Between the Poles

For the future of distributed energy watch the Hawaiian power utilities

Keep a close watch on the Hawaiian power utilities (HECO) because Hawaii has committed to 100% renewables by 2045 and 65% by 2030. That was the recommendation of Sharon Allan, CEO of the Smart Grid Interoperability Panel (SGIP) at a DistribuTECH2016 MegaSession on distributed energy resources (DER) in response to a question from the audience asking what should utilities do to get ready for GRID 3.0.

Hawaii already has 487 MW of solar PV capacity, 90% of which is residential rooftop panels. At  DistribuTECH2016, Talin Sakugawa from HECO and Matthew Shawver from in2lytics gave an insightful presentation on distributed energy generation (DER), big data and analytics at the Hawaiian power utility.  Hawaii has seen an exponential rise in rooftop solar PV. As a result since 2010 the utility has been experiencing a reduction in net load and revenue. The most dramatic drop in load is during daytime hours as is readily apparent by comparing the utility's load on clear and cloudy days which reflects the impact of residential solar PV.

Challenges facing utilities

The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) has published  an analysis of the economics of leaving the grid.  The central thesis is that solar PV and electricity storage enables consumers to leave the grid completely.  Solar PV has already reached grid parity in about 10% of the U.S. and declining PV prices suggest that this trend will continue.  However, without the ability to store electric power, consumers with rooftop PV still require the grid for nights and cloudy days.  The development of combined solar PV and batteries from Tesla and others promises to make solar + storage accessible for increasing numbers of consumers.  These consumers could form their own microgrid, either by themselves or with their neighbours and disconnect from the grid.  Alternatively they could become a source of dispatchable power and become an energy provider.  Increasingly they could find that either of these options is economically advantageous.  This has serious implications for local utilities because if this trend develops it will seriously erode the traditional utility revenue base.   It could also lead to a completely decentralized grid comprised of many microgrids.  From an operations perspective it increases the complexity of managing the grid compared to the centralized model in use today.

The other challenge for a utility with a high penetration of intermittent, distributed generation (DER) is load balancing, ensuring that generation meets demand. The German power industry, the U.S. Department of Energy, Hawaiian power utilities,  California power utilities, ERCOT, and many others are working to address this challenge.  HECO's presentation at DistribuTECH gave an insightful overview of what they are doing to meet this technical challenge.

Data sources

HECO collects a large amount of data from diverse sources. It is comprised of internal operational data plus data from esternal sources. It includes weather forecasts, data from customer sited PV, consumer/public resource data, phasor (PMU) data, renewables power quality, feeder data, irradiance meters, generator and substations power quality, SCADA, and vendor data such as forecasts and data from Independent Power Producers (IPPs). The data has widely different time resolutions ranging from real time such as PMUs sampling 30 times per second, SCADA reporting every 2 seconds, calculated gross load every 2 seconds, PV inverter data reporting every 5 minutes and aggregated monthly, weather forecast reporting every 15 minutes and aggregated daily, transformers collecting data every 15 mins and aggregated monthly, and smart meters reporting every 15 minutes and aggregated quarterly. Much of the data includes location. The data comes in different formats and has different levels of quality.

Fundamental to distributed energy are weather maps.  Maps of irradiance and wind velocity can be directly used to estimate or predict solar and wind generation in different parts of the islands.  Temperature maps are also important because the efficiency of solar panels depends on temperature.  The more accurate the weather forecasts are, the more predictable the generation.  Knowing that there it will be cloudy over the south of Oahu, but sunny over the rest of the island, or cloudy over the whole island, but with moderate to strong winds allows operations to estimate how much backup generation is required and where. 

EMS Integration

Data from new sources relating to distributed renewable generation are integrated with traditional sources in a distributed energy management system which enables operations and planning visibility into how distributed generation is impacting thte grid. It not only provides a view into the status of the grid (situational awareness) but also allows simulations to assess the impact of different future renewable generation scenarios on the grid. This helps to determine where backup generation may be required because high demand and low generation from renewables or curtailment when there is excess generation and insufficient load.  Location is fundamental to the analytics, because wind and irradiance varies widely over the islands.

Traditional input sources include SCADA and data from transmission, generators, protection, and so on. The new input data sources include GIS-based infrastructure models and data from the distributed generation sources. Also new is weather forecasting which enables predicting generation from renewable sources.  It also includes historical and actual weather reports, and satellite and other weather data.

HECO uses an IT platform from In2lytics (a spinoff from Referentia) which integrates all of these time series data with EMS, SCADA, CIS, and GIS and makes it available to operational users, planners, modelers and the public. in2lytics is a high performance time series database that is specially designed to provide instant data accessibility for planning and operational decision making.  in2lytics enables load, query, analysis using MATLAB, and sharing of the "big data" required to monitor and manage today’s complex electric grid. in2lytics has native high performance interfaces for MATLAB in addition to programming languages.  It translates data from different sources into its internal time series database. All data is archived in a spatially enabled time series database for future analysis. Matthew said that in2lytics is able to analyze large volumes of historical time series data very rapidly. For example, a longitudinal analysis on two years worth of archived data can be run in an hour or two.

Applications

Accounting for renewables requires a lot of data. Some areas that use this data include generation planning, load forecasting, distribution planning, and contract administration. One of the first applications is a customer facing web site called Renewable Watch - Oahu that reports the total renewables generation, solar and wind, on Oahu in real-time.

An example of an application that will be used for contract administration beginning next month estimates how much power is lost from Independent Power Producers (IPPs) in the case of curtailment. It uses weather information to estimate wind speed and irradiance meters to estimate wind and solar generation potential.

Another analytical application was used to study how solar PV variability affects transformer tap changes. This application allows HECO to relate frequency of tap changes to solar PV variability and to determine which transformers are most affected by solar variability.

HECO has a number of projects with the Department of Energy and other partners.

1. Department of Energy's Integrating System to Edge-of-Network Architecture and Management" (SEAMS) A federally-funded research initiative on high penetration grids which aims to streamline grid planning and operations for utilities in regions with high concentrations of distributed generation (DG) resources.

2. Department of Energy's Distributed Resource Energy Analysis and Management System (DREAMS) Department of Energy system to provide useful information about the distributed grid to grid operators.

   Partners: Siemens, Alstom, DNV, AWS Truepower, Referentia, Sunshot

   Advisory Team:SMUD, Southern California Edison, California ISO, TEP, APS, Kaua'i Island Utility Cooperative, Western APA

3. Making sense of synchrophasor data for utilities. The Synchrophasor Visual Integration and Event Evaluation for Utilities (SynchroVIEEU) with High Penetrations of Renewables. Accelerate the integration of synchrophasor information into production grade data visualization and analysis platforms/models. Leverage PMU capability at many substations – explore ways to tap resources and provide real-time visibility and real-time data. Make synchrophasor data accessible for efficient and reliable operations of a modern grid in light of high penetrations of renewable resources

   Partners: SEL, DNV GL, Referentia

4. Monitoring, planning, and modeling high PV penetration microgrid. Decision support for microgrid design and operation at Marine Corps Base Hawaii. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has launched an ambitious program to demonstrate and evaluate energy technologies using Navy and Marine Corps facilities as test beds, known as the Energy Systems Technology and Evaluation Program (ESTEP). Program management is being handled by the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command (SPAWAR) Systems Center Pacific (SSC Pacific). ESTEP was established in 2013. It brings together the Department of the Navy, academia, and private industry to investigate and test emerging energy technologies at Navy and Marine Corps installations. At present, ESTEP conducts over 20 in-house government energy projects, ranging from energy management to alternative energy and storage technologies.

Other projects include

• Remote light sensor technology at the Kahuku wind farm on Oahu to measure and forecast windspeed and direction to support reliability;
• Sonic detection and ranging technology to remotely measure wind speed and direction;
• Network of solar irradiance sensors to measure light and to make forecasts;
• EV Race to the Sun, a joint Japan-U.S. showcase event for electric vehicles,to take place on Haleakala;
• Battery storage technology development, including the JUMPSmartMaui project.

The ultimate objective for HECO is to become a company offering diversified services providing value to engaged customers, of course with satisfied regulators and sustainable costs and margins.  

Big data and spatial-temporal analytics

It was clear from this presentation that essential for HECO, or to any utility, with a high penetration of solar or wind are weather maps, forecasted, actual and historical because these enable the utility to project generation. The also allow utilities to analyze the historical record in conjunction with other data to discover trends that may help improve forecasting.  Collecting and analyzing temporal geospatial data is fundamental for distributed energy management.  This is in addition to the expanded application of geospatial technology for utility operations and planning in the smart grid era.

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.

Planet Labs donates imagery to the world community

Early this week Will Marshall, Co-Founder and CEO of Planet Labs and previously a scientist at NASA/USRA, traveled to the United Nations Headquarters in New York to represent Planet Labs at the UN Sustainable Development Summit where 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted.  In his speech Marshall announced that Planet Labs was making $60 million worth of its satellite imagery for select regions openly available and accessible to the global community. The imagery will be made available through a Planet Labs initiative called "Open Regions," under a creative commons license (CC BY-SA), and will be directly accessible online. According to Planet Labs’ analysis, the imagery is relevant to 15 of the UN's 17 SDGs. Some examples mentioned in Will Marshall's UN speech are:

• Monitoring deforestation - Planet Labs’ imagery makes it possible to monitor forests every day, to track illegal logging and enable proactive intervention.
• Combating climate change - Planet Lab's imagery can monitor climate change with up-to-date data on the state of the world’s ice caps and carbon stocks.
• Ending hunger and establishing food security - Planet Lab's imagery can measure the health of crops in farmers' fields around the world, and provide vital information to them to increase crop yield.

Planet Labs is unique in the satellite imagery world because it relies on many small, inexpensive satellites rather than a small number of large, expensive satellites.  The constellation of Planet Labs CubeSats (Doves) returns imagery of Earth with a resolution between 3 and 5 meters. The revisit rate, or frequency with which Dove CubeSats pass over a given area, is unprecedented among existing satellite systems in orbit. Planet Labs' goal is to capture an image of the entire Earth every day.

Convergence of BIM and geospatial contributes to better management of information

Dr Anne Kemp, Director and Fellow, Atkins, Vice-Chair of BuildingSmart, UK, Chair of ICE BIM Action Group, and Chair of BIM4Infrastructure UK, has published very thought-provoking insights into how the convergence of BIM and geospatial can contribute to the better management of information to help generate the understanding to make better decisions.

Her first assertion “So, let’s put paid to the hang-ups of what is and is not GIS and BIM, and discover what really deserves our focus” is a very good place for all of us to start if we are going to tear down the discipline boundaries that are inhibiting us from moving to a more holistic approach to problem solving in the era of smart cities.

Better outcomes, not BIM or geospatial

Her goal is not to support BIM or geospatial per se, but to use these technologies to improve outcomes.  From Anne's perspective the key outcomes we should be aiming at are

• CLARITY - Clarity of delivery
• TECHNICAL JUDGEMENT - Converging information production with sound engineering judgment and design
• ACCESS - Wider, faster access to comprehensible and integrated information
• LATERAL THINKING - Enabling reflective, adaptive thinking to incorporate whole life and integrated systems approach within the wider geographic context
• INNOVATION - Harnessing innovative technologies and harvesting intelligence from big data
• DECISIONS - Fostering instinctive, but rigorous collaboration and better decision making

Data, not documents

The construction industry is based on documents such as drawings. Documents lock data up within a discipline and prevents the wider access that can be used to build up an integrated view of an asset. In contrast digital data can be used, many times, for different purposes, by different disciplines.  This requires interoperability and the ability to map semantics across different disciplines.

Assets, not projects

The full lifecycle view of a building, road or airport requires thinking of assets not projects. Anne's perspective is that this is where the convergence of BIM with geospatial provides the biggest benefits. The UK government would agree. The short term objective of the UK Government BIM mandate is to reduce the cost of construction (design, tender, build) by 20%.  The longer term objective is by 2025 to reduce the costs associated with designing, building, operating and maintaining buildings and infrastructure by a third.  ‘In-use’ data from facilities management (FM) systems, building management  systems, and sensors including smart phones provides information on how an asset is actually serving the needs of people, and the patterns of behaviour of people using the infrastructure.  This information can be used to optimize building or infrastructure design. A geospatial perspective enables this data to be used not only with individual buildings or infrastructure, but for a whole neighbourhood, town or city.

Data ethics

Ensuring that data is not manipulated to distort decision making is critical to enabling the true data-driven organization of the future. Anne's perspective is that the industry is becoming increasingly dependent on data management professionals. This will require standards and a code of ethics to address challenges of privacy, distortion, and manipulation so as to ensure that data is made available in a way that aids rather than confuses decision making. In the future chief data officers and other information professionals will have even much greater responsibilities - they will be responsible for specifying, collecting, and analyzing the information for decision making that will be critical to the organization's success, even its existence.

Information is not understanding

Malcolm Gladwell in "Blink" points out that “We live in a world saturated with information. We have virtually unlimited amounts of data at our fingertips at all times, and we’re well versed in the arguments about the dangers of not knowing enough and not doing our homework. But what I have sensed is an enormous frustration with the unexpected costs of knowing too much, of being inundated with information. We have come to confuse information with understanding.”

At a recent BIM conference the term “infobesity” came up more than once. A decade ago people were concerned about not having enough data to make informed decisions. Now that we have more data being collected by sensors such as smart meters and smart phones, the problem is how do we make sense from the huge volumes of data that all these smart devices are collecting.

Anne makes the point that when managed correctly, “instant” decisions based on a small amount of data are not just as good, but can be better than those made after analyzing all available data. The "less is more" challenge is to distill the data to just the right subset to enable you can make better decisions faster with less data. Anne believes that this will require more sophisticated visualization techniques to enable insights from patterns in large amounts of data and better collaboration technology to enable a large number of individuals from different disciplines to understand each other (even when using different terms for the same piece of equipment or construction material) and to collaborate fruitfully.

This means that we will be asking our human or computer information  engineers to deliver that essential subset of information to the right people at the right time, and in an intuitively understandable way.  Anne suggests that our cartographic and GIS heritage of creating, analyzing and visualizing a view of the physical world as maps may provide a model for future data managers.  But, as Anne points out, this will have to be transformed for a virtual environment.

Unintended consequences

Anne's final point is often overlooked. BIM, geospatial, augmented reality and other technologies are transforming how we view "reality".  There are very real consequences for people working in a virtual world. Anne mentions the first case of internet addition disorder (IAD) involving Google Glasses on October 14, 2014 and asks how many of us are already there with our smartphones and tablets ?

Distributed processing with noSQL databases enables fast geoprocessing of big spatial data

I was lucky enough to attend the High Performance Geoprocessing Symposium in Ottawa.  It is amazing how far some very exciting geospatial projects focused on "big spatial data" under the LocationTech umbrella have come in the last few years. If you are not familiar with LocationTech, it is a working group hosted by the Eclipse Foundation with the objective of developing advanced open source geospatial technologies. Eclipse is a vendor neutral not-for-profit community collaborating on commercially-friendly open source software.

The talks today described projects that have been developed under the impetus of "big spatial data" and user demand for faster, more responsive geoprocessing.

GeoTrellis - high performance raster processing

Robert Cheetham of Azavea described how his project GeoTrellis is achieving "advanced spatial analysis on the web."  The challenges that this project strives to overcome are

• performance and scalability - performing overlays involving large rasters for multi-criteria suitability,  optimal siting analysis or simulation involves serious processing and to be able to do this in real-time with the type of response that a web user expects requires new algorithms
• large datasets - such as social media streams like Twitter, the huge volumes of data required to model a smart city, or just the volume of data require to monitor and run a modern city on a daily basis
• user interface - an ArcGIS syle menu bar with thousands of options is fine for trained GIS professionals, but an urban planner or other non-GIS professional needs something better

GeoTrellis has been designed to address these challenges.  It is open source released under an Apache licence, which means that all you need to do is indicate attribution, otherwise you can do anything you like with it.  It provides high performance raster input/output, geoprocessing, and web services using distributed processing to achieve quite amazing throught put for large raster datasets.  Robert described overlay operations with 6000 x 5000 pixel rasters, hundreds of megabytes in file size, that GeoTrellis performs in 200 milliseconds, effectively real-time from the point of view of a web user.

GeoTrellis relies on other open source libraries to achieve these phenomenal processing speeds.  It uses the Hadoop (a noSQL distributed database) file system (HDFS), but replaces Hadoop's MapReduce (MapReduce is software for  processing vast amounts of data in-parallel on large clusters of commodity hardware) with Apache Spark for distributed processing.  Robert said that one way to look at GeoTrellis is as the geospatial enabled version of Spark.

Robert described a number of applications that involve overlaying very large raster databases for analysis or simulation where different scenarios can be run in real-time so that the user can quickly assess alternatives.  For example, OpenTreeMap is a crowdsourced urban forest database where using GeoTrellis users can quickly assess the costs and benefits and optimize the planting of urban trees with different objectives, shading, air quality, reducing runoff, and so on.  This would not be possible with traditional GIS and geospatial databases.

GeoJinni - Spatial Hadoop

  Ahmed Eldawy from the University of Minnesota describes a LocationTech project he has been working on for several years that was originally called Spatial Hadoop, but has been renamed to GeoJinni.  Perhaps the best known NoSQL distributed database, Hadoop knows nothing about spatial data.  It doesn't support spatial datatypes, spatial indexes or spatial analytics. 

GeoJinni is a comprehensive extension to Hadoop that allows efficient processing of spatial data. It injects spatial awareness in the different layers and components of Hadoop to make it more efficient to store and process big spatial data.  It is a spatially-enabled Hadoop that supports spatial datatypes, spatial indexes, spatial analysis, and spatial predicates (such as "intersect").  GeoJinni can be installed as an extension to an existing Hadoop cluster which means that it can be run without the need to give up existing Hadoop installations. It is portable to run with a number of Hadoop distributions including Apache Hadoop, Cloudera, and Hortonworks.

Some of the applications where GeoJinni is currently used are modeling world traffic and querying and visualizing spatio-temporal satellite data.

Currently it uses MapReduce to distribute processing across multiple machines, but in the future the plan is to extend support to Spark.

GeoMesa - high performance geospatial (vector) analytics

Chris Eichelberger from the GeoMesa project described an approach to big spatial data that focusses on vector data and compliance with existing widely used geospatial APIs. 

The problem as outlined by Chris is if you want to find all the points that are within a certain distance from a fixed point your strategy depends on the total number of points you are dealing with.

• hundreds of points - can be handled reasonably well (but not optimally) by a full table scan with an SQL database such as Oracle or PostgreSQL.
• hundreds of thousands of points - you need PostGIS or Oracle Spatial to handle this efficiently.  The widely used GeoTools API is an open source Java library that provides tools for geospatial data management and analytics.  GeoTools supports plugins for various databases including MySQL, Oracle, SpatiaLite and SQL Server, but the most widely used database with GeoTools is PostGIS.
• hundreds of millions (typical of Twitter streams, for example) - this volume of data is in the realm of big spatial data and requires a new and different approach

NoSQL ("not only SQL") databases

I have already mentioned Hadoop.  To deal with data volumes that are too large for traditional SQL databases, beginning in 2004 Google developed "BigTable" which is a compressed, high performance, and proprietary data storage system built on the Google File System that is used by a number of Google applications including Google Maps.  Apache Accumulo is a distributed "key/value store" that is based on Google's BigTable design and is built on top of Apache Hadoop and other Apache projects.   "Key/value store" simply means that every record has a unique identifier, often a hash.  For putting geospatial data into a key/value store the key concept is that of the "geohash" converting a 2D, 3D or 4D coordinate such as a lon and lat, lon, lat and elevation or a lon, lat, elevation, and time to an integer index, such as a quadtree or R-Tree index, that can be used to order and rapidly retrieve spatial data.  Geohash means that you now can take advantage of key/value databases such as Accumulo and programs such as MapReduce - Accumulo uses MapReduce for distributed processing. GeoMesa aims to provide as much of the spatial querying and data manipulation to Accumulo as PostGIS does to Postgres.

An especially exciting thing about GeoMesa is that it is an implementation of the GeoTools API on Apache Accumulo instead of PostGIS.  If you have an application that was developed with GeoTools, you can simply replace PostGIS with GeoMesa to handle big spatial data volumes.  There is even a plug-in for GeoServer so that geospatial data in Accumulo to be shared and visualized via Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard services, such as WFS.  Chris also announced that the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency's (NGA) GeoWave project, which shares many goals with GeoMesa, will be folded into GeoMesa.

Spatio-temporal

A fairly common query when dealing with social media streams such as Twitter is to "find all the tweets from locations within 10 km and within 15 minutes of where I was in my car at 9:45 this morning."  Chris outlined how GeoMesa can handle that type of query through GeoMesa's support for an Open Geospatial Consortium standard called the web geoprocessing service (WPS).

Urban planning working group announced by the Open Geospatial Consortium

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

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

Image: Sunshine Ecomap

Coordinating public infrastructure construction projects in Bern saved SFR 7 million in first year

While in Switzerland for Geospatial World Forum 2014 I had the opportunity to spend some time with Dr. Martin Huber of Condesys Consulting who is responsible for the online web-based system Koordination im öffentlichen Raum (Spatial, temporal and financial co-ordination of city planning, traffic change, and construction projects on public land) of the City of Bern.  This is a primarily a system for coordinating street works that achieves some of the same goals as the 2004 Traffic Management Act in the U.K. It is location aware and enables planners to avoid serial excavations of the same stretch of street or road by coodinating all construction from multiple agencies including Federal, Kantonal and city street and highway agencies, water/wastewater, gas, and electricity utiltiies, and telecommunications companies so that a section of street or road is not dug up more than once every five years.

The City of Bern typically spends between SFR 80 and 200 million annually on construction for public infrastructure.  The initial phase of the coordination system cost about SFR 150,000.  In its first year of operation it was estimated that the coordination system saved SFR 7 million.  In other words the project paid for itself in about a week.

In 1999 regulations were passed by the city government requiring coordination among stakeholders involved with public infrastructure. Basically the bylaw specified that all excavation on public property   within city limits required a permit.  Stakeholders include the city electric and water utility (Energie Wasser Bern or EWB), Swisscom, UPC Cablecom, Colt Telecom, two railways (SBB and BLS), the Postauto bus system, billboard advertising companies, environmental agencies, archaeological agency, the agency responsible fro public monuments, the garbage collection department, fire, police and emergency agencies, Kantonal public works, and the Federal Highways Agency (Bundesamt für Strassen or ASTRA).  What this means in practice is that all projects involving a certain road or stretch of highway are coordinated so that they all happen at the same time.  After completion of construction there is a moratorium on any further excavations on the same stretch of street or road, except for emergencies, for five years.  It also means that everyone who is affected by street work from garbage collection to billboards to city planners is aware of when and where construction will occur.

The initial implementation of the system, developed by Condesys, was deployed in 2000.  In 2001 it received an award from Arthur Anderson for best egovernment application.

Geolocating underground infrastructure

In Bern the law requires that anyone planning a construction project involving excavation has to submit information about the proposed constrcution to the online coordinaton system.  Providing reliable information about the location of underground infrastructure is the responsibility of the organizations operating the infrastructure.

In Switzerland each utility and telecommunications company is responsible for maintaining records that show the location of their underground infrastructure.  In Bern they are required to provide the location of their underground facilities to the City Survey Office (Vermessungsamt der Stadt Bern ) who is responsible for aggregating the data from the multiple utiltiies and telecommunication companies into a single database (Leitungskadaster) and making it publicly available. 

As in many parts of the world the data quality of this underground geolocation information (Leitungskadaster) is an issue.  According to Martin utilities and telecoms are currently working to improve the quality of their geolocation infrmation about underground facilities.  Swisscom is spending about SFR 250 million to resurvey their infrastructure and other utilties have similar projects underway.  By the end of 2014 EWB and Swisscom are expected to have improved the reliability of their geolocation information about their underground infrastructure in Bern.

The city has also put in place regulations to ensure that accurate data is captured for new construction projects involving underground infrastructure.  For example, there is a 24 hour rule that requires a contractor to notify the city survey department 24 hours before closing a trench.  For large projects city surveyors periodically survey underground works.

Long-term, free and open satellite Earth observation program launched by Europe

April 3 Europe launched the first Sentinel-1A satellite of the €8.4-billion Earth monitoring Copernicus program, which is managed by the European Commission.  This was the first of a constellation of six Sentinel families which are scheduled to be launched by the end of the decade. The satellites will provide long-term monitoring of Earth’s land, water and atmosphere.  Copernicus will integrate data other satellites, from ocean buoys, weather stations and air-quality monitoring networks.

Copernicus was designed by the European Union (EU) and the European Space Agency (ESA) to help the European Commission and EU member states to develop environmental policies and monitor the results. Its data will be used to create services for practical applications such as ice mapping, agriculture management, climate-change monitoring and prediction and disaster response.

Free and open data

One of the most important aspects of the Copernicus program is that the data collected under the program will be free for anyone to access and use. Scientific  researchers and public authorities will be part of a formal program which included dedicated help desks and support.

Ongoing Maintenance

The other important aspect of the Copernicus program is that it is not a one-off, it is a system that will be maintained into the future.  Sentinel satellites will be replaced regularly as they age. This will privide data sets that can support longitudinal studies, for example, of the impact of climate change over long time periods.

Sentinel-1 is a constellation of two polar-orbiting satellites, operating 24/7 performing C-band synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imaging, enabling them to acquire imagery regardless of the weather.
Sentinel-1A was launched April 3. Sentinel 1B is scheduled to be launched in the next 18 months.

Sentinel-2 is a pair of high-resolution imaging devices that are basically advanced Landsat devices with a spatial resolution of about 10 meters and revisit times of 2–3 days at mid-latitudes.

Sentinel-3 will measure sea surface topography, sea and land surface temperature, and ocean and land surface colour with high accuracy and reliability to support ocean forecasting systems, environmental monitoring and climate monitoring.

Sentinel-4 will monitor atmospheric pollutants from a geostationary orbit to provide hourly measurements over most of Europe and North Africa.

Sentinel-5 is dedicated to atmospheric monitoring using multiple instruments including UVNS (Ultraviolet Visible Near-infrared Shortwave) spectrometer, IRS (InfraRed Sounder), VII (Visible Infrared Imager) and 3MI (Multi-Viewing Multi-channel Multi-polarisation Imager).

Earth observation satellite startups set to transform the EO imaging ecosystem

There seems to be a new startup in the Earth observation (EO) satellite sector every couple of months. Many of them rely on very small footprint satellites,  typically Cubesats or nanosatellites, to dramatically reduce costs compared to traditional large EO satellites like Digital Globe's Worldview-3, for example. Two of the startups use the International Space Station (ISS) as an Earth observation platform.  None of the the EO applications is able to compete with the sub-50 cm spatial resolution of Worldview-3, but several have better temporal resolution than existing EO satellites whose revisit times are on the order of a day.

Cubesats

Over the past few weeks 33 CubeSats were deployed from the International Space Station into low Earth orbit between 100 and 1,240 miles high. NASA's NanoRacks Smallsat Deployment Program provides commercial access to space, via the space station, for CubeSats to perform Earth and deep space observation.

One of the new CubeSats deploying through the NanoRacks program is SkyCube, developed by Southern Stars Group LLC of San Francisco. SkyCube is the first CubeSat to use a smartphone application to track SkyCube, provide updates on its mission and tweet messages from the public.  ArduSat-2, built and operated by NanoSatisfi of San Francisco, will help determine potential commercial applications for small satellite data collection and commercial, off-the-shelf electronics. A goal of the ArduSat-2 mission is to help lower the cost of space applications that use low-Earth observation techniques.  Both ArduSat-2 and SkyCube used crowdsourcing methods for funding (crowdfunding).

The next Cygnus spacecraft resupply mission to the ISS, scheduled for May 1, is fully booked with CubeSats developed through the NanoRacks program.

Temporal geospatial (4D)

28 Dove Cubesat satellites each weighing about 5 kilograms of Planet Labs' Flock 1 constellation began deploying in early February from the ISS.  .Planet Labs, San Francisco, California provides medium-resolution (3- to 5-meter) “whole Earth” imaging with high frequency revisits.  The constellation is designed to provide low spatial resolution and high temporal resolution.  In addition to the just released 28 satellites (Flock 1) from the ISS, next year an additional 72 satellites are scheduled to be launched. The total constellation will be comprised of 100 Cubesat satellites . Up to 10 % of the satellites can fail without affecting the capability of the whole constellation.

Skybox Imaging, Mountain View, California provides high spatial- and temporal-resolution Earth imaging including high-definition video. Skybox plans to launch a 24-satellite constellation within the next five years. These satellites weigh hundreds of kilograms.  SkySat-1, which was launched in November 2013, is capable of high spatial resolution of 0.9-meter-per-pixel.  The full constellation will be able revisit any spot on Earth up to four times daily.

UrtheCast, Vancouver, B.C., Canada provides 24/7 high-definition video of Earth for monitoring the environment, humanitarian relief, social events, and agricultural land.  Urthecast has installed two high-definition video cameras with 1-meter and 6-meter resolution on the Russian section of the ISS.  The cameras passed their first tests in mid-February.  Because they are on the ISS the UrtheCast cameras have a constant ground link on the ISS, enabling real-time control.

Teledyne Brown Engineering, Huntsville, Alabama provides Earth observation imaging from the International Space Station.  Teledyne is building an Earth observation camera platform for the ISS for up to four digital-imaging instruments. The first is a visible-through-near-infrared spectrometer for applications like fire detection, change detection, monitoring sea lanes, and atmospheric research. The platform is scheduled to launch in mid-2015, and the first camera in late 2015.

Weather monitoring

According to the GAO some of the United States' satellite systems for weather observations and forecasts are nearing the end of their expected life spans.  The US weather satellite systems include

• polar-orbiting satellites that provide  global coverage every morning and afternoon
• geostationary satellites (GOES) that maintain a fixed view of the United States.

Both types of systems are critical to weather forecasters, climatologists, and the military to map and monitor changes in weather, climate, the oceans, and the environment.   There is a substantial risk of a gap of 17 to 53 months or more in polar satellite data between the time that one of the current polar satellite is expected to reach the end of its life and the time when the next satellite is expected to be in orbit and operational. This means that the U.S. would have to rely on just one polar-orbiting satellite, rather than the two that are currently in service. There is also a risk of an additional gap if the Department of Defense’s next satellites do not work as intended.  According to NOAA, a satellite data gap would result in less accurate and timely weather forecasts and warnings of extreme events, such as hurricanes, storm surges and floods. Two startups are planning to provide a commercial alternative to fill these gaps.

PlanetiQ, Bethesda, Maryland provides atmospheric imaging for weather forecasts, climate modeling, and space weather prediction.  PlanetIQ plans to launch a constellation of 12 to 24 small satellites. The network could help fill a gap in U.S. weather-data collecting, and it would be cheaper to build and operate than the government’s own satellite-based weather systems.

GeoOptics, Pasadena, California is an environmental data company that plans to deliver information about the Earth to users in near real time.  Applications will include operational daily weather forecasting and long-term environmental monitoring and research.  GeoOptics plans to launch a 24-satellite constellation beginning in 2015 and ending in 2018. It is designed to outsource Earth imaging for government agencies including weather-related at very low cost.

Custom satellite systems

Dauria Aerospace, Munich, Germany provides custom-built small, low-cost Earth-observation, communication, and navigation satellites.  This is a joint German-Russian-U.S. start-up that designs and builds satellites for government and corporate customers, including NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Russian space agency, Roscosmos. It also plans to launch four of its own satellites, two this year and two more between 2015 and 2017.

Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems, Irvine, California provides custom CubeSat–based nanosatellites as well as CubeSat components for government customers and others.  Tyvak will build the satellite, launch spacecraft and arrange for the launch and will and operate the satellite. It will download and transfer the sensor data from the satellite to the customer. Currently it is working on NASA-funded experimental spacecraft called the Proximity Operations Nanosatellite Flight Demonstration, which will provide satellite rendezvous and docking for a Mars or asteroid sample return mission.  They are scheduled to launch in 2015.

NovaWurks, Los Alamitos, California provides small modular spacecraft, called Hyper-Integrated Satlets or HISats, that can be reconfigured for any payload or mission. Novawurks' first project is for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Phoenix program to build HISats that will attach themselves to satellites that have stopped functioning and enable them to come back on-line.  Novaworks also plans to launch and operate its own HISats for space-based imaging and greenhouse gas emissions measurements.

Planet Labs' Flock 1 comprised of 28 Earth observation Cubesats deployed from ISS

A release of 28 Planet Labs CubeSats known as Flock 1 from the International Space Station (ISS) has been completed.  The deployments began Feb. 11.  The CubeSats, each about the size of a loaf of bread, were released from pods mounted on the end of the space station's robotic arm.   The satellites were carried to the ISS aboard a Cygnus cargo spacecraft on an Antares rocket January 9.

The constellation of Planet Labs CubeSats will return imagery of Earth with a resolution between 3 and 5 meters. The revisit rate, or frequency with which Dove CubeSats pass over a given area, is unprecedented among existing satellite systems in orbit. Imagery will be collected at latitudes within 52 degrees of the equator, which encompass expanses north and south of the equator that cover the majority of the world’s populated areas and agricultural regions. The Flock 1 constellation will travel in a lower orbit than most satellites, at a distance between 240 and 400 miles above Earth. For comparison, weather and commercial communications satellites are often given geostationary orbits, which are circular orbits above the Earth’s equator at a distance of approximately 22,236 miles above Earth.  According to Planet Labs continuous whole-Earth images have the potential to serve many purposes simultaneously, from a single set of data.  According to this source the imagery from the Flock 1 satellites will be avaialble for free access by commercial and humanitarian users.   Flock 1 will allow scientists and the public to monitor natural disasters, deforestation, agricultural yields and other environmental changes.