Between the Poles

An infrastructure digital twin provides a dynamic environment for managing underground assets of a multi-utility campus

For organizations managing a campus such as educational facilities, healthcare facilities, commercial real estate, utilities, and municipalities managing public works, storm sewer systems, and parks which are characterized by having many different utilities and and other infrastructure, an infrastructure digital twin provides owners, operators and third-parties with a streamlined, cloud-based solution that maps, manages and shares a wide range of subsurface and above ground assets, including fibre, pipes, electric power cables, lighting, conduits, and other structures enabling campus asset owners to not only track their assets but to provide all the information about their assets; their history, their replacement cost and their current cost without which you cannot justify your financial demands, be it a budget request for next year or a bid bond for a major project.

Infrastructure digital twin

A major challenge for legacy asset management systems is that documents are hard to access. Problems in the field are hard to identify because it takes too long to access the relevant documents and other information in the field. It's hard to share architecture and utility drawings with contractors and other stakeholders. People are really copying large blueprints or as-builts and delivering a set of documents to a new contractor who's just been onboarded and the contractor has to spend weeks studying these documents and comparing this information to what's there, what's underground, what's above ground and matching it together.

The way we address this challenge is by creating an infrastructure digital twin which provides accessible information to all stakeholders through a subscription service. A full digital twin of your campus, is a big, costly project, but an infrastructure digital twin is simpler and much faster. It involves site verification and infrastructure mapping as a service including drone imaging, site surveying, walking the campus and verifying objects. If the customer is using some type of infrastructure detection, the accurate information from that system plugs into our system, so it remains live. We support Open Geospatial Consortium standards to ensure interoperability. We onboard all of the data and we do that for any new updates on the campus. If something is wrong in the map and it's not in the site, or in site and not in the map, or if the drone gave us a better accuracy, we detect that and make corrections. For example, customers often hire utility engineering firms to conduct subsurface utility surveys (SUE).  We load that information and match it with everything we have in the system about their underground and other assets. Full onboarding requires 40 days or less. And more importantly, all the data is owned by the client all the time.

We've loaded over four million assets for our customers. Those assets are being used by thousands of users, including facilities, teams, construction managers, engineering and architecture firms, local utilities, fire departments and others.

You can share data immediately with anyone you want. And there are no limits on the number of users in any of our systems. If you onboard a new construction company for a new project, you just provide them with a login, specify what they can access and see, and they are onboard.

Dynamic view of your assets

The system provides a dynamic view of all your assets. It's not a static image, GIS or CAD files which you update every several months. It's real time, live presentation of information coming from a database and it is integrated with all your other systems. You can drill down on every single conduit, cable, pipe, or other piece of infrastructure and query all its attributes and see the sources of the data. You have access to the data in real time from your phone, your tablet, or your laptop because it is a fully cloud solution. We are able to do that because we are compliant with the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) and follow OGC standards. We are using open systems in terms of representing all the attributes about every item.  For a typical campus environment, ranging from a few blocks to a college campus or hospital complex, for example, you may have 20,000 assets. All of those assets and their associated attributes are captured and live in that database. We're building IOT integration, so you will have real time data on top of their various asset layers. You can see the water flow and the temperature and the pressure from the sensors. To go back to the updates. We are building integration with augmented reality. so that all underground assets can be visualized in 3D AR.

We provide a dynamic way of having base maps. You can use Google Maps, Esri World Imagery, or OpenStreetMap or even a mix of these. You can add your own imagery. 

In addition to the dynamic view of the locations and attributes of all your assets, you also have a plan room. All your documents are there, your engineering drawings, as-builts, survey and SUE reports, legacy maps, and other sources of underground data. You can search them by date or by the contractor or surveyor who supplied this data to you. These documents are accessible to you at any time from any device.

Managing asset budgeting

More importantly, the system provides an executive summary of all your assets. For example, in this site, which we have built as an example (we cannot share real data publicly) we have included about $4 million worth of assets. FM people need to deliver projects on time, minimize disruption of services to those people who are using these facilities, and improve the sustainability of their facilities. To do this requires that you can justify your CAPEX and OPEX budget. For some capital projects, you might be able to look at the total cost for adding a new building. But for budgets for operations and maintenance, retrofitting a fiber network, changing your irrigation network, it's really difficult to do that without having access to everything about your assets, their history, their replacement cost and their current cost. Without this information you cannot justify your financial demands, be it a budget request for next year or a bid bond for a major project.

The key to managing budgets is by replacement costs. If you want to replace your electric network, you need to know how you built the electric network in the first place. The database provides access to all this information. You can break your assets down by type of structure; electric power, conduits, lighting, water, wastewater and gas pipe networks. You can see their life expectancy, aggregate them based on their expected time of expiry and then decide on remedial action. You also need to worry about the impact of potential accidents and most importantly your liabilities. If a major underground gas line is damaged, then you might face heavy liabilities because it might interrupt gas service not just to your campus but for the entire area or even an entire municipality.

Our system has an ROI calculator so you can compute your potential savings. This has helped customers secure grants because they were able to compute the information needed to submit a bid bond.

Conclusion

An infrastructure digital twin provides immediately accessible information to all your assets for all stakeholders through a subscription service. It's a real time, live presentation of information coming from a database and it is integrated with all your other systems. For critical budgeting operations and maintenance, you have immediate access to everything about your assets; their history, their replacement cost and their current cost that enables you to justify your financial demands, be it a budget request for next year or a bid bond for a major project.

This post is based on Moufid Charafeddine's (BetterGIS) talk at Subsurface Utility Mapping Strategy Forum (SUMSF).

Growing gap in electric power infrastructure investment in the U.S. will decrease reliability and resilience of the grid

Last week the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) released a new report in the Failure to Act series "Electric Infrastructure Investment Gaps in a Rapidly Changing Environment" that estimates the investment gap through 2039 for electric power infrastructure in the U.S. and assesses the impact of under investment in electric power infrastructure on the U.S. economy.  Modern economies are increasingly dependent on "chip technologies" powered by electricity. Recent projections suggest that ICT consumption of electricity could reach over 20% of total demand by 2030 with data centres consuming over a third of that.  It is estimated that the average cost of an outage at a data centre is about $8,851 for every minute the electricity grid is disrupted,

Background

Just about everything that we use daily from phones and the internet to water and wastewater rely on electric power. In addition as we reduce the carbon footprint of the economy, electric power becomes increasingly important because in most jurisdictions electric power has a low or decreasing carbon footprint compared to other sources of energy.

The U.S. electric power grid is composed of the bulk power system including large-scale generation facilities and the transmission network. 10,000 power plants comprise the generation capacity of the U.S., not including residential solar panels or small-scale wind farms.  More than 600,000 circuit miles of transmission lines, of which 240,000 are high-voltage, carry power from generation plants to the distribution nrtworks. An estimated 5.5 million miles of local distribution lines (including underground cables) carry the power to end users.

Increased ICT consumption of electricity

One of the sectors that is projected to consume an increasing share of the U.S. electricity supply is information and communications technology (ICT).  Currently it is estimated that the share of electric power consumption by ICT is between 5 and 9% of total power demand. Currently  ICT’s electricity consumption has plateaued.  Increasing load from growing Internet traffic and chip technologies has been balanced by increased efficiencies. But this may change in the next few years. Forecasts suggest that the total electricity demand by information and communications technology (ICT) will accelerate and that of the ICT pie data centres will take a larger slice. The chart shows an "expected case" projection which shows that ICT consumption of electricity could reach over 20% of total demand by 2030.  ICT requires a reliable and resilient power grid and will be one of the most important drivers to address the gap in investment in electric power.

A related aspect of the U.S. economy is a structural shift away from energy intensive industries such as heavy manufacturing. A measure of this is energy intensity which is the amount of energy that is required to produce one dollar of GDP.  In 1980 12,100 BTUs were required to create one dollar of GDP.  By 2014 this had declined to 6,100 BTUs per dollar. About 40 percent of the improvement in energy intensity was attributed to structural shifts, and the remainder to improved efficiency.

Gap in investment in electric power

Over the period 2011-2020 demand growth estimated at about 8% has been net with increased generation capacity. But for the period 2021-2040 the report projects increasing divergence between demand and capacity. If current trends are projected into the future the U.S. is facing a $208 billion (in 2019 dollars) shortfall by 2029 and a $338 billion shortfall by 2039 in what is needed to ensure a reliable energy system.  Most of this shortfall is attributed to under investment in generation and transmission. For transmission the largest challenge is not so much attracting investment in transmission, but that regulatory approval from all levels of government averages about 10 years for a new transmission line and can amount to 50% of the cost. Unlike Germany where the Bundesnetzagentur has national authority over long distance transmission lines, for bringing wind power from the North Sea to the south, for example, in the U.S. states are the top level regulatory authorities for transmission lines and a rule of thumb that has emerged is that to build a transmission line as rapidly as possible, don't cross state boundaries.  The demand for new transmission is exacerbated by the growing sources of renewable energy generation in the West that require new transmission lines to bring the power to the East and the Pacific Coast.

Impact on the economy

For consumers electricity system outages, voltage surges, and brownouts represent a direct cost to their households and businesses, and indirectly through impacts on the national economy. It is estimates that the cost to residential customers from each electric interruption event was $6.68 (2018 dollars).   This is about twice as high as it was five years earlier partly because or our increasing reliance on chip technologies in out daily lives.

When the grid fails businesses experience downtime, lost labour and productivity.  The report found that outages have the biggest impact in the manufacturing sector, costing almost $42,000 per event on average in 2008. As a result of the growing importance of ICT, data centres have become essential for many different industries. It is estimated that the average cost of an outage for a data centre increased from $505,000 in 2010 to $740,000 in 2016, or about $8,851 for every minute the electricity grid is disrupted.

Furthermore, disruptions to the grid add to costs and can result in U.S. manufactured products becoming less competitive in international markets. Between 2020 and 2039, it is estimated that the gap in investment in electric power will result in the loss of $271 billion in the value of U.S. exports.  In addition businesses and households will have to pay an additional $142 billion for foreign imports.

First step toward developing a national infrastructure map to enable smart investments

In its 2017 Infrastructure Report Card, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) assigned an overall grade of D+ to U.S. infrastructure. Addressing the problem of bringing national infrastructure up to a standard where it becomes an enabler of economic expansion rather then a drag on the economy is hindered by a lack of systematic information readily available to decision makers on the nation’s inventory of infrastructure assets, their location, and condition. Geospatial data and technology are key to providing an accessible platform making it possible for decision makers to have a uniform view of the nation's infrastructure.  Access to this data is constrained by a variety of factors including the lack of interoperability across systems and proprietary rights. Also, data is often not comparable.  Consequently, infrastructure challenges cannot be assessed in an integrated way or communicated effectively to the relevant decision-makers and constituencies.

Initiative to create a national infrastructure map

To begin to address this challenge National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA), Arizona State University (ASU), the American Geographical Society (AGS), and the National Academy of Construction (NAC) partnered to put on an event to convene leaders in public administration, infrastructure development, geography, geospatial, and data integration/open data. Entitled "Building a Shared Map of the Nation’s Infrastructure to Enable Smart Investments" , the event was held at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

By way of background NAPA is a congressionally chartered, non-partisan organization with a mandate to make government work better.  After the last presidential election NAPA decided to get out of Washington and talk to people in different levels of government across the country.  NAPA talked to local government people in Sacramento, Austin, Syracuse, and in Virginia and came to the conclusion that there is a need for a national strategy for infrastructure.  Infrastructure is local, but data with the granularity that is required is not available.  Data is uneven, is not integrated and is basically not interoperable.  The challenge is not technical, but one of leadership and effective public administration.  The need for a national strategy was reinforced by the Trump administration's infrastructure plan which appears to only provide federal support for state initiatives.

State of U.S. infrastructure

Introduced by Terry Gerton, President and CEO of NAPA and Jonathan Koppell, Dean, College of Public Programs, Arizona State University, the keynote was delivered by Greg DiLoreto, Former President, American Society of Civil Engineers, who provided an overview of the challenge from the perspective of the latest American Society of Civil Engineers report card.

• Aviation D : Two million passengers are served daily bu U.S. airports, but congestion is growing and it is expected that 24 of the top major airports may experience "Thanksgiving-peak traffic volume" at least one day a week.
• Bridges C+ : The U.S. has 614,387 bridges of which 9.1 % or 56,000 were structurally deficient in 2016.
• Dams D : 17% of U.S. dams or 15,498 have been identified as high-hazard potential dams.  Nationwide, 73 dams failed between 2010 and 2015.
• Drinking water D : There are an estimated 240,000 water main breaks in the U.S. every year and 6 billion gallons of treated drinking water are lost every year.
• Energy D+ : There were 3,571 power outages in the U.S. in 2016. Most electric power infrastructure has exceeded its life-expectancy.
• Hazardous waste D+ : There are over 18,000 hazardous waste sites in the U.S. 53% of the American population live within three miles of a hazardous waste site.
• Inland waterways D : The U.S. has 25,000 miles of inland waterways. 49% of vessels experience delays across the waterway systems.
• Parks and recreation D+ : Seven of ten Americans use park facilities on a regular basis. About $11.9 billion in maintenance has been deferred by the National Park Service because of underfunding.
• Rail B : The U.S. rail industry invested $27.1 billion in infrastructure in 2015. Rail was one of the brighter spots on the report card.
• Roads D : America's road are often congested resulting in Americans spending 6.9 billion hours, or 42 hours per person, stuck in traffic every year.  The The Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation (PIRE) estimates that over half of the deaths that occur on America's roadways can be blamed on poor road conditions.
• Schools D+ : There are about 100,000 schools in the U.S., serving 50 million K-12 students every day.  About a quarter of public schools are rated to be in fair or poor condition.
• Solid waste C+ : Americans generate 258 million tons of municipal solid waste every year of which 53% ends up in landfill.
• Transit D- : Transit in America is losing ridership in some regions, the result of chronic underfunding which has generated a $90 billion maintenance backlog.

The state of much U.S. infrastructure is poor because of chronic underfunding.  Greg pointed out that China spends more on its infrastructure than North America and Europe combined.  The only real bright spot in the 2017 report card is rail.  There are slight improvements in seven of the categories the ASCE tracks.  But in three sectors the ASCE's lower grade reflects a worsening assessment. Transit, solid waste and parks and recreation have seen a decline since the last report in 2013.  For 2016-2025 the ASCE estimates that there is an investment gap of about $ 2 trillion.  This is the difference between the actual allocated funding and what is needed. 

 

Substandard infrastructure reduces the income of every American.  The ASCE estimates that failure to act will result in a loss of $3.9 trillion to the U.S. economy, which translates to a loss of $3400 per year per family.  The ASCE estimates that to bring U.S. infrastructure up to an acceptable standard would require investment equivalent to a latte per day, or $4 per day, per family. 

 

To fund infrastructure properly requires increasing investment from the current 2.5% of GDP to 3.5%.  Greg emphasized that this will require increased investment from all levels of government and the private sector.  Greg suggested some ways to improve how infrastructure is funded. First, congress should raise the federal motor fuel tax.  This would increase funding of federal highways through the Highway Trust Fund.  Secondly,  the contribution from the federal government should be increased.  When the interstate highway system was built during Dwight D Eisenhower's administration, the federal government provided 90% of the funding.  Since then the funding ratio has been inverted.  Greg also emphasized that when highways are built, full lifecycle cost analysis needs to become standard practice.

 

The good news is the message about the importance of infrastructure to the economy is getting out.  A recent survey found that 87% of Americans think that the federal government should increase its investment in infrastructure.

A conceptual design software tool for rail ?

Software tools have become the standard for detailed design. Software has also made significant inroads into many aspects of construction. In contrast conceptual design still relies for the most part on "pencil and back of the envelope". It turns out that creating a successful conceptual design tool is significantly more challenging than detailed design.  Fifteen years ago Sketchup (now Trimble Sketchup) was introduced,  It was the first conceptual design tool, primarily for buildings, that attracted significant interest, but it wasn't enough to keep Google's interest who had acquired the software from the original developers.  In 2012 Autodesk Infrastructure Modeler (now Autodesk Infraworks) was introduced to address concept generation for linear features, primarily roads, but also rail.  Sketchup and Infraworks have attracted adherents, but they have not become the de facto standards that AutoCAD and Revit have become.  Now Bentley has introduced preliminary design design tools for rail and for road.  At the Year in Infrastructure 2017 (YII2017) in Singapore the results of an interesting exercise in conceptual design were reported.  Bentley staged the exercise to demonstrate how successfully their new conceptual design for rail tool is able to address the challenge of conceptual design.

The fastest growing transport mode is rail, which represents over 50 % of all transport projects currently under development. Rail is quite complex because it involves many other systems beyond the track system itself including communications and signaling, tunnel systems, electric power, heating and cooling, ventilation systems, stations, lifts/elevators and escalators, and others. In addition rail systems require efficient pedestrian and road systems to deliver passengers to and from rail stations.

To be successful, a conceptual design tool has to satisfy several requirements which together support what Bentley refers to as "conceptioneering".  Chief among these are that it has to be easy and fast to use, it must be rapid to learn, it must support rapid "optioneering", must be able to enforce design standards or rules, and must be capable of photo-realistically rendering design output. In addition it should be able to incorporate sustainable design, should be flexible enough to accommodate a range of existing conditions, and be able to generate deliverables that provide a foundation for detailed design.

Bentley's conceptual design tool for rail is called OpenRail ConceptStation. To develop some marketing capital among the engineering design community for this tool's ability to address the challenging requirements of conceptual design, Bentley came up with a novel idea. Six teams from well-known construction companies: Arup, BBMV, Costain, Kier Bam JV,Network Rail, and Mott MacDonald were each given two hours of training on the software. Using that training they were then asked to #designinaday a new mass transit system involving both rail and road in a real world community, Oakland, California. Their challenge was to design a mass transit rail system that was environmentally sympathetic, that connected with existing transport networks and community facilities, and included upgrades to existing road and rail infrastructure. Oakland suffers from the malaise that plagues many secondary urban areas in the U.S.: poor connectivity from existing rail and freeway networks to local roads; substantial walking distances from residential areas to local amenities, schools and hospitals; derelict and run-down areas; and high traffic congestion on both highways and local roads.

The winning design was submitted by Jake Sarjant, Serena Gosden, Hiu Chow, and Alicia Winter, who composed the Mott MacDonald team.  The winning team, comprising three civil engineers and one carbon and sustainability specialist, reported that in the context of the one day design competition they had found the software easy and fast to use and that they appreciated its ability to automatically ensure that designs met rule-driven standards.  Overall they found that it was well suited to optioneering and preliminary design processes.  An additional advantage that they found really helped was that it could be easily used with other software, in this case a carbon portal which made it possible to rapidly calculate emissions for alternative scenarios. They did report that hardware with high processing power was essential.

One third of Be Inspired Awards involve mapping, managing, rehabbing and replacing aging infrastructure

Worldwide there is increasing demand from building and infrastructure owners for service provision throughout the entire life cycle of a building or infrastructure. This represents a distinct break with the design/build tradition which has dominated construction for years.  At the Year in Infrastructure conference in London, a dominant theme was the growing recognition of the importance of full lifecycle management of infrastructure.  I found it symptomatic of the direction of the construction industry that fully one third of the 54 finalists for the annual Be Inspired Awards involved mapping, rehabbing, retrofitting, replacing and managing existing infrastructure.  This is my classification of these Be Inspired finalists;

Be Inspired Finalists

1 Full lifecycle workflow
2 Replacement
7 Renovation, rehab, retrofit
3 Mapping existing infrastructure
1 Historic site protection
5 Utility asset management

Full life cycle management

Patrick MacLeamy, Chairman of buildingSMART and CEO of HOK, has been pushing a very simple message about the U.S. construction industry for years.  Buildings are too expensive, are too inefficient to operate and maintain, and don't last long. As a result the U.S. construction industry is falling behind the Nordic countries, the U.K. and Singapore.  His solution is a full life cycle approach to construction.  Information has to be shared between owners, designers, contractors, operations and facilities management over the entire life cycle of the building or infrastructure.

Buildings

Over 50% of the cost of maintaining a building is operations and maintenance which is comprised of administration, maintenance and repairs, and restoration projects.  In several countries BIM has become essential for design and construction.  But many including the UK government believe that the full value of BIM can only be found during the operational life of the building where the majority of the life cycle costs occur.  The UK government has said that "the 20% saving refers to CapEx cost savings however we know that the largest prize for BIM lies in the operational stages of the project life-cycle".

Road and highway infrastructure

Highway construction is being transformed, due in part to the arrival of autonomous vehicles.  I've blogged about the startling (at least to traditional construction contractors) vision of the future of highway construction of the Chief of Surveys at the Oregon Department of Transportation (DoT) which targets the full lifecycle of highway assets from planning through design and construction and operation and maintainenance.  Some large construction projects are already being designed, built and operated and maintained with a full lifecycle perspective.

Utility infrastructure

Industry surveys report that up to 80 percent of a utility's resources and budget can be spent on operating and maintaining existing utility infrastructure.   Surveys also show that aging utility infrastructure is a top priority for most utilities.

Be Inspired Awards: Mapping, Monitoring, Rehabbing, and Replacing Infrastructure

One of the projects focused specifically on full lifecycle data management for highway construction.  The project, which was submitted by the Roads Directorate, Denmark, is for the $ 580 million 39-kilometer Herning – Holstebro highway which includes eight interchanges, four railway crossings, and five bridges.  The important achievement of the project was to create a digital workflow with meaningful requirements for sharing data among disciplines and across the entire project lifecycle.  The project was a finalist for the year's Be Inspired Award for Innovation in Roads.

Seven of the finalists' submissions involved renovation, rehabbing, and retrofit.  An outstanding example of a rehab project is the Bond Street to Baker Street Tunnel Remediation Project.  This is a London Underground  project in the UK.  It involved the replacement of the existing elastoplastic concrete lining of a 215-meter tunnel segment on the Jubilee Line with a spheroidal graphite iron lining - all while the line was running at full capacity.  This achievement won this year's Be Inspired Award for Innovation in Rail and Transit at the Year in Infrastructure 2015 conference.

Two of the finalists' projects involved replacement. An example of a replacement project was the Decommissioning and Replacement of Del Rio Bridge on US 20  this was carried out by Harper-Leavitt Engineering for the Idaho Transportation Department with minimum disruption to traffic.

Five of the finalists submitted projects that involved monitoring and extracting more value from existing transportation and utility infrastructure including rail, electric substations, electric and water and waste water distribution networks.

An example is a project submitted by SA Water which won the Be Inspired Innovation in Asset Performance Management Award.  The project involved integrating a hydraulic model and an operational analytics tool with network sensors to help them optimize their network.  These tools enable them to optimize chlorine dosing for different water sources (runoff, desalinization, rivers), minimize electric power costs, and improve water quality by mapping water age across their entire network. SA Water have not only been able to reduce their power bill by A$3 million, but also have cut their network operating costs by nearly a A$ million.  It has also resulted in improved water quality.  More fundamentally it has given them much greater insight into sources of revenue and the costs of various aspects of operating a water network.

Four of the finalist projects involved mapping and historic site protection.  An example is a gas main project submitted by Utility Mapping Services Inc.  This project involved creating a 3D map of underground utilities along a stretch of highway with complex utility infrastructure woven through dense commercial and residential areas with limited right-of-way and heavy traffic congestion.  Most critically from a safety perspective, there were no utility strikes on the project.  As a result the 3D model is credited with reducing construction time from 10 to 7 weeks.  Most importantly from a budget perspective, there were no change orders and the total cost of the project came in at 10-15% less than estimated in the absence of a 3D model.

Another example is a project submitted by the Singapore Land Authority (SLA).  Singapore intends to be the world's first "smart nation".  Part of this initiative involves developing a virtual Singapore that is intended to be the source of authoritative information about Singapore for use by government agencies.  The project involves capturing large amounts of data using multiple rapid mapping technologies including oblique imagery, airborne laser scanning, mobile laser scanning, and terrestrial scanning.  The data has been compiled into 3D city model in a single database repository which includes geometry, topology, semantics and appearance.  The database relies on CityGML, a standard managed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), for the database schema and for data exchange.  The total volume of data is more than 50 terabytes. The database is open and accessible to all government agencies. The most challenging part of the project has been the development of business processes and technologies for ensuring the data remains current.  At the the Year in Infrastructure conference in London the SLA the won the annual Be Inspired Award for Innovation in Government.

Smart cities market in Asia projected to grow rapidly through 2023

The Asia Pacific region is a primary driver of global urban development trends and is where some of the world's the most ambitious attempts to direct those trends to national development goals.  Increasingly, smart city technologies are seen as means to keep metropolitan and national economies competitive, and Asia Pacific companies are among the leaders in smart city solutions.

According to BSRIA, there are many smart city initiatives underway in Asia.

Some examples are Songdo IDB in Korea and Fujisawa in Japan - two smart cities already under development. China has 36 smart cities in development and a low carbon model city in Tianjin as well as 104 nationally selected smart city demonstration projects.  Singapore plans to become a smart nation by 2015.  Iskandar is Malaysia's first smart city.  After a devastating earthquake, Christchurch, New Zealand is being redeveloped as a smart city.

Two of these I am acquainted with because I visited the planning office for the DMIC the last time I was in India and  I met with several people involved with the Songdo project quite a few years ago in Korea.

Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor

In India the Delhi Mumbai Industrial Corridor (DMIC)is intended to be a smart city.  The Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor is a huge US$ 90 billion project 1,483 km in length between Delhi and Mumbai.  The objective of the DMIC is to create a base for economic development by providing  access to the best state-of-the-art infrastructure.

Songdo IDB

Songdo IBD is much smaller scale and has very different objectives.  It is a completely new city, being built from scratch on 1,500 acres of reclaimed land along Incheon's waterfront.  Songdo represents a serious attempt to create a sustainable, liveable city.  The city will be the first LEED certified district in Korea and the largest project outside North America to be included in the LEED ND (Neighborhood Development) Pilot Program.

Asian smart city market sizing

Navigant Research has released a report  that provides an assessment of smart city initiatives in Asia Pacific and profiles the key industry players in the region.  The report attempts to size the smart city market through 2023 by region (Australia/New Zealand, Greater China, India, Japan, Southeast Asia, and South Korea) and sector (smart energy, smart transportation, smart water, smart buildings, and smart government).

Navigant points out that the smart city market is a loose collection of several markets that are concerned with addressing urban problems in some way.  Navigant considers the smart city market to be comprized of five industry sectors: smart energy (and the smart grid), smart transportation, smart water, smart buildings, and smart government (including social services such as health, education, and security).

The Navigant report examines smart city drivers, policies, and development prospects in six distinct Asia Pacific regions: Australia/New Zealand, Greater China, including Hong Kong and Taiwan, India, Japan, Southeast Asia, including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, and Singapore; and South Korea.  Navigant estimated that these regions make up most of the addressable Asia Pacific market for smart city technology and include most of the cities that have active smart city development initiatives.

The uderlying trends driving the smart city market in Asia Pacific include continuing economic growth in China, India, and Southeast Asia; a focus on upgrading infrastructure in  China, India, Australia, and South Korea; and high expected levels of smart city technology adoption in Japan, Australia/New Zealand, and South Korea. Navigant estimates that the annual smart city technology investment will almost quadruple to $11.3 billion by 2023. This just represents the smart part of much larger smart city projects: smart sensors and meters, dedicated networks, cloud computing platforms, data analytics, and integrated systems and applications across different industries and sectors.

The smart energy and smart transportation sectors are the largest and most developed.  The smart government sector which includes security, health, and education applications is the fastest growing.  Smart water systems are currently a small part of the overall market, but will experience substantial growth to meet the needs of expanding cities in water-scarce areas such as India, Northern China, and Australia. Smart buildings will become an appreciable part of the overall $ 7 trillion construction market as the benefits of smart city technology become apparent and increasingly stringent energy intensity requirements are mandated throughout the region.

Maryland's Utility 2.0 proposes "utility of the future" business model

In response to a recommendation from the Governor’s Task Force on Grid Resiliency to “scope out a Utility 2.0 pilot proposal", the Energy Future Coalition (EFC) prepared recommendations for a smart grid pilot project that would address key business objectives including eliability and resiliency, residential customer empowerment, large customer flexibility, infrastructure upgrading, a regulatory framework for the smart grid, and a new utility business model that would keep utilities financially viable even as they delivered less electric power.  EFC's "Utility 2.0" recommendations include

• Utility investment in an interoperable, integrated suite of smart-grid technologies, for the utility's own system, but also on customer sites.  This would include time-of-use rates, automated demand response, conservation voltage regulations and other technolgies.
• Allowing utilities to provide low-cost loans to consumers to finance new technology to be repaid by customers on their utility bills.
• Automated system sectionalizing and reclosing (self-healing networks)
• Support for micro-grids in areas where customers could safely provide their own energy during an outage.
• Utility-controlled vehicle battery charging.

Utility of the future

But the key recommendation is a proposal for a new utility business model that would decouple utility revenue from selling electric power.  EFC is proposing that a set of five performance parameters measured through objective metrics would be used to vary the utility’s rate of return on equity by up to one percent above or below the current rate of return determined by the regulator. The performance parameters would be: cost, reliability, customer service, adoption of smart grid technologies and services, and support for alternate energy.

EFC is proposing that the relative weighting of these five factors would be determined by customers’ own rankings of their relative importance. This would provide utilities with a geographically detailed understanding of their customers’ priorities, and a direct incentive to serve those priorities. It would also encourage a potentially mutually beneficial utility-customer dialog.

Economic impact of weather-related power outages estimated at $18 billion to $33 billion annually

The White House has just released a report The Economic Benefits of Increasing Electric Grid Resilience to Weather Outages that was prepared by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers and the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, with assistance from the White House Office of Science and Technology. 

The U.S. power grid connects more than 144 million customers over 450,000 miles of high voltage transmission lines to 5,800 major power plants with a total capacity of roughly a thousand GW. The grid not only supplies power to residential, commercial and industrial customers, but 99 % of all U.S. Department of Defense installations located within the United States rely on the commercial electric grid for power.

Severe weather is the single leading cause of power outages in the United States. Outages caused by severe weather  account for 58 percent of outages observed since 2002 and 87 percent of outages affecting 50,000 or more customers. In all, 679 widespread outages occurred between 2003 and 2012 due to severe weather.

Economic impact of outages caused by extreme weather events

It estimates that between 2003 and 2012 weather-related outages are estimated to have cost the U.S. economy an inflation-adjusted annual average of $18 billion to $33 billion. But annual costs fluctuate significantly from a high in 2008 of $40 billion to $75 billion to a low in 2007 of $5 to 10 billion.  The financial impact of outages includes lost output and wages, spoiled inventory, delayed production, inconvenience and the cost of restarting industrial operation.

(In constant 2012 dolllars)

2012 $27 - $52 billion

2011 $19 - $36

2010 $13 - $25

2009  $8 - $14 

2008 $40 - $75

2007  $5 - $10

2006 $23 - $43

2005 $14 - $27

2004 $14 - $27

2003 $14 - $26

Aging transmission grid

Projected construction of transmission lines remains well below the rates experienced between 1960 and 1990. Seventy percent of the grid's transmission lines and power transformers are now over 25 years old and the average age of power plants is over 30 years.

Climate change likely to increase extreme weather events

The IPCC and other scientific sources forecast the increased probablility of more severe hurricanes, winter storms, heat waves, floods and other extreme weather events being the primary impact of global climate change.  The incidence of both major power outages and severe weather is increasing. Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration show that weather-related outages have increased significantly since 1992.

Grid modernization (aka smart grid)

In June 2011, President Obama released A Policy Framework for the 21st Century Grid which set out a strategy for modernizing the electric grid. The initiative is aimed at applying smart grid technologies to increase the grid’s efficiency, reliability, and resilience.  This involves hardening the grid to make it less vulnerable to weather-related outages and recovery/reconstitution to reduce the time it takes to restore power after an outage occurs.

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.