s transportation policies and programs.  The report estimates a federal shortfall of up to $194 billion a year in infrastructure spending on roads, rail, and air transportation through 2035. Given the poor state of current US transportation infrastructure, as described in the ASCE's Infrastructure Report Card, it is estimated that an investment of $262 billion per year will be required to actually improve the US transportation network.  The report cites lack of  a vision and underinvestment as compromising US productivity and its ability to compete internationally.  The report says that it is time to "rethink existing systems for the 21st century and create an agenda for enacting change."

Deteriorating infrastructure and private capital

Last year 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 many sectors 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.

UK National Infrastructure Plan based on private capital

Last year 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. 

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 challenge of construction productivity

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.

Modeling downtown The Hague to reduce energy consumption

I've blogged previously about a project by the Los Angeles Community College District, the largest community college district in the U.S., create 3D BIM models of all the buildings on the LACCD  campuses.  One of the most important motivations for creating these models was that BIM models would faciliate energy performance analyses of LACCD buildings.

Reducing energy usage in The Hague

At the Geospatial World Forum 2013 (GWF 2013) conference in Rotterdam Martinus Vranken and Jene van der Heide of the Dutch Kadasre described a project to model a square kilometer of downtown The Hague with the objective of reducing and stabilizing energy usage and costs for the entire area.

The Dutch Ministry of the Interior has initiated a joint project with the Municipal government of The Hague to reduce and stabiize energy usage and costs in downtown The Hague, including the use of renewable energy.  The study area is roughly about a square kilometer of The Hague where the buildings are large and mostly owned by the National and Municipal governments.  The Dutch Kadaster has been contracted to provide an information system to assist the Ministry of Interior in developing a business case.

The Kadaster has combined its own data with that from other government agencies

Kadaster

• Topography
• Ownership and building information
• Energy labels
• Underground grids electricity, gas and heat
• Monuments

Ministry of the Interior and City of The Hague

• Energy consumption
• Employees
• Surfaces suitable for solar panels
• 3D model

Province of South Holland

• Heat pump facilities
• Solar probability map
• Wind probability map

Ministry of Economic Affairs

• Geothermal facilities
• Permits for geothermal concessions

The Kadaster has assembled land registry information like ownership, monument status; building information such as year of completion, surface area, energy labels, energy indices; information on underground networks like heat networks, gas and electricity grids; together with government information on heat pump facilities, energy consumption of buildings, and available building facade area suited for solar panels.  Combining this information provides a tool that the Ministry is using to develop the busness case for a new form of energy supply that is reliable, clean, and affordable.

The two main challenges have been to translate this information to fit the perspective of the Ministry of the Interior and structuring the information so that it can be reused for similar projects in the future.

The next steps  on the project are data collection and processing, defining business case,  and tendering and then transition to the new energy supply.

The lessons learned so fare are interesting.  First of all, visualization using a geospatial information platform has been vital in developing the business case.  This approach has provided important Insight into the energy and heat exchange possibilities between buildings and enabled exploration of the possibilities of solar, wind and geothermal energy.  The geospatial approach also provides a platform which the private sector can use as a foundation in preparing bids for the project.

There is a video about this project available here.

Executive order makes open and machine readable data the default for the US Federal Government

The principle of free and open access to government geospatial data has been adopted by many governments including US Federal, Canada, Japan, South Africa, Brazil, California, and by the City of Vancouver and other cities.  But being able to access prepared maps and other derived material is just a first step, governments need to provide access to raw geospatial data in commonly used Web-friendly formats. Tim Berners-Lee, in Government Data Design Issues, is a strong advocate of making raw data accessible over the web including supporting standard Web methods, most critically, searching.

An Executive Order has been released by the White House which makes open and machine readable (raw) data the default for government information.

"To promote continued job growth, Government efficiency, and the social good that can be gained from opening Government data to the public, the default state of new and modernized Government information resources shall be open and machine readable. Government information shall be managed as an asset throughout its life cycle to promote interoperability and openness, and, wherever possible and legally permissible, to ensure that data are released to the public in ways that make the data easy to find, accessible, and usable. In making this the new default state, executive departments and agencies (agencies) shall ensure that they safeguard individual privacy, confidentiality, and national security."