Between the Poles: OpenGridMap: open, crowdsourced project to map power grid infrastructure

Geoff Zeiss

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Gene Roe's laser scanning industry news
Open Source Geospatial Foundation OSGEO
OSGeo was created to support the collaborative development of open source geospatial software and promote its widespread use
Proven guidelines for reducing underground infrastructure damage at airports, university, industrial, and commercial campuses, and towns
There are proven measures that an administration, owner, or municipal government responsible for an airport, university, industrial or commercial campus, or town can undertake to reduce the risk of underground utility damage, the associated disruptions to operations and business and the danger for workers and the public.
Sharing information about the location of underground utilities
The U.S. devotes an estimated $10 billion annually to locating underground infrastructure. Every construction project requiring excavation involves significant efforts in locating underground utilities prior to and during construction to reduce the risk of injuries and unexpected project delays. But this information is rarely shared and the location of underground infrastructure is recaptured over and over again. There are successful examples around the world where municipal and regional governments have helped enable a shared underground utility network database.
Growing evidence of the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach to construction
Building information modeling (BIM) has been applied to design-build construction projects for many years. A growing number of countries are mandating BIM for public projects. While the UK government has said that "...we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life-cycle", until recently there has not been hard data to support this conjecture. Similarly there has been only anecdotal support for an integrated BIM and geospatial approach for design, build, operate and maintain projects. Now we are beginning to see data from real world projects that offer evidence for the benefits of an integrated BIM+geospatial full lifecycle approach for construction projects.
Progress in geospatial, civil, and BIM interoperability promises efficient workflows for infrastructure
The BIM and geospatial interoperability challenge is the latest symptom of the broader problem of integrating AEC and geospatial workflows, that has contributed to low productivity in the construction sector. After the announcement about a year ago by Jack Dangermond and Andrew Anagnost of a new relationship to build a bridge between Autodesk and ESRI technologies, I thought it a good time to review progress toward interoperability between the AEC and geospatial worlds.
Geography2050: Accurate location information about underground infrastructure is essential for powering our future planet
I thought it would be worth while to include here a talk I gave at GEOGRAPHY 2050 Powering Our Future Planet at Columbia University in New York about the importance of accurate location information about underground infrastructure for the future development of the energy grid. With some notable exceptions accurately recording the location of subsurface infrastructure including oil, gas, electric power and other energy infrastructure is ignored - perhaps this is a case of out-of-sight is indeed out-of-mind. The reality is that knowing the location of underground energy infrastructure is critical for national security, for disaster planning and management, for public safety and for economic efficiency. Everyone is aware of at least one disaster resulting from or exacerbated by not knowing where our energy infrastructure is - the explosions in San Bruno in California (2010) and Belgium (2004) immediately come to mind.
Deep learning enables automated extraction of building footprints and road networks from satellite imagery
Automated feature extraction from satellite imagery has made major progress in the last year. Accurate building footprints extracted from high resolution satellite imagery are becoming available from companies such as Ecopia, which has just announced a partnership with DigitalGlobe, whose satellites are capable of 30 cm (approximately one foot) resolution. Also NVIDIA has demonstrated the ability to automate detection of many road networks using sophisticated algorithms and multi-spectral high resolution imagery.
BIM + geospatial interoperability would avoid another CAD + GIS quagmire
A specific challenge currently facing the AEC and geospatial industries is integrating building information models (BIM) and geospatial infrastructure and building models. There are parallels between what happened in the 1990s in unsuccessfully addressing CAD+GIS interoperability and the current challenge of BIM+geospatial interoperability. But there are also important differences which provide grounds for optimism that the availability of both BIM and geospatial standards, a vibrant open source geospatial community, and a new willingness on the part of major software players in the BIM and geospatial industries will make it possible to successfully address the latest interoperability challenge facing the AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) and geospatial industries.
BVLOS drones improve power line inspections amid increasing fire and storm risks for utilities | Utility Dive
Transmission line inspections for vegetation management and other purposes are essential in ensuring grid reliability and resilience. We saw the devastating effect of vegetation encroachment in the recent California fires, which in part have been blamed on failure to maintain properly cleared transmission lines. With drones that can cover great distances in a single flight and provide detailed and accurate aerial imagery of transmission lines and other infrastructure, it is now possible to almost completely automate this expensive process. Automating transmission line inspections for vegetation management using BVLOS drones not only saves money, but also could improve the resiliency and reliability of the transmission grid.

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December 30, 2016

OpenGridMap: open, crowdsourced project to map power grid infrastructure

Earlier this year on a Sunday renewable power supplied almost all of Germany’s power demand, a major milestone in Germany's “Energiewende” policy. The transformation of the grid (called by some a revolution) is being driven by distributed energy (DER) and smart devices. It requires profound changes to how we monitor and manage the power grid and to be able to understand the impact of the integration of more distributed intermittent sources and new consumer, industrial, and commercial electronics requires data and tools that only exist partially today.

If you are familiar with OpenStreetMap (OSM), then the OpenGridMap project is not that different except that it focusses on mapping electric power infrastructure instead of transportation. I had heard rumours about an OSM-like project in Germany to map electric power infrastructure several years ago, but was unable to find more information about it. OpenGridMap is an new open community that crowdsources power grid geospatial location and related data to be used for research purposes. The goal is to collect reliable grid data to enable researchers to conduct simulation studies. OpenGridMap is intended to support the entire process from data collection to making grid data available for various applications. An OpenGridMap app for Android for people interested in helping to collect grid infrastructure data is available on Playstore.

Using OpenGridMap data analytics developed at the Technical University (TU) Munich generates a power grid model in the form of a Common Information Model (CIM) description file which provides the basis for a power grid simulation model. Experiments with OpenGridMap data have demonstrated the effectiveness of this approach for grid modeling and simulation. It is expected that as more data is collected it will be possible to generate power grid simulations of larger size, more variety and more accuracy than the currently available state-of-the-art test power grids.

The project was initiated by Professor Hans-Arno Jacobsen, Chair of Business Information Systems, and José Rivera at the Technical University of Munich. It is supported by a German Federal Ministry of Education and Research grant and the Alexander von Humbolt Foundation. Collaborators include Siemens AG, World Bank's ESMAP, the Technical University Berlin's VEREDELE project and Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) KOSiNeK project.

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Between the Poles

Geoff Zeiss

July 2023

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December 30, 2016

OpenGridMap: open, crowdsourced project to map power grid infrastructure

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