Between the Poles

Shortage of skilled trade workers drives prefabrication

At the Fall BIMForum/BuildCon conference in Dallas two presentations about actual prefabrication experience - for data centres and for large automotive plants - both mentioned shortage of skilled labour as an important motivation for turning to prefabrication for construction projects.  In addition to reducing onsite labour requirements, Improved quality, greater safety, faster project delivery, and in some cases reduced costs were mentioned as the key benefits of prefab.

A compelling presentation on the market drivers for and benefits of prefabrication for data centre infrastructure was given by Matthew Englert, Vice President at Rosendin Electric and President, Modular Power Solutions and Chris Crosby, CEO of Compass Datacenters. Data centers, which used to be defined in terms of servers and racks of servers, are now defined by containers of servers. Timing is of the essence for building data centres.  Compass advertises "We’ll deliver your dedicated data center in six months from breaking ground on a pad ready site or we’ll pay you $100,000."

The electric power requirements of data centres are reckoned in the hundred of kilowatts and even megawatts. A significant portion of the cost of a data centre is the electric power rooms to convert and manage the power for the servers and other equipment in data centres.

Both Chris and Matthew said that an important motivation for turning to prefabrication for the power rooms is the decline in the number and quality of the skilled tradesmen required to build power rooms. Older and more highly skilled trades people are retiring and they are not being replaced by younger people. This is partly a North American problem because there are limited apprenticeship programs. Perhaps because in the past skilled trades people were simply imported from Europe.

There are other advantages to prefabrication. It is easier to attract skilled workers to work in a plant under a roof with the amenities of factory environment as opposed to working outside often in inclement weather.  Weather is always a risk on a construction site.  Another advantage of a factory environment is safety. Statistics show that injuries are less in a prefab environment compared to a construction site. Quality is another factor that is easier to control in a prefab plant.

For data centre power rooms the prefab "skids" built by Modular Power Systems are huge weighing 60,000 to 80,000 pounds and requiring large flatbed trucks to deliver from the prefab plant to the construction site.  You can watch the construction of a couple of data centres at the Compass site and the power rooms are prefabbed offsite and delivered on flatbed trucks.  They are offloaded onto concrete pads that have been prepared in advance.  The process is very efficient and reduces the congestion of trades people at the construction site. 

Chris was blunt in his assessment of the appropriateness of existing BIM software for designing data centres. His perspective is that BIM software is no better than traditional CAD. The problem is that the level of detail (LOD) currently supported by BIM software is simply not detailed enough. He argues that if you are going to use 3D design software then mechanical design tools such as Solidworks are better than BIM tools.  He believes that BIM software is ripe for disruption. Designing buildings and other infrastructure in the future is going to require new design tools and that is going to require significant investment in new technology. This is a very similar sentiment to Greg Luth's perspective on the advantages of high definition building information modeling (HD BIM) for structural engineering of large manufacturing plants such as the Tesla Gigafactory in Nevada.

Based on his experience Chris believes that prefab always costs more the first time. Repetition is required to bring the costs down to where prefab is cheaper than stick built. Therefore Chris and Matthew are convinced that the next step is to move beyond prefab to manufacturing.

General Motors came to similar conclusions based on their experience in using Epsilon Industries prefabbed utility system upgrades for four GM automotive plants.  As presented by Jeffrey Johnson, Manager, Process Energy Initiatives, Bob Stevenson, Senior Vice President, Ghafari Associates, Chris Wiederick, President, Epsilon Industries, and Christopher Hofe, Project Director, Barton Malow Company, the problems that encouraged the GM team to prefab most of the utility components were a shortage of skilled trades and wanting to avoid congestion resulting from many trades tripping over each other at construction sites.  They estimated that prefabbing reduced their costs by about 20% and enabled them to deliver completed utility plant for the automotive factories in eight months instead of eighteen. For example, a complete chilled water system including a safety system and weighing 85 000 lbs was manufactured in Kingston, Ontario, trucked down and and was up and running in 2.5 weeks. Also since quality assurance for the chiller was completed in the factory in Kingston, the handover was virtually instantaneous compared to the prolonged period required for a stick built chiller.

For GM shortage of labour is a major problem and was a major motivator of the decision to use prefab components from Epsilon Industries.  The GM team repeatedly emphasized that they didn't know how they could have staffed stick build projects at these four sites.  Onsite congestion at a construction site is also a major problem that is relieved by prefabbing components.  Work conditions on a construction site are often poor because of bad weather. Weather is always a risk that can hold up a stick built project.  They also reported that supervising in a factory environment is much easier compared to a construction site.  GM found it easier to recruit labour for a factory environment and they was able to retain better quality labour, people who wanted to settle down, as opposed to the high proportion of transients typical of construction projects.

Geoeducation for engineers and skilled workers

At the last GoGeomatics Social in Ottawa Jonathan Murphy gave an insightful presentation on Geospatial Tech in use for Oil & Gas production in Alberta.  Jonathan related his experiences in Northern Alberta preparing terrain for seismic surveys.  The is almost entirely muskeg and surveying is only feasible in winter when temporary frozen roads are used to move and setup survey equipment. The seismic survey preparation process in this terrain involves several steps (and some new vocabulary); tramping, mulching, slashing, hand cutting, surveying, laying out, and picking up. 

Geospatial technology is used in all aspects of field operations.  Everyone carries a Garmin GPS in their coat.  Equipment are equipped with mobile phones which also can report geolocation.    Geospatial is used to track the location of field personnel and heavy equipment. The surveyors use their own highly accurate survey equipment to survey the location of all bore holes for both source (explosives) and receiver grid (seismic recorders).  Mapping is highly dynamic with new ice roads and new source and receiver bore holes  being created every day.  Tools such as OziExplorer, ArcGIS 10.1, and Microsoft SQL Server are used for elementary mapping applications.  Jonathan reported that the applications hardly scratched the surface of geospatial technology.  For example, a lot of manual work in updating and maintaining the maps could be eliminated by using basic GIS technology such as buffers. 

One of the challenges that Jonathan identified is that the geospatial applications are used by skilled staff who are experienced in seismic surveying, winter drilling programs, wildfire management, and road and facility construction, but have minimal education in geospatial technology.  Basically the staff have learned enough GIS "on the fly" to do their jobs.  But from Jonathan's talk it was readily apparent that GIS could be leveraged to do much more.

This is a global problem.  Engineers and skilled workers in many sectors have received minimal or no education or training in geospatial technology.  I remember a India Geospatial Forum in Hyderabad in 2014, where I moderated a session on electric power.  It turned out to be an absolutely fascinating conversation with a wide range of speakers representing different aspects of the Indian power industry.  One of them was Arup Ghosh, Chief Technology Officer at Tata Power Delhi Distribution Ltd (TPDDL) who presented an insightful view into implementing GIS from the perspective of a private utility.  (Only 5% of India's power industry is private, but the private sector seems to be leading a transformation of the Indian power industry in a number of areas.)  One of the major implementation challenges that TPDDL experienced was finding and recruiting skilled GIS professionals.  The GIS group at TPDDL has about 60 field personnel and 18 analysts and support staff.  None of these has an educational background in GIS.  Twelve are electrical engineers and the rest are people with electric power experience.  All have learned GIS "on the fly".  According to Mr Ghosh the major problem is that Indian engineering facilities do not include GIS in their curriculum.  I don't think this problem is restricted to Indian engineering and technical schools.

In the U.S. in response to the demand for computer savvy technicians, a growing number of higher education institutions, especially community colleges are customizing programs to train electrical power workers to handle both conventional  electric power and renewable and smart grid networks.  For example, Richmond Community College (RCC) in Hamlet, N.C. is teaming up with area utilities to develop a two-year associate's degree in utility substation and relay technology. The college plans to provide training for students in operating and maintaining the current and next generation fleet of  substations.  Apparently the idea for the education initiative began when Progress Energy approached the school with concerns that in the normal process new inexperienced hires required up to five years of training to become relay technicians, which Progess Energy saw as too protracted a process to keep up with the rate at which experienced workers are retiring.

As another example, York Technical College in Rock Hill, South Carolina has partnered with Duke Energy and other area power companies to develop a nine-week certificate program for specialized electrical line workers.

Electric power utilities experiencing increased employee turnover

I have blogged extensively over the past few years about some of the workforce challenges that utilities especially in the developed economies are facing.  These are often related to the aging workforce and in some countries to a shrinking workforce.

I have blogged about the shrinking workforce in countries around the world like Japan and Germany, where there have been declining populations.   The shrinking workforce is acting as a brake on the German economy.  Recently Germany liberalized its immigration laws and for the first time in a decade the population of Germany is actually increasing.

In the U.S. because of its policy of encouraging immigration, the shrinking workforce is not the result of population decline, but the result of a decreasing participation rate.   One explanation for the decline is the aging workforce. Boomers are retiring at an increasing rate.  This has created a serious problem for many utilities where it has been estimated that over half the work force will be eligible to retire in the next few years.  But there is another trend that tends to mitigate this, the percentage of older workers who remain on the job post-retirement is trending upwards.  For the age group 65 to 74 the proportion of workers still working is nearly twice what it was in the 1990s.  In the long term the problem remains, finding young workers to replace the older workers when they retire.

A recent report from PricewaterhouseCooper's (PwC) Human Resource Services practice based on data from 29 utilities representing nearly a quarter of a million employees identifies some very interesting  workforce trends, some new, in the power utility industry.

Increasing turnover

First of all the PwC research indicates that utilities are losing workers at an accelerating rate. The voluntary turnover rate increased by a full percentage point between 2010 and 2012, and for high performers and early tenured employees the rate of separation was especially high.  

The research also shows that the turnover of utility employees in their first year was significantly higher in 2012 than in 2011 pointing to a retention problem. As the economy continues to strengthen PwC anticipates that first-year turnover will continue to increase. This is a new experience for many utilities because in the past working for a utility was seen as a job for life.  With the new skill sets for smart grid and releated technologies requiring increasing IT skills, utilities are having to compete with other sectors for IT savvy workers.  PwC reports that other industries have been experiencing intense competition for workers for some time and are better equiped to attract and retain new talent.

Accelerating executive retirement

The PwC research also found that while the number of employees currently eligible or due to become eligible over the next 3-5 years for retirement appears to have stabilized, retirement eligibility rates for executives have continued to increase. From 2011 to 2012 there was a 50% jump in the number of executives currently eligible for retirement.

Perpetuating a culture that discourages innovation

PwC found that by forcing older employees either to delay retirement or to remain in place as contractors, the recession has helped perpetuate a conservative culture that has inhibited innovation in the industry.  Older, experienced workers are unlikely to push for changes when they have only a few more years until retirement and in a aheavily regulated industry there is little incentive for these workers to innovate because of the potential of creating risk for themselves and their employer.

Critical knowledge loss

There is also a tendency for older utilities workers to communicate information orally rather than documenting it in a database.  When these workers leave, critical knowledge leaves with them. This impacts productivity and creates risk for the utility, especially when they leave before replacements can be effectively on-boarded typically through a mentoring process.

Retention

Younger workers tend to be much more tech savvy.  This is critical for the electric power industry as it moves toward the smart grid.  As I have blogged about frequently, younger workers' expectations with respect to technology are also higher.  Sitting a younger worker who has been brought up on 3D technology down with a CAD application to create and print a 2D paper construction drawing risks losing him or her to more technically progressive utilities or to other industries.

Challenges

PwC suggests that there three key areas where there is potential for improvement:

1. Knowledge Retention & Succession Planning
2. Operations
3. Technology & Processes

Knowledge transfer

PwC recommend that utilities organizations need to adapt rapidly to these technology, resource and demographic trends.  In particular, they need to evolve an efficient and effective approach to succession planning and knowledge transfer.  PwC forecasts that the rate of process and technology change is likely to accelerate as smart grid adoption picks up.  It also projects that a culture of continous improvement will become more typical in the utility sector than it has been in the past.

Operations

Operational effectiveness is critical for utilities, but with a static or even decereasing workforce, productivity has to improve and continue to improve. This means the adoption of new technology.  PwC points out that an ageing workforce, deeply knowledgeable but prone to resist change, can significantly inhibit operational improvements unless these workers are fully integrated participants in the change effort.  In my experience older workers can be just as and even more enthusiastic about change if they can see that it simplifies  their work, eliminates tedious redundant and manual paper-based processes, and improves the quality of the final deliverable. 

Technology & Processes

Driven by goals of improving productivity and improving the quality of their decision making through data-driven analytics, utilities are recognizing the importance of understanding their core business processes and implementing standardized, streamlined IT systems for these processes.  PwC recommends that as a first step these processes need to be documented (before the knowledge about them walks out the door) to safeguard core institutional knowledge as part of change management practices.

Are utilities prepared for managing "big data" and analytics

At the Second Annual Summit on Data Analytics for Utilities in Toronto, Brad Williams, Vice President of Utilities Industry Strategy at Oracle, presented recent results from a survey of of 151 North American senior-level utilities executives with smart meter programs.  The report Utilities and Big Data: Accelerating the Drive to Value is the result of the second annual study conducted by Oracle Utilities in their Big Data series.  They survey showed that the industry as a whole still hasn't really taken advantage of the data that is available, but there is a small group of early adopters who are pushing the envelope.

* Big data preparedness: Utilities are more prepared to manage the huge volumes of data that smart grids are capable of generating in 2013 than they were one year ago, but the majority still say they are unprepared.  This year 17 % of respondents said they are completely prepared compared to 9 % in 2012.

* Mutiple data sources:  In addition to smart meters 95% of utilities gather useful data from other sources such as outage management systems (68 %), SCADA (58 %), customer data and feedback (54%), alternative energy sources (12 %), social media (11 %), weather-monitoring systems (11 %), wholesale market data (11 %), and other grid equipment (11 %).

* Using smart grid data to improve customer service: How are utilities leveraging smart grid data to improve customer service today?

1. Provide customers their usage patterns (57%)
2. Implement demand-response programs (47%)
3. Establish new pricing programs (43%)
4. Target customers for new programs (40%)
5. Alert customers with usage spikes (26%)

The average utility has implemented just two of these measures.

* Strategic decision making: More respondents report using information for strategic decision making.  In 2013 11 % said they were using  smart meter and other data for  strategic decision making.  This is an increase from 4 % in 2012.

* Skills gap: 62 % of survey respondents said they have a "big data" skills gap.  This is a very serious problem. The preferred solution according to respondents is retraining existing employees. 

In addition to Brad many of the other speakers at the Data Analytics Summit mentioned this problem.

* Confidence in analytics: 70 % of utilities said they expect predictive analytics to improve revenue protection.  61 % saw analytics reducing asset maintenance costs.  55% expect an ROI on implementing analytics of less than 5 years.

* Benefits from analytics:  What utility processes are expect to benefit the most from predictive analytics?

1. Improving revenue protection (70%)
2. Reducing asset maintenance costs (61%)
3. Reducing asset replacement costs (57%)
4. Reducing infrastructure costs (54%)
5. Analyzing distributed generation (50%)
6. Reducing generation planning costs (41%)
7. Reducing generation operations costs (39%)
8. Assessing electric vehicle impact (26%)

Applying analytics to smart grid data

Brad outlined a number of areas which represent relatively low hanging fruit where significant benefits from applying analytics to smart grid data can be expected.  Brad emphasized the importance of spatial analytics because many if not all of these of these have a geospatial dimension.

1. Reducing non-technical losses - this has been one of the first areas where analytics has been applied by many utilities.  The payback is typically significant and immediate.
2. Targeting demand response - prioritizing customers for energy conservation and demand response programs using geospatial techniques such as energy density mapping
3. Distribution operations planning -  target customers with high peak load to help them reduce peaks by staggering powering on ventilation, heating/cooling and lighting
4. Transformer load management - identify transformers that are overloaded or underutilized
5. QA/QC data quality - improve the quality of connectivity information including phase
6. Voltage correlation - use analytics to link meters to transformers including phase
7. Energy modeling - analyzing usage patterns including including unmetered usage from street lights and other devices
8. Voltage deviation - identifying transformers with voltage deviating from the rated voltage by 2-3% or more
9. Geospatial outage frequency analysis - analyzing outage patterns geographically
10. Predictive analytics for electric vehicle adoption - identifying PEV owners and predicting demand pattterns to ensure adequate transformer capacity  is in place

A very interesting point that Brad made is that there are really two types of analytics.  Measuring and analyzing things we know - for example, the key performance indicators that are already on many dashboards - and the things we don't know.  The latter is where we can find significant opportunities for improving performance or reducing the frequency and duration of outages where we really don't have any preconceived notion of what to expect.  This is an area where different and  more sophisticated analytical and visualization tools for analyzing relationships and looking for patterns can be very valuable.

Smart grid requires the next generation of convergence: real-time, geospatial and network analytics

At the Space-Time Insight annual SI World conference this year, Dave Haak of Accenture gave a riveting overview of the research that Accenture has conducted on smart grid deployment including a survey of utility executives in Europe and North America.  Some fundamental questions that Dave was able to shed some light on are

1. Is smart grid here to stay or is it a passing fad ? 
2. Is smart grid expected to reduce the cost of maintaining the grid in 2030 ?
3. How do you manage the complexity of the modern distribution grid ?
4. Is the electric power utility industry entering a disruptive phase ?

Managing the smart grid

Dave discussed the complexity of the modern grid which has to support distributed generation including intermittent renewable energy sources like solarPV and wind, energy storage, PEVs,  and potentially microgrids.   Monitoring and managing the modern complex grid is a challenge that traditional tools that have been used for the current grid such as traditional GIS are simply not capable of.  A new "converged" approach that tightly integrates GIS, intelligent grid analytical tools using grid topology (what's connected to what) and visualization, all in real-time, is required.  It needs to integrate traditional IT systems (GIS, CIS, work management, financials, and meter data management) and traditional OT systems (outage management, distribution management, SCADA, and energy management).  Accenture points out that Other industries such as telecommunications, retail and banking have gone through a similar disruptive phase and have applied IT including embedded analytics to transform their business processes to improve productivity.

Is smart grid here to stay ?

98% of respondents in Accenture's executive survey said that smart grid is a natural extension of the ongoing upgrading of the grid.  In other words this is not a flash-in-the-pan fad that will go away.  The evolution of grid operations is going to involve a broad change to how utilities are organized and how they operate.  Accenture predicts that it will require a major overhaul of utility organizations and will affect operational groups, as well as information technology and security.

Staffing the next generation utility

It also requires development of new skills, either through hiring new staff or retraining existing staff.  This is a key part of the challenge.  I have blogged on multiple occasions about the challenge facing the electric power industry as the older generation retires and a younger, but inexperienced workforce takes their place.  Accenture reports that utilities are finding it difficult to staff their workforces with the necessary combination of power engineering and IT skills.

Grid reliability and resilience

As the world becomes more dependent on IT solutions in our daily lives from point of sales to hospital admissions, reliability of the electric power network has become increasingly important.  A few years ago 40% of U.S. power went to chip technologies.  By 2015 this is expected to reach 60%.  Reliability of electric power supply varies significantly among countries.  For example, the duration of outages (SAIDI) in the U.S. is greater than the UK, France, or Italy and much greater in the than Germany.  I was not happy to see that Canada's average outage duration is over twice that of the U.S and 20 times that of Germany.

A major challenge facing utilities as they move to the smart grid is how to achieve better reliability (and reduced emissions) with less cost.  Accenture asked executives whether smart grid would reduce the cost of maintaining the grid in 2030.  72 % of respondents said that that expected that the costs of upgrading/maintaining the grid will be less in 2030 as a result of the adoption of smart grid technologies. 

Smart grid business drivers in different regions

There are significant differences between different regions of the world in the priority business drivers for smart grid deployment. For example, in Brazil and India the primary driver is non-technical losses.  According to the Accenture survey in North America the primary drivers for smart grid are improving grid reliability and outage response.  In Europe where climate change is taken more seriously, distributed generation and support for renewables are priorities.

Increasing competition from microgeneration

Accenture's view is that the industry is experiencing a disruptive phase.  Technologies such as distributed generation, storage, EVs and microgrids have the potential to impact competition and regulatory models in a fundamental way over the longer term.

In every part of the world decreasing solar PV prives combined with cheaper storage are beginning to displace centralized generation. This is changing the economics of the traditional electric power business model based on the existing, centralized power networks.  Accenture argues that if consumers are given a cost-effective option to move off the grid (for example, grid parity of coupled solarPV and storage), utility revenues will be at risk.

Utilities under threat from PV and other microgeneration technologies will need to look at novel strategies to develop new sources of revenue and integrate new distributed  generation capacity while maintaining quality and security of supply. 

23% of respondents said that they expected their utility would have a significantly different business model by 2030.  For example, incentivizing consumers with microgeneration capacity to stay on the grid or developing and maintaining microgrid solutions on behalf of consumer groups.

Other areas of competition

The Accenture 2013 Executive survey indicates a substantial degree of competition from new entrants is expected even within the next 5 years.  Respondents saw increased competition in the following areas:

• 85% - beyond the meter energy efficiency and demand response
• 85% - distributed generation
• 85% - data-related services (using customer electric power usage data). 
• 67% - demand-side aggregation
• 58% - PEVs and charging infrastructure
• 57% - smart meter services
• 52% - microgrid development and operations
• 48% - Embedded (distribution) energy storage
• 46% - Power electronics h/w and services
• 43% - Last-mile deployment

While increased competition in areas such as distributed generation and demand aggregation is widely expected, respondents expect competition to increase even in the core distribution business including embedded energy storage, power electronics hardware and services and last-mile network deployment.

The changes that are required are fundamental and a majority of the respondents said that legislative and regulatory change will be required.

Data management

The telecommunications, insurance, and other industries view IT as a strategic asset, whereas utilities still treat it as a cost centre.  Utilities are under invested in data management technology which does not position them well for the rapidly increasing volume of data and the competitive environment that they are beginning to experience.  96% of the utility executives that Accenture surveyed said that data management will be critical or important for managing the complexity of the network. Some industries are taking data management very seriously.  A survey of 600 companies revealed that 66% of them have appointed Chief Data Officers.

Convergence and Analytics

The area where respondents saw the most value from analytics was grid operations (96%). Being able to use visualization and analytical tools to monitor and manage complex modern networks which include distributed generation, storage, PEVs, and potentially microgrids is the first priority in both Europe and North America.  This where the next generation of "converged" analytical tools that integrate GIS,  artificial intelligence, grid analytical models that take account of network topology, and visualization tools and can operate in a real-time data streaming environment are required.

Outage management (93% in NA) and asset management (92%) were the next priorities in NA.  In Europe the next priorities were asset management (92%) and volt/var analytics (83%).

In 2009 12% of the companies surveyed were using predictive analytics.  This had risen to 33% in 2012.  But the same year 60% of internal customers surveyed said that they wanted predictive analytics.

In the specific area of AMI, Accenture's analysis suggests that the value of using smart grid analytics to transform operating results conservatively could approach  $40-$70 per meter per year.  Financial benefits of this order provide a strong motivation for companies to use modern grid analytics to drive change in business processes.

Can crowdsourced land cover data be used as an authoritative data source ?

At this year’s AGI GeoCommunity '13 Conference in Nottingham, Laura Kinley gave a very germane presentation about her research on using crowdsourced data as a source of authoratative land cover data.  Land cover data is used for a variety of purposes incluidng socio-economic for monitoring how land is used and determing policy and ecological purposes such as ecosystem services, climate change modeling, environmental management and as an ecosystem health indicator.

The most common techniques for large scale land use monitoring are automated using satellite and aerial imagery.  But automated methods can be unreliable for a number of reasons including misclassification because of poor or the lack of ground truth data for training, inconsistent nomenclatures, and out-of-data information because of the cost of regular maintenance and updating.

The questions Laura is attempting to answer are

• What kind of information do existing crowd contributions contain?
• Do existing crowd data sources contain good quality land cover information? (in terms of coverage, temporal and attribute accuracy)
• Is it viable to use crowdsourced input in combination with authoritative Centre for Ecology and Hydrography (CEH) land cover data?

The methodolgies she applies as part of her research include semantic analysis of textual data, determination of spatial and attribute agreement between crowdsourced content and official land cover data.  She also considered data density and temporal appropriateness.

The two main crowd data sources are OpenStreetMap and Geograph, both of which collect information on land coverage.  One of the very interesting results of a semantic analysis is that OpenStreetMap is very consistent in its use of classifications.  Only 16 land coverage classifications are used by OpenStreetMap as opposed to 369 unique terms used by Geograph.  This highlights an important problem which is the low level of standardization in the terms used to classify land coverage and in how data is collected and classified.

An important advantage of crowdsourced data is that is generally much more timely than the official CEH data.  For example, 56.8% of Geograph data was captured and uploaded since January, 2011 and only 1.8% of Geograph grid squares predate the most recently available offical CEH survey date.  There is the question of whether this level of timeliness can be maintained.

Her general findings to date have been that currently the lack of standardization is a major problem that prevents crowdsourced data from achieving and maintaining the necessary level of quality that the Ordnance Survey requires for authoratative data sources.

What Laura sees as needed are methods of encouraging enthusiasts to develop and adopt standards for collecting and classifying land cover data.  But she recognizes that there is a tradeoff between restricting projects to achieve the necessary level of quality and encouraging user led innovation. She also suggests that making crowdsourced projects more aligned with professional practices would enable professional bodies / businesses to provide feedback.

Future work Laura outlined includes streamlining the process of obtaining and testing crowdsourced data and standardizing the terms used by crowd sourced projects by mapping common user terms onto official definitions.

Why is the workforce shrinking in the U.S. ?

I have blogged about the shrinking workforce in countries around the world like Japan and Germany, where there have been declining populations.   The shrinking workforce is acting as a brake on the German economy.  The German Chamber of Industry and Commerce DIHK  estimates that German economic growth has been reduced by one percent by the labour shortage and that the problem is getting worse.  Recently Germany liberalized its immigration laws and for the first time in a decade the population of Germany is actually increasing.

In the U.S. because of its policy of encouraging immigration, the shrinking workforce is not the result of population decline, but the result of a decreasing participation rate.  The labour participation rate is the percentage of the population that is employed or actively looking for work.  In the U.S. as a result of increasing numbers of women entering the workforce and increasing longevity, the participation rate increased from the 1960s until about 2000 when it reached about 67%.

Since 2000, however, the participation rate has declined.  One explanation for the decline is the aging workforce. Boomers are retiring at an increasing rate.  This has created a serious problem for many utilities where over half the work force will be eligible to retire in the next few years.  But there is another trend that tends to mitigate this, the percentage of older workers who remain on the job post-retirement is trending upwards.  For the age group 65 to 74 the proportion of workers still working is nearly twice what it was in the 1990s.  In the long term the problem remains, finding young workers to replace the older workers when they retire.

Massive open on-line courses potentially transforming education

I have blogged frequently on the workforce challenges facing the utility industry resulting from accelerating retirement among engineers and skilled workers and by the technology transformation  associated with the smart grid.  Community colleges in partnership with utiltiies have been the quickest to respond to this challenge.  But universities, encouraged by program like the IEEE PES Scholarship Plus program, are responding as well, though they are also facing an aging workforce problem.  Now something has appeared on the horizon in education that may provide a way of ramping up more rapidly to the challenge of training the next generation of engineers and skilled workers.

From October 10th to December 18th 2011 Stanford offered a free, on-line course, "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence", open to anyone, that  attracted 160'000 students.   The course was taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig based on Stanford's introductory Artificial Intelligence course.  Thrun led the development of the Google self-driving car.  Norvig worked at NASA and is the co-author of a widely used college textbook on artifical intelligence.  The term applied to this type of on-line education is massive open on-line courses (MOOCs).

There were a number of precursors.  The one explicitly referenced by the Stanford instructors is the Khan Academy that offers videos to instruct anyone in a wide range of topics including arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, probability and statistics, differential equations, Cosmology and astronomy, organic chemistry, finance and capital markets, microeconomics, macroeconomics, computer science, healthcare and medicine, drawing, programming Basics, animation, history,  american Civics, and art history.

The open online course that I have watched over and over again is Open Yale's Roman Architecture given by Professor Diana E.E. Kleiner of Yale University and available for free on iTunes.

In August 2012, the online education company Coursera began offering free college courses.  According to the New York Times, by January 2013, it had attracted a million users, growing at a rate outpacing even Facebook and Twitter.  There are at least three other startups (Udemy, Udacity, edX) attempting to do the same thing.

The MOOC approach is getting some acceptance among traditional universites and colleges.  The American Council on Education, which represents the presidents of 1800 U.S. accredited, degree-granting institutions, which include two- and four-year colleges, private and public universities, and nonprofit and for-profit entities. has recommended that colleges could grant credit for some of the free classes from Coursera.

Increasing international competition for highly skilled labour

I have blogged about the shrinking workforce in countries around the world like Japan and Germany, but also in other West European countries.   The shrinking workforce is acting as a brake on the German economy.  The German Chamber of Industry and Commerce DIHK  estimates that German economic growth has been reduced by one percent by the labour shortage and that the problem is getting worse.

The Bundestag recently adopted a bill to implement the 2009 EU directive on highly qualified employment. The "Blue Card" is intended as a new, unbureaucratic way for graduates and people with similar qualifications from outside the EU to enter Germany's labour market.  Austria and Gernmany have also opened the door to skilled immigrants from the east European countries that joined the EU in 2004.  As a result last year the population of Germany increased for the first time since 2003.

North America and Australia would be facing the same demographics if it weren't for immigration.  Canada and Australia allow more immigrants in annually on a per capita basis than any other major countries.  For the past seven years Canadian  immigration levels have been at about 240,000 to 265,000 new permanent residents annually..

Many countries are now competing for highly educated and skilled international workers.  As an example, in a recent interview Steven Harper, the Prime Minister of Canada, said that Canada is changing its immigration to shift the immigration system away from accepting people on a first-come, first-serve basis to one where potential immigrants are chosen according to how they can benefit Canada.  The old system operated on receiving applications and processing them in order.  The new system is designed to prioritize potential immigrants depending on the skills that the Canadina economy needs.

For example, the Canadian Experience Class program is designed to attract people who have already proven they can integrate into Canadian society and meet its labour-market needs.  This program fast-tracks permanent residency applications for skilled foreign workers and graduate students who have already spent time in Canada on temporary permits or student visas and can demonstrate they are proficient in either English or French.  Before it was created, highly skilled outsiders could not apply to become permanent residents from within Canada. Under the new program, applicants can apply from within Canada and expect a quick decision, normally within one year.  The top three countries of origin under this program are China, India and the Philippines and the program is the fastest-growing category of newcomers to Canada.

Shortage of engineers predicted in the UK

In the UK the median age of Chartered engineers rises 10 years for every 14 that elapse.  A new report from the Royal Academy of  Engineering in the UK, titled Jobs and growth: the importance of engineering skills to the UK economy, concludes that the UK will not produce enough engineers to meet the demand for replacement as engineers retire at a an increasing rate.

It is projected that about 1.25 million science, engineering and technology (SET) professionals and technicians are needed by 2020 to support the UK's economic development.  The report finds that to maintain status quo employment levels the annual demand for SET occupations is projected to be 830,000 SET professionals and 450,000 SET technicians. About 80% of these people will be in engineering and technology-related roles.

For the period 2012 to 2020 the minimum number of science, engineering, technology and mathematics (STEM) graduates required to maintain the status quo in SET occupations is 100,000 a year.  Currently, there are only 90,000 STEM graduates annually and roughly a quarter of these choose to pursue non-SET occupations.  The estimated shortfall is more than 30 000 STEM graduates annually.

The result is that demand for STEM skills will exceed supply in the foreseeable future.  Projections of future skills demand predict shortages of STEM-qualified people for all occupational levels of SET. Much of this is replacement demand resulting from skilled people retiring and leaving the labour market.