Between the Poles

First Worldview-3 images with 40 cm resolution available for download

Digital Globe’s WorldView-3 Earth observation satellite was launched August 13, the first commercial Atlas mission to fly out of Vandenberg.  WorldView-3 is the first multi-payload, super-spectral, one-foot-resolution commercial satellite. It is intended to operate at an altitude of 617 km and can collect up to 680,000 km² per day.  WorldView-3 is capable of

• 31 cm panchromatic resolution
• 1.24 m multispectral resolution (8 bands)
• 3.7 m short-wave infrared resolution (8 bands)
• 30 m Clouds, Aerosols, Vapors, Ice, and Snow (CAVIS) resolution (12 bands)

with an  average revisit time of less than 1 day. Digital Globe has received permission from the U.S. Department of Commerce to sell imagery to all of its customers at up to 25 cm panchromatic and 1.0 m multispectral ground sample distance (GSD) beginning six months after WorldView-3 is operational.

WorldView-3 is now sending images back to Earth.  Digital Globe has released some images of Madrid, but is only licensed to release images with 40 cm resolution at this time.

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Small utilities turning to "smart grid as a service"

Globally, smart grid technology has emerged to help utilities deal with challenges such as increased reliability, the need to reduce non-technical losses, distributed renewable generation, and electric vehicles, but for small to medium utilities, access to IT resources limits their ability to implement smart grid solutions.   Back in 2010 McKinsey was already seeing AMI vendors starting to look at options for providing AMI services using a "software as a service" model.  Now power industry IT vendors and service providers are increasingly offering managed services solutions, referred to as smart grid as a service (SGaaS).

I blogged previously about Burlington Hydro, a small utility in an affluent part of southern Ontario that is integrating into an intelligent network many aspects of what is typically included in smart grid including intelligent network devices, self healing networks, smart meters, distributed generation, electric vehicles (EV) , factory ride-through systems (enables factories to continue functioning through outages), battery-based electric storage, bidirectional communications network linking the intelligent devices to the control center, and dramatically increased volumes of real-time data.  Burlington Hydro has been working with a local IT consulting company AGSI to develop systems to manage their smart grid deployment in a real-time, big data IT environment.  But what about small utilities who don't have the in-house skills or the revenue stream to support bringing in an outside IT consulting company ?

Back in 2012 at an annual Geospatial Information and Technology (GITA) Pacific Northwest Conference, Terraspatial Technologies gave a presentation on a hosted or SaaS (software as a service) solution for small utilities.

Hosted solution

What struck me as as so unique about what Terraspatial offers and which is so valuable to small utilities is that it is a hosted solution. Basically, all the utility needs to install at its site is a browser, everything else is running in the cloud.  The most important benefit of a hosted solution like this is that it has the potential to provide a high level of IT security without the need to increase the level of IT capacity that the utility needs to maintain in house.

Terraspatial's hosted solution is called PlantWorx for electric power utilities. The design goals of the solution that Terraspatial developed are very relevant to small utilities. 

• Hosted, which means that the utility does not need to own or manage servers or software. 
• Secure because it relies on the security of a major cloud hosting provider such as Rackspace or Amazon that can provide a level of security, including protection from internal tampering, role-based access by users, protection from external  threats, the latest encryption, redundancy and back-ups, ISO certified data centers, and mirrored servers for persistent backup, in other words a much higher level of security than the average utility network is capable of.
• Accessible from the office and the field
• Integrated solution that supports staking through to accounting and reporting with interfaces to CAD, GIS, customer information systems, accounting and billing systems, materials management, and other systems

Now according to Navigant Research the growth in cloud-based services has increased the awareness of SGaaS. Offerings are available for a host of smart grid applications in several categories, including home energy management (HEM), advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), distribution and substation automation (DA and SA) communications, asset management and condition monitoring (AMCM), demand response (DR), and software solutions and analytics. 

The complexity of smart grid deployments, systems integration, spatial analytics, real-time big data and cyber security and limited internal IT capacity are some of the drivers behind a growing market for SGaaS. Navigant Research forecasts that the global SGaaS market will grow from just under $1.7 billion in 2014 to more than $11.1 billion in 2023.

Climate change projected to reduce South Asian GDP by 1.8% by 2050

The South Asia developing members (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) of the Asian Development Bank (ADB) have a population of 1.43 billion people.   One-third of the inhabitants of the region live in poverty. 

In a recent report the ADB has estimated the impact of climate change on important sectors of the economies (agriculture, energy, coastal and marine resources, forests and other ecosystems, health, and water) of these countries.   It projects that the total cost of climate change in South Asia will increase over time and that in the business-as-usual economic scenario, South Asia could lose an equivalent 1.8% of its annual gross domestic product (GDP) by 2050 due to climate change. The report forecasts that the Maldives will be hardest hit in GDP loss, but all South Asian economies could face serious decreases in annual GDP;

• Maldives 2.3%
• Bangladesh 2.0%,
• Bhutan 1.4%
• India 1.8%
• Nepal 2.2%
• Sri Lanka 1.2%

The ADB suggest that if measures are taken by the international community to reduce fossil fuel consumption so that the rise in global mean temperature is kept below or within 2 °C, the region would lose an average of 1.3% of GDP annually by 2050.

New patent appeals process invalidates mapping patent

According to Gigaom in 2012 a Florida-based patent troll sued both Apple and Google because they included a view of street level images next to or inserted in a map in their products.  The troll had filed patents on this type of combined imagery (see image for an example) in 2003.   Apple and Google joined forces to challenge the troll based on "prior art" using a new Patent Office appeals system.  The system is known as inter partes review.  Inter partes review is a new trial proceeding conducted at the Board to review the patentability of a claim in a patent based only on  prior art consisting of patents or printed publications. It came into effect in 2013 through the America Invents Act of 2012. It allows third parties to challenge patents before administrative patent judges.  Last week the appeals board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruled  that all 27 claims contained in the troll’s patent are invalid.

Urban planning working group announced by the Open Geospatial Consortium

An Urban Planning Domain Working Group (DWG) has been chartered to define the role for Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standards within the urban planning discipline.  The DWG offers an open forum for the discussion and presentation of interoperability requirements, use cases, and implementations of OGC standards relevant to urban planning. 

Technologies and trends such as smart cities, smart grids, sensor webs, the Internet of Things (IoT), facilities and asset management, indoor and outdoor navigation, energy performance modeling and real-time, “big data” analytics are important for urban planners.  In these technology domains, open standards encourage the sharing of information. The OGC Urban Planning Domain Working Group intends to discover requirements for open spatial standards in information systems involved in the planning, design, use, maintenance and governance of publicly accessible spaces. Requirements identified by OGC Domain Working Groups are typically used as the basis for standards development by chartered OGC Standards Working Groups (SWGs).

Image: Sunshine Ecomap

Remote microgrids expected to show strong growth in Asia Pacific

Several of the heavily populated countries in the Asia Pacific region, including Bangladesh, India, and Indonesia, are experiencing high rates of rural electrification. Meeting the increased demand for power across the region will require innovative approaches, especially for regions remote from the existing power grid.  These include microgrids that are capable of operating in isolation the centralized power grid.   For example, in Bangladesh the Globle Environment Facility (GEF) is helping to speed the rural electrification process by working with the Government of Bangladesh, the World Bank, and Bangladesh’s Infrastructure Development Company Limited (IDCOL) to increase the spread of off-grid, renewable energy technologies, such as solar home systems (SHS) in rural areas where people live too far from the main electrical grids.

India’s new government, led by Prime Minister Modi, plans to use solar power to bring electricity to the 400 million people who currently do not have access to it.  The government intends to aggressively implement the National Solar Mission that aims to install 20,000 MW of grid-connected solar power capacity and 2,000 MW of distributed solar power capacity by 2022.

A  recent Navigant Research report analyzes the Asia Pacific market for microgrids in four key segments (commercial/industrial, community/utility, campus/institutional, and remote) for nine countries (Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines).

In emerging countries such as India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh electricity access through a centralized grid is not feasible in the immediate future for many. For example, in India many of the 400 million people who do not have access to electric power and cannot expect it in the near future because they are remote from the Indian power grid.  Microgrids, often including renewable energy sources, are a proven way to rapidly provide power to many of these people. Navigant expects that "remote microgrids" will show strong growth in emerging countries through 2023.

In addition developed nations, such as Australia, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea, will pursue technology development and pilot projects in the next few years and then will deploy diverse applications, especially in the commercial/industrial, campus/institutional, and community/utility microgrid segments. Navigant Research forecasts that annual grid-tied and remote microgrid capacity in the nine select Asia Pacific countries will grow from 37.0 MW in 2013 to 597.3 MW in 2023. The microgrid market in Asia Pacific is projected to grow from $778 million in 2014 to nearly $5.8 billion in 2023.

Cost of distributed wind energy in the U.S. estimated at 14¢/kWh

The total wind capacity in the U.S. at the end of 2013 was 61 GW which provided about 4.5 % of total U.S. demand.  A large portion of all wind turbines installed in the United States generate power for on-site or local use.  In 2013 distributed wind installations accounted for more than 80 percent of all wind turbines installed in the United States.  However, distributed wind capacity is a small proportion of the total U.S. wind capacity.  Reducing utility bills and hedging against rising electricity rates are common reasons for installing distributed wind.  Some utilities implement net metering which pays the distributed wind owner for excess generated energy that is returned to the grid.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has just released an interesting report on distributed wind energy in the U.S.  Distributed wind is defined by the wind project’s location relative to end-use, rather than on turbine or project size.  Distributed wind power is used at or near where it is generated, as opposed to wind power from wholesale generation, where power is sent to consumers via transmission lines and substations.  The distributed wind market includes wind turbines from very large to small domestic turbines.  DoE breaks the market into two segments:  "small wind" with turbines 100 kW or less and wind turbines greater than 100 kW.

In 2013, 2700 new turbines were added totalling 30.4 megawatts (MW).  At the end of 2013 the total installed distributed wind capacity in the U.S. included 72,000 wind turbines totaling 842 MW. In 2013 40% of the new installations were residential, followed by 26% agricultural, 20% industrial and commercial, and 14% government and institutional.  Off-grid small wind turbines account for the bulk of wind turbine units deployed in U.S. distributed wind applications.

DoE has estimated the levelized cost of distributed wind energy.  The levelized cost of energy (LCOE) is used to compare the cost of energy across different technologies.  For wind turbins the cost of the turbins and their capacity factor, which is dependent on the available wind resources, siting, and tower height, are the major factors determining a wind project’s LCOE.  Typically the higher the capacity factor, the lower the LCOE.  The capacity-weighted average capacity factor for a selected group of distributed wind projects installed between 2006-2013 analyzed by DoE is 15%, and their capacity-weighted average LCOE is 14¢/kWh. This can be compared to utility-scale natural gas 6-7¢/kWh, utility-scale wind at 8¢/kWh, or solar PV at 13¢/kWh.

Earth observation satellite Worldview-3 with one-foot resolution successfully launched

United Launch Alliance (ULA) conducted a Atlas V launch today at 11:30 am PDT, orbiting DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-3 Earth observation satellite. The launch was the first commercial Atlas mission to fly out of Vandenberg.

WorldView-3 is the first multi-payload, super-spectral, one-foot-resolution commercial satellite. It is intended to operate at an altitude of 617 km and can collect up to 680,000 km² per day. 

Nuclear power is making a slow comeback

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) the Fukushima Daiichi accident led to a 10% decline in nuclear electricity production from 2010 to 2012.

• Permanent shutdown of eight reactors in Germany
• Temporary shutdown of 50 of Japan’s operable reactors - it now looks likely that some reactors will be restarted beginning with the Sendai plant
• Phaseout of Switzerland's and Belgium's reactors

But despite Fukushima, 72 new reactors were under construction at the end of 2013, mostly in China, India and Russia.  Belarus, United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Viet Nam, Bangladesh, Jordan, Poland and Saudi Arabia have projects under development.  The United States is building its first new reactors in 30 years in Georgia and South Carolina.  The United Kingdom and Finland have announced plans to build new reactors.  South Korea has decided to build two more reactors to add to the 23 already operating in that country.

Nearly half of the reactors under construction use Generation III technology, generally believed to be much safer than previous types of reactors. China has announced that it will build only Generation III reactors.  A Westinghouse AP1000 pressurized water reactor is scheduled to come online in Sanmen, China in late 2014.

However, the rate of development of new nuclear capacity is much less than what was projected pre-Fukushima.  In the context of emissions reduction the IEA projects that installed nuclear capacity in 2025 will be 7% to 25% below what it estimates is required to reduce carbon emissions sufficiently to keep climate warming under 2° C.

Fukushima is not the only factor that has slowed the development of nuclear power capacity.  The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE), which allows comparison of the cost of different fuel sources for power generation, shows that from a cost perspective solar PV ($130/MWh) and wind ($80/MWh) have become comparable to nuclear power generation ($96/MWh).  As smart grid technology developes and becomes more capable of integrating distributed intermittent sources, wind and solar PV will continue to become increasingly attractive alternatives to nuclear power.

First commercial Earth observation satellite with 31 cm resolution to be launched Aug 13

Lockheed Martin Commercial Launch Services has set the launch date for DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-3 Earth observation satellite for Aug. 13, 2014. The spacecraft will launch on an Atlas 5 from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.

WorldView-3, is the first multi-payload, super-spectral, one-foot-resolution commercial satellite. It is intended to operate at an altitude of 617 km and can collect up to 680,000 km² per day.  WorldView-3 is capable of

• 31 cm panchromatic resolution
• 1.24 m multispectral resolution (8 bands)
• 3.7 m short-wave infrared resolution (8 bands)
• 30 m Clouds, Aerosols, Vapors, Ice, and Snow (CAVIS) resolution (12 bands)

with an  average revisit time of less than 1 day. 

Digital Globe has received permission from the U.S. Department of Commerce to sell imagery to all of its customers at up to 25 cm panchromatic and 1.0 m multispectral ground sample distance (GSD) beginning six months after WorldView-3 is operational.

The Atlas 5 launch is set for August 13, 2014 at 11:30 AM (PDT).  You can watch the launch here.