Between the Poles

Autodesk University Utility Symposium

On Monday here in Las Vegas at Autodesk University the Utility Symposium attracted an overflow crowd of utility folks.  It was an opportunity to exchange information and to hear presentations from a number of utilities across North America including water and electric power utilities.

Electrical Distribution Design

Tim Boucher and Paul Joseph gave an overview of business drivers at Southern California Edison (SCE) and some of the projects underway for meeting their business objectives.  SCE plans to invest on the order of $30 billion in renewable energy and smart grid related infrastructure, including new transmission lines, over the next decade. 

One of the SCE's primary business drivers is efficiency, because they have to do more with what they have. Tim and Paul described the Graphical Design Tool (GDT) project at SCE.  GDT is designed to provide designers with tools to help them do their job better.  It is a rule-based design application that provides electrical design functions such as voltage drop and flicker calculations; mechanical design functions such guying, pulling tension, sag analysis, and wind loading; as well as bill of materials and job estimates, in an AutoCAD-based desktop application. GDT not only provides tools that experienced designers find useful, but helps newly hired, younger, less experienced designers to get up to speed sooner.  Tim described the process for deploying GDT across SCE's territory to about 600 designers and supervisors.  Paul demonstrated some very cool GDT add-ons for multiplanar cable pulling tension, house corner loading, pole modeling, and Google Earth integration.

Tim outlined some of their next business priorities, which are all on my top 12 utility priorities list, including

• single landbase (they currently have five)
• single point of truth for all spatial data
• reducing their as-built backlog from a year to days
• enabling field staff in the field to be able to see the same spatial information in the field that the people in the office can see.

Sub-station Rehabilitation

Arnold Fry of Duke Energy talked about substation design and redesign.  At Duke Energy they have developed the Substation Design Solution (SFS) which automates the design of electrical control systems, uses model-based design for the structural design, manages a library of reusable components, automates the creation of the BOM, and helps the different disciplines to collaborate in developing the final design through 3D visualization, which enables the engineers to see how the different components fit together.

Duke Energy estimates that SDS will reduce design time by at least 50% for both greenfield and brownfield projects.  The Duke Energy SDS will be coming on line just at the time when the company is accelerating its smart grid deployment and will enable it to pursue an ambitious substation retrofit program.

Wastewater Treatment Plant Expansion

Asa Reese of Parsons talked about the Advanced Wastewater Treatment Expansion Project at DeKalb County, Georgia.  DeKalb decided to double their water treatment capacity using innovative membrane bio-reactor (MBR) technology.  This is a large, nearly one billion dollar project involving over 50 people and 10 disciplines.  Parsons, the firm DeKalb selected to design the water treatment expansion, decided early on to take a model-based design approach to enable collaboration between the different design teams and to use 3D visualization tools to ensure that the stakeholders, technical and non-technical, were able to participate in critical design decisions. Asa described how model-based design enabled Parsons to change the design process from a traditional linear approach, which Asa suggested is analogous to a relay race or tag team approach, to a parallel process based on collaboration between the teams.  Asa emphasized that changing the design process has been critical in keeping the design project within budget and on schedule.

Newly Renovated "Guide to Sustainable Design"

More than half of the buildings that will be standing in the year 2030 are already built, and the urgency to improve the efficiency of existing buildings as a means to reduce energy use and greenhouse gas emissions is growing. Autodesk has just announced a “retrofitted” Guide to Sustainable Design.  The newly renovated Guide is designed to let building industry stakeholders select their profession and then walk through virtually all phases of a design or renovation/retrofit project to see how design choices affect energy efficiency, water efficiency and carbon emissions.  The Guide to Sustainable Design illustrates sustainable design principles and technologies for more energy-efficient buildings and environmentally conscious infrastructure projects.

Chrome OS Running on Another Netbook

It has been reported that an employee of Dell has gotten Chrome OS, which Google released to open source Nov 19, to run on a Dell Mini 10v netbook.  I blogged earlier that Ed Parsons has Chrome OS running on his Aspire One netbook.

Free Ordnance Survey Maps Down to Scale 1:10,000 by April ?

The UK Government has announced its intention to explore ways of making all Ordnance Survey maps freely available online from April.  The Free Our Data campaign has worked for over three years to convince the government to "abandon copyright on essential national data, making it freely available to anyone, while keeping the crucial task of collecting that data in the hands of taxpayer-funded agencies".  The UK prime minister said that it was his intention by April to complete negotiations on the free online provision of Ordnance Survey maps down to a scale of 1:10,000.  The online maps would be free to all including commercial organizations who in the past have had to acquire expensive and restrictive licenses.  This measure would bring the UK in line with many other national governments around the world including the US, Canada, South Africa, Japan, and Brazil as well as increasingly state and provincial governments such as California, and cities such as Vancouver.

I blogged earlier about a study by a team at Cambridge University and commissioned by the Treasury that found that making all OS data free would cost the government £12m and bring a net gain of £156m.  Australia and New Zealand have commissioned studies of the contribution of spatial data to the national economy that have concluded that with appropriate government policies the contribution to the GDP, estimated to be on the order of 1%, could be doubled.

Thanks to Mapperz for pointing me to the Guardian article.

Utility Events at Autodesk University

Autodesk University happens next week in Las Vegas.  Here's some of the utility related events.

Monday, November 30

12:00 pm - 01:00 pm Utility Symposium Lunch  - [South Pacific C - Mandalay Bay]

01:00 pm - 06:00 pm Utility Symposium Sessions  - [Islander C - Mandalay Bay] - RSVP

06:00 pm - 07:00 pm Utility Symposium Reception - [South Pacific C, Mandalay Bay]

07:00 pm - 09:00 pm    AEC Mixer - [South Pacific E -  Mandalay Bay]

Tuesday, December 1

08:00 am - 09:30 am

GS104-1: From CAD to Autodesk® Topobase™: Migration to Enterprise GIS  [Louis Ball 90-Minute Class].

UT104-1: Bringing Mobile Field Updates into AutoCAD® Map 3D Effortlessly [Glenn Vlass 90-Minute Class].

03:00 pm - 04:30 pm   

UT118-1: GIS for the Utility or Municipality With AutoCAD® Map 3D [Rick Chappell 90-Minute Class]

AutoCAD Map 3D & Autodesk MGE Interest Group - [Must RSVP to receive location information]

05:00 pm - 06:30 pm UT122-2L: Hands-On Design Using Autodesk® Utility Design [Dan Leighton 90-Minute Class]

Wednesday, December 2

08:00 am - 09:30 am UT204-1: Using AutoCAD® Inventor® to Electrify the Grid [Andy Warren 90-Minute Class]

10:00 am - 11:30 am AEC Keynote  [Location: Concourse Level in the Events Center Arena]

01:00 pm - 02:30 pm    AEC Government Keynote   [Location: Level 3 South Seas C ]

03:00 pm - 04:30 pm UT218-1: Managing Utility Network Connectivity with Autodesk® Topobase™ [Doug Laslo 90-Minute Class]

05:00 pm - 06:30 pm UT222-1: Autodesk® Utility Design at APS - Phase 2: What the Heck Did We Do in 2009? [Brett Hauf, Arizona Public Service  90-Minute Class]

06:30pm - 08:30pm Government Networking Reception  - [Location: Rum Jungle at the Mandalay Bay Hotel] RSVP

Thursday, December 3

07:30 am - 09:00 am E&C Water & Power Breakfast - Join us for a discussion about how to grow your water and power business with Autodesk solutions. [RSVP to receive location information.]

08:00 am - 09:30 am UT304-1: Integrate Autodesk® Topobase™ With Other Systems and Get More Value Out of Your Data [Giulio Pagan 90-Minute Class]

10:00 am - 11:30 am UT308-1: Water and Wastewater Network Management Using Autodesk® Topobase™, AutoCAD® Map 3D, and MapGuide® Enterprise [Pat Byrne 90-Minute Class]

01:00 pm - 02:30 pm UT314-1: Manage Electric Utility Assets and Designs with Autodesk® Topobase™ and AutoCAD® Map 3D: A Case Study [Peter Krotky, ASI – 90-Minute Panel]

Ordnance Survey's OS OpenSpace Beta

According to the Ordnance Survey, OS OpenSpace is intended to promote free and open access to Ordnance Survey data (which is in general relatively expensive) via the OS OpenSpace API to application developers.  This means that a variety of organizations including entrepreneurs and commercial organizations can develop applications using the OS OpenSpace API that use OS data without charge subject only to a maximum daily usage restriction. The OS appears to have taken a leaf out of the Google business model, which allows you to develop mashups using Google's API that access Google data (often licensed from commercial sources) free of charge, but does not permit you to download or otherwise access the raw data.

OS OpenSpace applications must be free and open.  They must be "publicly accessible on the internet and not restricted or protected by password, username, membership or firewalls", and "cannot be used in the ordinary day-to-day activities involved with the internal administration of a business."  Advertising on OS OpenSpace web applications is permitted,  but no charge can be made for use of applications developed using OS OpenSpace.

China Surpasses US in Emissions

I've attached an interesting graph that shows that China has passed the US in emissions, no mean feat, but China has 1.3 billion people contributing compared to the US's 300 million.

UK PM Gordon Brown and French President Nicolas Sarkozy have proposed a $10bn fund to help developing nations deal with climate change.

Sewer Infrastructure Requires $400 Billion

The Clean Water Act of 1972 was to intended to upgrade the US's sewer systems.  In the 1970s and 1980s, Congress distributed more than $60 billion to cities to upgrade sewer systems.  In 1994 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a national framework to control overflows, to ensure that pipes are designed so they are not easily become plugged by debris and warning the public when overflows occur. In 2000, Congress amended the Clean Water Act to further limit overflows.

According to the New York Times, in the last three years more than 9,400 of the US’s 25,000 sewage systems have violated the law by dumping untreated or partly treated human waste, chemicals and other hazardous materials into rivers and lakes and elsewhere, according to data from state environmental agencies and the EPA.  More than a third of all sewer systems including San Diego, Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, Philadelphia, San Jose and San Francisco have violated environmental laws since 2006, according to a New York Times analysis of EPA data.  In New York the sewer system overflows just about every other time it rains.  Similar problems occur in other municipalities such as Newport, Rhode Island.

In Ottawa it was reported that the equivalent of about 265 Olympic swimming pools full of overflow sewage entered the Ottawa and Rideau rivers from the City of Ottawa during the 2007 rainy season.  Rainfall between April and November 2007 was slightly above average in volume and intensity.  An estimated 730,000 cubic metres of sewage mixed with stormwater overflowed from 18 pipes between April 15 and Nov. 15, 2007. That represents two per cent of all sewage in the part of downtown served by combined sewers.  As a rule of thumb municipalities east of the Mississippi have combined sewers, one sewer system for sanitary and storm sewers.  West of the Mississippi, most municipalities have separate sanitary and storm sewers.

According to the EPA and the Government Accountability Office (GAO), $400 billion in extra spending is needed over the next decade to fix the US’s sewer infrastructure.  The ARRA stimulus bill has set aside $6 billion to improve sewers and other water systems.

At Autodesk University next week Asa Reese of Parsons is going to talk about a DeKalb County, GA project to double water treatment capacity using innovative bioreactor membrane (MBR) technology.

Thanks to Chris Maeder for pointing to the New York Times article and the Newport, RI video.

Chrome OS Running on a Netbook

Ed Parsons reports that he has Chrome OS running on his Aspire One, "deadly fast" he says.

COP15 Copenhagen UN Climate Change Summit Dec 7-18

Suddenly there is a renewed world effort to achieve some measure of progress toward an agreement to replace the Kyoto Accord.

In preparation for the Copenhagen meeting, China's State Council says China will reduce its carbon intensity 40 to 45 percent by the year 2020 as compared to 2005 levels.

President Obama has announced that he intends to attend and is expected to make a provisional pledge to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020.

Canada's announced goal is 20% reduction in GHG by 2020, compared to 2006 levels, and it appears that Prime Minister Harper will attend the Copenhagen conference.

The key objective many people believe the Copenhagen agreement must include are commitments to

• prevent the earth's temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit)
• cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% by 2050, with at least 80 percent of the reduction coming from developed nations.

With these agreements in Copenhagen, it may be possible to arrive at a final treaty by the end of 2010, at a meeting likely to take place in Mexico.