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www.americainfra.com • Q1 2010
High-speed rail, floating airports and urban cable cars: what will America’s transport future really look like? THE GATHERING STORM
POWER SURGE
FOOTING THE BILL
Are we prepared for the infrastructure challenges posed by climate change?
Andres Carvallo on Austin Energy’s smart grid 2.0
Resolving the issue of infrastructure financing
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FROM THE EDITOR 7
Future shock We don’t know what lies ahead, so maybe it’s best to keep our options open
W
e don’t have a particularly good record when it comes to predicting the future. Fans of sci-fi films from the 50’s and 60’s would have been very disappointed to make it to a 21st century still devoid of rocket boots, robot butlers and regular trips to the moon. Less fanciful forecasts have proved themselves to be equally misguided. Consider Thomas Watson’s statement from 1943: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” That Watson was then IBM chairman serves to illustrate how wide of the mark our predictions often are. It’s easy to laugh at these kinds of missteps, but the truth is that it is extremely difficult to accurately divine what our world will look like in a decade’s time, much less in 50 years. It’s a particular problem when it comes to infrastructure planning, which concerns systems that may remain in use for generations. The wake of the fi-
nancial crisis has brought with it a renewed focus on infrastructure, with the administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act seeking to emulate FDR’s New Deal in using infra spending as a tool of economic regeneration. In the position we currently find ourselves, it is important that we separate the long-term and short-term goals of the nearly $800 billion pledged by ARRA. Right now, a key priority is getting people to work and stimulating the economy, but it is vital that we also take this opportunity to invest in ideas that might not fully pay off until many years down the road. Take high-speed rail. With an investment of just $15 billion, it forms a pretty small chunk of the total ARRA award, yet it has drawn plenty of criticism from those who label it as too expensive and simply not necessary. It’s true that while fuel costs remain reasonably low, HSR is going to have a hard time getting Americans out of cars and planes. But oil is a finite resource and no one can seriously argue that this
status quo will persist indefinitely. More efficient vehicles or alternative sources of energy could provide solutions in the coming years, but a growing network of fast trains between major population centers could also have its part to play. We may not see the benefits for a long time, but can we confidently predict that this investment will never justify itself? One of the main causes of the recent economic crisis was a blinkered focus on short-term goals, with scant attention being paid to the longterm consequences of our actions. It would be a terrible shame if our response to it showed a similar lack of foresight. n
Huw Thomas, Editor
“The smart grid is a conduit to
“Imagine whisking through towns at
“For Orlando and Tampa, the only
enabling and accelerating more
speeds over 100 miles an hour,
real way to connect those two right
energy efficiency and accelerating
walking only a few steps to public
now is Interstate Four. Having the
renewable energy at the central
transportation, and ending up just
high-speed rail line in place will
power plant level, but also at the
blocks from your destination. Imagine
provide a definite improvement to
distribution level. You need the smart
what a great project that would be to
that corridor” Florida DOT’s Kevin
grid for all that to come together”
rebuild America” President Barack
Thibault (p118)
Austin Energy’s Andres Carvallo (p40)
Obama (p100)
CONTENTS_feb10 11/02/2010 15:05 Page 8
CONTENTS 8
FUTURE TRANSPORT
The climate challenge As the effects of climate change put our nation’s infrastructure at increasing risk, the need to develop an effective adaptation policy has never been greater
100 Mixed signals? As the administration unveils its plans for high-speed rail, US Infrastructure investigates whether the reality can live up to the rhetoric
104
32
Plane sailing
134
Adam Englund talks to Stacey Sheppard about his futuristic vision of an offshore floating airport for San Diego
108 No strings attached? Could cable driven vehicles really be the answer to the 21st century city’s urban transport challenges?
Investing for success Emilia Istrate and Robert Puentes of the Brookings Institution examine ways to improve the federal government’s infrastructure investment process
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74
A perfect fit
66
Keeping it real
40 First off the mark
66 Keeping it real
Andres Carvallo explains how Austin Energy’s aggressive pursuit of new smart grid technologies has put it at the forefront of the utility revolution
Michael Morris takes a pragmatic approach to renewable energy
52 Power play
88
Crystal clear?
SILVER SPONSOR
74 A perfect fit Rhone Resch looks at solar’s place in the energy puzzle
Politics and the smart grid
60 Virtual reality Larry Clinton explains that critical infrastructure protection is not purely a physical security issue
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION 44 Smart grid With SAP’s Maureen Coveney, Jack Danahy of IBM, OSISoft’s Patrick Kennedy, AT&T’s Don Troxell and Malcolm Unsworth of Itron
80 Current risks
88 Crystal clear?
Dawn Kristof Champney explains how aging water infrastructure, public health concerns and funding legislation make water a matter of national security
Cynthia Dougherty of the EPA talks about the state of the nation’s water infrastructure
ASK THE EXPERT 78 Pete Resler, BP Solar 84 Ian Macleod, Master Meter, Inc. 86 Chuck Scholpp, Hach Company 132 Dominic Li, TruePosition
INDUSTRY INSIGHT 64 Mike Brown, Matrikon Inc. 72 Barry Batson, MasTec Inc 92 Jennifer Muller, Trojan Technologies 130 Matt Jackson, Polycom
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CONTENTS 12
116 Security’s next wave
EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW 58 Matt Nelson, AvaLAN Wireless Systems 112 Bryan Boettger, PIPS Technology 126 Louis Demargne, Fugro EarthData
94 Pipe dreams Wayne Klotz explains why the US water system is in such poor shape and what needs to be done to turn things around
118 Destination: Florida As government investment flows into the state, Florida DOT’s Kevin Thibault explains that high-speed rail is only one part of the transportation picture
122 Linking technology to land management Stig Enemark explains the importance of suitable infrastructure and sustainable land administration
114 Driving smart Caroline Visser of the International Road Federation details the benefits of intelligent transportation systems
IN THE BACK
The futuristic technology that helps Schiphol Airport fight terrorism
128 Public safety progress Wireless broadband technologies will play an increasingly important role in the public safety applications segment
138 Project focus: ASCE top five 141 Opinion: The sustainability bubble 142 In review: Hot off the press 144 Photo finish: Las Vegas Aria Resort and Casino
40
First off the mark Virtual reality
60
Security’s next wave
116
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UPFRONT THE BRIEF
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REBUILDING A NATION The scale of the magnitude 7.0 earthquake that struck Haiti at 16:53 on January 12, 2010 has shocked, saddened and horrified the world. The international community has responded by launching a much needed humanitarian aid effort to help locate and rescue the huge number of Haitians af-
fected by the disaster. Confusion over the death toll has arisen after conflicting reports put figures anywhere between 170,000 and 230,000. Figures are unconfirmed as to how many people have been injured, but hundreds of thousands of Haitians are taking refuge in makeshift shelters in Port-au-Prince. But the relief effort is no short-term undertaking and the
complete devastation that has now It is likely that billions of dolleft the country in ruins is exlars will be required to build pected to take years to new homes and govrectify, not to menernment buildings Conflicting reports put the tion the billions of in Port-au-Prince death toll anywhere dollars that will be and the surbetween required for reconrounding area struction. Haiti’s where 75 percent infrastructure – what of the buildings and230,000 little of it there was bewere destroyed leaving fore the quake – has been approximately one million more or less destroyed. homeless Haitians. Many of the
170,000
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UPFRONT
THE BRIEF
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buildings that collapsed were poorHaitian capital, providing up to ly designed and built – most were 175,000 survivors with clean, lacking any steel reinforcement or safe water. proper foundations. Renewables are stepping up The difficult task of transand delivering the much needed porting aid to those in desperate power that traditional sources of need of help was further exacerenergy are failing to provide. But bated by the fact that roads have the role of renewables in Haiti been blocked by piles of rubble could extend far beyond this iniand the huge volume of people tial recovery period. Although it trying to move out of or around may not seem like it right now in the capital. It is estimated that the face of a disaster that has had clearing the debris from around such a high human cost, there Port-au-Prince alone could take may be a silver lining to this up to a year. tragedy. Many of history’s great While the main airport in Portnatural disasters have provided a au-Prince was not rendered inactive catalyst for positive change. by the disaster, it was not As Haiti continues to be equipped to deal with the demolished by the men The volume of flights rewho are finishing existing system quired by the relief efwhat nature began, only provided fort. Port-au-Prince’s there is talk about main port was badly the opportunity to of the population of damaged and other rebuild the infraPort-au-Prince with ports in the area have structure on a more clean water only been able to accept solid and equitable smaller vessels. footing. As the reconstrucThere is an acute shortage of tion beings, expanding the role of drinking water in areas affected by renewables in Haiti could make it the earthquake. The water supply more resilient in the face of future system, which even before the disnatural disasters. It would also be aster only provided 40 percent of an affordable way to increase access the population of Port-au-Prince in a country where – even before with clean water, has effectively the quake – only 25 percent of the collapsed, as has the electricity grid. population had regular access to Communication networks have electricity. also suffered as phone lines and inThe opportunity also exists ternet connections were brought to reconstruct the buildings of down across most of Haiti. Haiti using tried and tested The complete loss of Haiti’s building codes that incorporate power grid has resulted in solarsound design criteria and conpowered equipment for water, struction standards in a hope that lighting and communications they too could withstand any fubeing sent to the island to power ture quakes. the reconstruction efforts. Despite the tragedy that we Everything from solar powered have witnessed, this may yet prolights to solar powered ovens and vide the opportunity for Haiti – a cell phones are being sent to the country that has for so long existcountry. Solar modules have been ed on the edge of disaster – to rise donated to Water Missions from the ruins a more socially, enInternational (WMI), and will vironmentally and economically power 10 pump stations in the sustainable island.
NEWS IN PICTURES
Democratic Senator Dick Durbin recently announced $1.2 billion of federal funding for Illinois to bring a high-speed passenger rail service to the state by 2014.
40%
Work has began on a $7 million facelift of the Sunset Strip after the City of West Hollywood received $1 million in federal funds from the Federal American Reinvestment and Recovery Act for the beautification project.
Trucks move through flood waters in southbound lanes of the 710 freeway as it is shut down during the evening rush hour after the second storm of the week moved through Long Beach, California on January 19, 2010.
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UNDER THE BRIDGE Building work has just started on what is set to be the longest sea-bridge in the world. The 30-mile Hong KongZhuhai-Macau Bridge, which is due for completion in 2016, will cost $10.3 billion to build, can handle earthquakes of magnitude 8.0, and withstand the impact of a 300,000-tonne vessel. The six-lane expressway that will link China's southern economic hub of Guangdong province to Hong Kong and Macau will enable traffic to travel at around 60 mph, reducing the traveling time between these economic powerhouses to half an hour, compared to three or four hours it takes now. It is hoped that this will boost the area around Zhuhai, which has traditionally been overlooked in favor of manufacturing zones like Shenzhen or Dongguan. The design work for the project – one of the most technically complicated projects in transport history – is being done by British-based engineering group Arup. Naeem Hussain, Arup’s global bridge leader, told UK newspaper The Independent that the project threw up considerable difficulties. “The challenging part in terms of design was trying to have the minimal environmental impact.”
A SLOW STARTER Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh promised to improve infrastructure, following criticism from the world's biggest steelmaker Arcelor Mittal who rebuked the country over delays in getting projects off the ground. Infrastructure bottlenecks have long been blamed for slowing the growth of Asia's third-largest economy. Whilst China has forged ahead with world-class infrastructure, its smaller neighbor still suffers from power cuts, deteriorating roads and overcrowded ports. India has previously admitted that investment of $500 billion is needed in infrastructure by 2012 and has recently renewed its commitment to develop roads with a target of building 12 miles per day.
SPENDING SPREE Dubai's transport department has announced that it will spend up to 7.5 billion dirhams ($2.04 billion) in 2010 on projects despite the fact that Mattar al Tayyer, chairman of Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority, said that he expects revenues in 2010 to reach a mere 3.3 billion dirhams. The spending will be spread over 120 projects, the large majority of which are already under construction. The Rail Agency will be allocated 46 percent of the budget, whilst 29 percent will go to the Traffic & Roads Agency, and 13 percent to the Public Transport Agency. The remaining 12 percent will go to licensing, marine agencies and corporate support services.
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UPFRONT
INTERNATIONAL NEWS
INTEGRATED GRID
19
MOVING ON
FLYING HIGH
In order to utilize wind power and cut down on carbon emissions, nine countries including the UK have signed up to develop an integrated offshore grid in the North and Irish Seas.
The Ivory Coast is to receive a $112,000 grant from the World Bank in order to to help restore movement on highways across the country, with a further $1.2 million to be added later this year.
Viracopos airport in São Paulo state's Campinas city is to receive 61million reals (US$33 million) from the government’s 2010 federal budget for an ambitious expansion plan.
The agreement – entitled the “The North Seas Countries’ Offshore Grid Initiative” – was signed by UK energy and climate change minister Lord Hunt along with ministers from Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Sweden and Ireland. The declaration highlights the role offshore wind energy can play in meeting the EU's 2020 targets and the benefits an integrated offshore grid can bring in terms of security of supply and market integration.
Road blocks and control points that are operated by the army are the main cause of bottlenecks and delays on the highway, making it difficult for a free flow of people and goods. The funds will be used to finance a campaign for ease of movement on the highways, launched by the government in 2008.
Overcrowding at neighboring air-
Governments all round the continent have been investing in wind technology, with the UK government announcing $7.8 million in new grants for offshore wind research.
The builders of the toll highway, which is shortly going to be constructed between the Ivory Coast and Burkina Faso, are currently discussing ways to improve movement on the highways and feasibility studies are already in progress. Koné Souleymane, technical consultant, explained to journalists from Abidjan.net that the studies have shown that “users are ready to pay (to use the motorway) but on condition that the unofficial road blocks no longer exist.”
ports has left Viracopos in dire need of improvements so that it can cope with higher passenger numbers as airlines are slowly being redirected there. Of the total 61million reals approved, 40 million reals will be used to build a second runway, 19.7million reals for airport infrastructure expansion and 1.34 million reals for rehabilitation of the existing runway, which is due to be completed this year. The second runway will be completed by 2012, while the infrastructure expansion will be done by 2015. Future investments include a new passenger terminal, cargo aircraft parking areas, parking lots, waste treatment facilities, a railway station and an industrial area. This should provide a passenger capacity of nine million per year. The construction of a third runway is scheduled for completion by 2025. Once completed, it will have an annual capacity of 61million passengers and 570,000 takeoff and landings.
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SNOW BUSINESS
also due to a lack of available funding that has been allocated to snow The dream of a white Christmas removal activities. played rapidly turned into a The economic crisis has led to nightmare for many across the budget cuts and many counties, United States as heavy snowfall cities and states across America are played havoc with transportation feeling the pinch. Salt has been ranetworks. A country that tioned, side roads are not is usually well prebeing ploughed and pared for such public works proKansas City events found jects have been has already spent itself lacking cancelled for fear its entire the necessary of running out of resources to money to clear winter snow deal with the roads, according removal budget onset of severe to The New York storms that hit much Times. of the country. In Kansas City, Mo., the $2.5 One of the main reasons that million allocated for the entire winstorm clean-up operations have ter’s snow removal budget, includnot run so smoothly this winter is ing overtime pay for workers and not only down to the severity of the chemicals used to combat the the winter weather conditions but snow, has already been spent.
$2.5 million
FURTHER READING In the latest issue of EU Infrastructure we explored the ambitious engineering plans that are being put forward to save Venice from the rising sea levels and subsiding land that are threatening to sink it. To read the stories from this issue, head to www.euinfrastructure.com
AN EASTERLY WIND
FAST FACT
Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “Twenty percent wind is an amA recently released government report states that 20 percent of the elec- bitious goal,” said David Corbus, the tricity needed to power households project manager for the study. “We can bring more wind power onand businesses in the eastern line, but if we don't have half of the United the proper infrastrucStates could come ture to move that from wind power around, it's power by 2024. like buying a hyHowever, this of high tech brid car and leavprogress will not power lines are ing it in the garage.” come cheap and needed The study also is estimated to rereported that wind generquire up to $90 billion in ation capacity in the eastern grid investment to install onshore and offshore wind turbines as well as would need to increase tenfold from 22,000 miles of new high-tech power current levels in order to reach the lines, according to the Energy 20 percent threshold by 2024.
20,000 miles
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) estimates a global infrastructure investment need of
$1.8 trillion Source: OECD
a year
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UPFRONT
HACKERS REVENGE
COMPANY NEWS
As if our infrastructure didn’t have enough to deal with, a new study has now revealed that critical infrastructure may now be at the mercy of hackers. McAfee Inc surveyed 600 executives and technology managers from infrastructure operators in 14 countries and found that more than half have had their computer networks infiltrated by sophisticated criminals. The findings of the survey reveal the damage that can be caused to critical facilities such as power grids, water and sewage systems, and oil and gas companies. In such cases hackers are able to break into systems and plant malicious software allowing them to disrupt service. Floods, oil leaks, power outages and sewage spills could all result from the malicious manipulation of vital computer systems. In April last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Chinese and Russian spies had penetrated the electric grid leaving behind software that could be used to damage infrastructure during times of crisis or war. Utilities are increasingly putting themselves at risk of threats from hackers as they connect parts of their operations to the internet.
21
INCREASING SAFETY AND EFFICIENCY The safe and efficient routing of oversized infrastructure. Intergraph’s complete system and overweight vehicles are a key component allows Oklahoma to automatically generate of successful Department of Transportation safe travel routes, share temporary changes in operations. An automated system can stream- road conditions in real-time, and log routes for line workflow processes, improve the safety of simple tracking and improved infrastructure vehicle movements, and help preserve trans- management – all through an easy-to-use, portation infrastructure. web-based application. The Oklahoma Department of Based on Intergraph’s Transportation Transportation (DOT) and Department of Solution, the new OS/OW routing application Public Safety automated their oversized/overleverages roadway and bridge data for restricweight (OS/OW) vehicle routing tive routing, which ensures vehicles functions with an integrated can pass safely. Specific funcRoad,rail and transportation solution from tions enabled by this comtransit agencies,as Intergraph. “We are bined application include well as airports and pleased that Intergraph has online automated routing, seaports,use offered a turnkey solution restriction management and for oversized/overweight route logging. transportation routing that will further Road, rail and transit solutions boost our productivity, enagencies, as well as airports and hance driver safety, help manage seaports, use Intergraph transportaour infrastructure and improve the economic tion solutions to manage and maintain their viability of Oklahoma’s commercial trans- networks, keep systems up and running, and portation industry,” said Jay Adams, chair- make key management decisions about work man of the selection committee for OS/OW priorities and budget allocations. The routing at Oklahoma DOT. Intergraph OS/OW routing application is ofIntergraph’s automated routing solution fered standalone, or may be combined with apenables DOTs to create safe OS/OW routing plications from partners. The solution can also for vehicles moving through their jurisdiction, be integrated with existing applications already meeting the expectations of the commercial in place. trucking industry while balancing the safety For further information please visit needs of the motoring public and protecting www.intergraph.com/transportation/solutions.aspx
Intergraph
THE BIG APPLE’S ROTTEN CORE FAST FACT
16% of commuters in the US have considered leaving their job because of commuting time Source: Regus
New York state officials recently announced that repairs to the tens of thousands of miles of aging sewer and water treatment systems could cost the city billions of dollars over the next twenty years. New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation estimates that sewage-treatment infrastructure is in need of an estimated $36.2 billion in repairs over the next 20 years whilst a similar state Health Department study estimated that drinking water infrastructure requires an investment of
approximately $38 billion over the same time frame. The poor condition of water and wastewater infrastructure is sadly something that often goes unnoticed as the large majority of it is hidden underground. This makes the probability of receiving local funding a little less likely. In 2009, New York’s total spending on wastewater infrastructure was $1 billion, $400 million of which was grants. That will be down to $700 million in 2010, with $117 million in grants.
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UPFRONT COMPANY NEWS
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REGIONAL SOLUTIONS TO GRANT FUNDING SUCCESS
TOP 10
tional 911 funds may not be available, but are There is always money… The difference is how you aware that there are many other sources of one goes about designing a solution to qualify for funding that can be used for safety, security and that money. Strengthen your odds by adapting job enhancement solutions? Now, more than your public safety objectives to cover not only ever, government agencies are seeking cross911, but Emergency Management and agency, multi-jurisdictional collaborative soluInfrastructure Protection. tions as recipients of their funding dollars. Realize that one size does not fit all. Not all While there are websites with information cities and counties have the same problems, pofor nearly every US government grant tential threats or population size. Each program, www.grants.gov is the potential market needs to be anacentral storehouse for informalyzed and it’s crucial to consider tion on more than 1000 grant the demographics of the area. programs and provides access Areas with high unemployment is available to approximately $500 billion in are eligible for Department of in annual awards annual awards. Labor grants if an E911 PSAP Make certain you meet the could provide employment. Areas submissions guidelines and that your with volunteer fire departments are eliapplication is complete. Every year, hundreds of gible for volunteer fire department funding. applicants lose out simply because they couldn’t Aged communities need to be certain that area manage these simple tasks. Once you have the hospitals and Emergency Management needs grant, don’t forget to put a plan in place for adare funded. ministering the funds and providing timely reThere has never been a more pressing time to ports back to the funding agency. “regionalize.” Regional solutions across political
$500 billion
10 countries with the best infrastructure as voted by the World Economic Forum in their Global Competitiveness Report 2009-2010
1 2 3 4 5
6
7 8 9 10
Germany
Hong Kong SAR
jurisdictions are funded solutions. Your tradi-
For more information please visit www.plantcml.com
France
ON YOUR BIKE Singapore
Switzerland
United Arab Emirates
Canada
United States
Austria
Finland
Long Beach declared itself the most bicycle friendly city in America in January, and whilst leaders admit that this proclamation may be a little premature they are certainly making progress in this direction. Whilst many other cities are cutting costs across the board, Long Beach has raised $17 million in state and federal grants to improve its bike
system. In the next few months, the city will resurface 20 miles of streets to include new bike lanes, part of a plan that includes painting and paving more than 100 miles of bike infrastructure. The city plans to replace entire lanes of traffic with protected bikeways and in a controversial move prime parallel parking spots will be replaced with on-street bicycle parking.
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AMERICA BUILDS Though work has slowed on major commercial developments as a result of the downturn, there remain a number of major projects currently underway. US Infrastructure takes a sampling of some of the biggest construction efforts happening right now.
NYC WATER TUNNEL 3
KENT HILLS FACILITY
Project: Deep beneath the crowded streets of New York City, one of the world’s most ambitious engineering projects is underway. Commenced way back in 1970, the tunnel will eventually stretch over 60 miles from the Kensico Reservoir in Westchester County. It will supply water to eight million residents and thousands of businesses in Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn and burrows between 450 and 800 feet below the surface, 16 times deeper than the average subway tunnel.
Project: Over the border in Canada, TransAlta Corp. are adding an additional 54 megawatts of wind generation capacity to the 94 megawatts already available at the New Brunswick site. At a cost of around $93 million, 18 three megawatt Vestas turbines will be erected, generating 160,000 megawatt hours per year, enough to power as many as 9000 homes in Canada and the US. The Kent Hills facility has been operational since 2008.
Cost: $6 billion Completion: 2020
Cost: $93 million Completion: 2010
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UPFRONT
PROJECT FOCUS
I-95 WIDENING Project: Work to add a fourth lane on a six mile stretch of the I95 between Route 123 and Fairfax County Parkway has been underway since March 2008. The project will alleviate bottlenecks on this congested section of road and improve traffic flow around the busy Springfield interchange. To limit the impact that a greater number of vehicles passing through will have on the area, new sound walls will limit traffic noise along the corridor. Cost: $123 million Completion: 2011
25
WORLD TRADE CENTER
NIANTIC RIVER BRIDGE
Project: Beset by controversy and delays, the flagship building at what has come to be known as Ground Zero, has already taken longer to build than the two towers that once occupied the site. Original timetables predicted that the 408 foot spire that would give the structure an overall height of 1776 feet would be topped out by the end of 2011. That estimate has now been revised down by around two years. Safety features are obviously key for the new structure. It is set further back from the street than its predecessor and boasts features such as reinforced concrete stairwells, emergency stairs designed specifically for firefighters and tempered blast resistant plastic windows.
Project: The single biggest standard rail project to be funded by the Obama administration’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The 102 year old drawbridge over the Niantic River in Connecticut will be demolished and replaced with a new two-track electrified railroad bridge linking East Lyme to Waterford. The bridge’s replacement has been on the agenda for over 20 years, but a lack of capital funding from Amtrak has delayed the project until now. The new bridge will allow faster travel times and will be built higher than its predecessor, allowing better navigation for shipping.
Cost: $3.1 billion Completion: 2013
Cost: $105 million (approx) Completion: 2013
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UPFRONT 26 LISA JACKSON, ADMINISTRATOR, ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY Currently serving as the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Jackson is regarded as one of the most powerful women in US environmental politics. Officially nominated by President Obama in December 2008, she was confirmed through unanimous consent of the US Senate in January 2009. Beginning her career with the EPA in 1986, Jackson has always been at the forefront of environmental strategies. During her tenure at the EPA, she worked on the federal Superfund program, developing hazardous waste clean-up regulations and overseeing projects throughout New Jersey, later becoming Deputy Director and Acting Director of the region’s enforcement division. Delving further into politics, Jackson joined the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in 2002 as Assistant Commissioner of Compliance and Enforcement and headed numerous programs such as land use regulation, water supply and geological surveys. Most notable was the department’s creation of standards for the Highlands Water Protection and Planning Act. Becoming Commissioner of Environmental Protection was the logical next step for Jackson, and she led a team of 2990 professionals responsible for protecting New Jersey’s natural and historic resources. She actively aimed to aid those communities that had long been neglected, and led numerous compliance sweeps on areas heavily affected by pollution, such as Camden and Patterson. Opinion regarding strong enforcement was divided at that time, and she received much criticism from those working on toxic clean-ups at the local level. She became Chief of Staff to the Governor of New Jersey, handling all state operations and political liaisons for the governor, before being appointed to her federal position by the President. In her role at the EPA, she is currently attempting to push through the Clean Air Act. The act declares CO2 to be a public health threat and paves the way for the government to impose taxes on US businesses producing large amounts of CO2. It is expected to provide the basis for cap and trade. The suppression of a report in June brought Jackson under question. It was alleged she was involved in withholding data written by Alan Carlin that was unsupportive of climate change. Senator John Barrosso of Wyomng has also accused her of taking decisions based “more on political calculations than scientific ones”. Combine that with damning reports from DEP employees, and her time in federal government is likely to be a colorful one.
PROFILE
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TOP 100 GLOBAL INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS BY SECTOR
11% Electricity
8%
TOP 10
4% Oil & Gas
29%
Surface Transportation
HSR
9% Airports
4% Water & WW
World’s 10 most expensive airports Source: www.iata.org
7% Ports
16% Renewables
13% UMT
NEW YORK’S NEW WIND Plans for what could be the nation’s largest offshore wind farm are gaining pace in New York. The Long Island / New York City Offshore Wind Collaborative, a group of utilities and government agencies, recently announced that it will be requesting proposals from developers this year and said that it has already heard from 30 developers potentially interested in such a project. The 350-megawatt wind farm near the Rockaway Peninsula and 13 miles from Queens is expected to cost more than $1 billion and involve more than 100 turbines. Operating at 30 percent of its capacity a 350megawatt wind facility would generate about 920,000 megawatt-hours per year, enough energy for over 250,000 homes. This is not that first time that the Long Island Power Authority has proposed such a project. In 2007, plans for an $800 million project were rejected due to local
Source: CG/LA Infrastructure
opposition. However, supporters of the project are hoping that this time around it will get the support required to finance the project and have a fully operational wind farm connected to the grid by 2015. In December, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg visited the world’s largest offshore wind farm, which is situated near Esbjerg, about 180 miles west of Copenhagen in Denmark. He is hoping to overcome the main hurdle facing many offshore wind proposals in the US, which is opposition from local communities who see them as eyesores.
1 2 3 4 5
6
7 8 9 10
Toronto
Athens
New Jersey-EWR
London-LHR
Paris-CDG
Vancouver
Osaka
Vienna
Zurich
Berlin
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UPFRONT 28
TRACK AND TRACE How do airports keep track of millions of bags from scores of carriers to meet today’s all-encompassing security requirements? For LAX the answer is revolutionary new software integrating GPS, scanning, and schedules movement messages for a true realtime, track and trace solution. Developed by Aviation Software, Inc (ASI) for Aero Port Services in October of 2009, the new software manages over six million bags from 43 airlines. A strong combination of GPS monitoring, daily patrol by internal staff, and service level agreements work in tandem to optimize customer experiences and the overall baggage transport process. ASI’s premier RFID-ready solution, InterBAG provides real-time internet-based GPS information, airline movement messages and itinerary and baggage messages for intelligent decision support. Using real-time data from BSM, SIMM and MOV messages in conjunction with alert messaging, multi-directional communication, and immediate data availability, APS now has the tools and support to track every bag traveling to and from LAX
COMPANY NEWS THAT SINKING FEELING Global warming and rising sea levels are putting the ports of California at considerable risk. According to a report by the California State Lands Commission, sea levels are expected to rise by 16 inches over the next 40 years, causing flooding and endangering facilities throughout the state. A total of 40 ports and shipping hubs were surveyed for the report and the majority admitted that they are nowhere near prepared to cope with such a rise, which could see sea levels increase by 55 inches by the year 2100. Officials are stressing the need to prepare for such scenarios now rather than facing the consequences further down the line. Experts have responded saying that some preparations would come naturally from the need to service ships of increasing size and height.
FAST FACT
InterBAG benefits include:
Reduced lost bag claims and labor costs Ease for staff to secure the status of any bag at any time Reduced misconnections and late bag deliveries Secure bag monitoring from airport arrival through carrier pick up Fully audited control over every step of the baggage process Real-time “flight hold” decisions based on in-bound flight connections “The addition of products for the airport industry is a logical evolution of our traditional efforts to offer any software solution our aviation clients voice a need for,” said ASI president, Gordon Rosen. “Our blend of technology with operations adds efficiency and accountability to the interline baggage operation.” For more information please visit www.aviation-software.net.
The Rhode Island DOT needs $639.5 million annually to preserve its highway system. The state has only $354 million available each year to meet the need – leaving an annual funding gap of
$285 million Source: The American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials
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Division. “Working cooperatively with the water utility industry and researchers from Aging water and wastewater infrastructure within EPA and universities will help identify is to get a helping hand from the EPA, which a new generation of technologies to determine has awarded $10 million of funding to the the condition of the pipes, improve rehabilitaWater Environment Research Foundation tion techniques, and optimize replacement (WERF) through its Aging Water schedules. The overall goal is to Infrastructure Research reduce the cost to the nation’s Much Program. WERF will use the cities.” of our water money to evaluate new techinfrastructure is Source: Water Environment nologies that could help Research Foundation (WERF) take the pressure off aging the end of its water systems. useful life Of the money allocated, $6.25 million will be used to address wastewater and stormwater infrastructure research and $3.75 million will be spent on the aging drinking water systems. Research will mainly focus on innovative tools and procedures that can promote cost-effective improvements in maintenance, rehabilitation and replacement of sewer lines and water mains. “Much of our water infrastructure is approaching the end of its useful life. Citizens are usually not aware of the poor condition of these systems because they are mostly underground,” said Thomas Speth, director of the National Risk Management Research Laboratory’s Water Supply and Water Resources
WATER’S GOOD FORTUNE
approaching
BUILDING AMERICA In a speech given at The Next American Economy conference, Governor Schwarzenegger expressed his commitment to rebuilding California through infrastructure investment. “I've pushed and pushed and pushed since I became governor to rebuild California. And as you know, we have been very successful,” said Governor Schwarzenegger. “All together, we’re talking about $70 billion since I have come into of-
fice. There is no state in the United States that even comes remotely close to that kind of a commitment to rebuilding their state.” In his speech he highlighted the fact that America was falling behind on infrastructure investment while countries such as China were aggressively pursuing some of the most advanced and sophisticated infrastructure projects. “Now, I think that America can do much better. We always have led the world and I think we ought to do it again in infrastructure,” he said.
IMPROVED ACTIVITY In a recent poll by Ernest & Young LLP, CFO’s of some of the largest construction and engineering contractors in the country reported that they do see improving activity over the next year or so in infrastructure-related sectors such as transportation, power and renewable energy, water, sewer, waste and environmental/hazardous waste construction, healthcare and education. A little more than half of those surveyed reported they have already been awarded federal contracts funded using government stimulus money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Among geographic regions, Asia, particularly China, and Australia are perceived to hold the best opportunities for contractors to increase their business in 2010. Respondents see some potential in the US, but less in Africa, Europe, and Latin America. Source: www.areadevelopment.com
NUCLEAR REACTION In his State of the Union address President Barack Obama made no secret of his positive opinion towards nuclear energy as he called for a new generation of nuclear plants. His spending plan for the next budget year is expected to include billions more dollars in federal guarantees for new nuclear reactors. Obama reaffirmed his commitment to creating more clean-energy jobs by building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in the US and he is expected to seek $54 billion to pay for this. The United States now has 104 operating reactors, which generate about 20 per cent of the US electricity supply. In order to meet the 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050 many more will need to be brought into operation. The EPA estimates that 180 new reactors will be needed by that date.
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GOLDEN STATE GOES GREEN
California has taken the lead in trying to trim nationwide emissions by introducing a mandatory state-wide 'green building' code. Known as CALGREEN, The Green Building Standards Code, was unanimously passed by the California Building Standards Commissions and will aim to cut statewide emissions by a third by 2020. It will take effect on January 1, 2011 and will cover all areas of construction, from the materials to their disposal. The new code states that all new buildings will have to reduce their water usage by 20 percent and recycle 50 percent of their construction waste instead of putting it in landfills. Any commercial buildings will be forced to have separate water meters for indoor and outdoor water use, whilst inspections of air conditioner, heat and mechanical equipment will be mandatory for all commercial buildings over 10,000 square feet. The only exception will be hospitals, which will not be required to meet the new regulations. Currently, only 10 percent of the state’s cities have adopted any environmental building regulations but those that have implemented a more stringent green code will be allowed to retain their standards in the face of the new rules. With support from building firms, it is hoped that three million metric tons of emissions will be removed from the air by 2020.
DON’T MISS...
40 FIRST OFF THE MARK Andres Carvallo explains how Austin Energy’s aggressive pursuit of new smart grid technologies has put it at the forefront of the utility revolution
COMPANY INDEX Q1 2010 Companies in this issue are indexed to the first page of the article in which each is mentioned. ADS Environmental 97
America 112
Polycom 130, 131
American Electric Power 66
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Radio IP Software 129
ASCE 80, 94, 138
Change 32
Resources for the Future 32
AT&T 2, 44
Intergraph 4, 21
SAP 44, 47
Austin Energy 40
International Federation of
Schiphol Airport 116
AvaLAN Wireless Systems 58, 59
Surveyors (FIG) 122
Skygone 125
Aviation Software Inc. 28, 29
International Road Federation 114
Solar Energy Industries
BNSF Logistics
Internet Security Alliance 60
Association 74
BP Solar 78, 79
Itron IFC, 44
Trojan Technologies 6, 92, 93
Brookings Institution 134
MasTec Inc 11, 72,73
TruePosition 132, 133
Creative Urban Projects 108
Master Meter, Inc. 84, 85
Water and Wastewater Equipment
Environmental Protection Agency 87, 88
Matrikon Inc. 64, 65
Manufacturers Association
Euphlotea 104
National Climatic Data Center 32
(WWEMA) 80
Florida DOT 118
National Commission on Energy Policy 32
Frost & Sullivan 128
Oak Ridge National Laboratory 52
Fugro EarthData, Inc 126, 127
Oliver Wyman 52
Hach Company 13, 86, 87
OSIsoft LLC 44, 49, OBC
Huntsman Advanced 111
Pacific Crest 77
IBM 44, 51, IBC
PIPS Technology 9, 112, 113
Intelligent Transportation Society of
Plant CML 22, 23
15
66 KEEPING IT REAL Michael Morris takes a pragmatic approach to renewable energy
118 DESTINATION: FLORIDA As government investment flows into the state, Florida DOT’s Kevin Thibault explains that high-speed rail is only one part of the transportation picture
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CLIMATE CHANGE
The
challenge As the effects of climate change put our nation’s infrastructure at increasing risk, the need to develop an effective adaptation policy has never been greater.
I
t is no secret that the Earth’s climate is changing rapidly and the im-
pacts of rising global temperatures are proving to have serious, and in many cases, deadly consequences. For years now climate change experts the world over have been warning of these dangers, but it is only recently that they have had the ears of the global population. Concerns voiced by experts have long been countered with the argument that the Earth’s climate has always varied. But as measurements at the Earth's surface show that average temperatures have risen by some 0.4˚C since the 1970s, scientists are pointing a confident finger at human activity as the main cause of the variation. Rises in greenhouse gases in particular are being held responsible and the fight is now on to reduce our emissions before things spiral irreversibly out of control. It is thought that if green house gas emissions were to continue unabated, the continental United States is expected to warm one-third more than global averages, which, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is predicted to rise 1.1 to 6.4˚C by 2100. At the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit held in December of last year, hopes were high that a legally binding global agreement could be reached that would set out strict targets for the reduction of carbon emissions to address the situation. Whilst a legally binding treaty was not concluded at Copenhagen, the so-called Copenhagen accord that emerged does recognize the scientific case for keeping temperature rises to no more than 2˚C. But in
32 www.americainfra.com
a move that disappointed many of the 192 countries taking part in the summit, the accord does not contain commitments to emissions reductions to achieve that goal. However, politicians are optimistic that a legally binding treaty is foreseeable by December 2010. Whilst Copenhagen may not have been a total success, what can be said is that at least there appears to be widespread acceptance of the severity of the situation and the need for corrective action. However, evidence suggests that even if we were to cut emissions dramatically as of today, we would continue to see the consequences for years to come as CO2 can remain in the atmosphere for years. Cutting our emissions may well reduce the threats we face in the future, but in the meantime it is necessary that we focus on adaptation planning at the local, state, and national levels in order to limit the damage caused by climate change, as well as the long-term costs of responding to such disasters. According to the National Climatic Data Center, the US sustained 90 weather-related disasters between 1980 and 2008 in which overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion. The total normalized losses for the 90 events exceed $700 billion. The occurrence of adverse weather conditions and natural disasters is increasing in both frequency and severity and we are now confronted with the complex and difficult task of effectively adapting the infrastructure of the United States to deal with the impacts of climate change.
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Billion dollar weather disasters 1980-2008 Where do the billion dollar disasters occur?
Number of events 21 - 30 11 - 20 0 - 10
Hurricane
Severe weather
Nor’easter
Tropical storm
Blizzard
Ice storm
Flood
Fires
Heat wave / drought Freeze
Billion dollar US weather disasters 1980-1994 (Damage amounts in billions of dollars and costs normalized to 2007 dollars using GNP Ination/Wealth Index)
1980
1983
1985
1986
1988
1989
Drought/ Heat Wave
Hurricane Alicia
Florida Freeze
$2.3
Drought/ Heat Wave
Drought/ Heat Wave
Hurricane Hugo
$6.3 Florida Freeze
Hurricane Elena
$2.4
$71.2
$4.2
$2.5
N Plains Drought
Gulf Storms/ Flooding
Hurricane Juan
$55.4
$2.3 W Storms/ Flooding
$2.3
$2.9
$15.3 $1.7
Climate & Infra_ed_4August 10/02/2010 15:06 Page 35
SNAPSHOT
Hurricanes and Tropical Storms account for
51.7% of all damage caused
51.7%
Hurricanes / Tropical storms
4.7%
Severe weather
25.3%
Heatwaves / Droughts
9.9%
Non-tropical Floods
3.0%
Fires
2.6%
Freezes
1.7%
Blizzards
0.8%
Ice storms
0.3%
Nor’easter
A study of Mar yland’s coasta l vulnerability that 263 mile found s of the roadw ays are either will face regu at risk or lar inundation fro m addition, a to sea-level rise. tal of 176 mile In s of the railroa Maryland are ds in expected to be impacted, representing 11 percent of th e State’s tota l.
In deep water In terms of infrastructure, climate change poses an enormous threat to the critical framework of our nation. The main risks include all number of extreme events. As temperatures rise, so too will sea levels – the IPCC predicts a rise of 18 to 59cm by 2100 – and this will lead to an increase in coastal flooding and erosion. More than half of the nation’s population lives in the 17 percent of its land area bordering the coastlines, and a large portion of the nation’s transportation infrastructure is located in coastal plains. Many roads and rail lines were built along the coast in order to take advantage of level ground or long available rights-of-way. Similarly, many airports are situated in wetlands and other coastal areas that afford large expanses of level ground. Underground transit facilities are also at risk from flooding as many of the ventilation openings and access points are not sufficiently elevated. Low bridges may also be affected by rising sea levels and in the future they may no longer be able to provide the necessary clearance. Even if facilities are elevated or protected, the networked nature of the transport system means that they may still be rendered inoperable by sea-level rises. Highways may not be able to function if their approach ramps are underwater and ports may suffer too if their landside facilities – warehouses, container storage areas etc – and access are not adequately protected.
Percentage of damage caused
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
S Plains Drought
Hurricane Bob
Hurricane Andrew
E Storm/Blizzard
SE Ice Storm
$1.6
$1.6
$40.0
$7.9
$4.2
California Freeze
Oakland CA Firestorm
Hurricane Iniki
SE Drought/Heat Wave Tropical Storm Alberto
$5.5
$5.5
$2.7
$1.3
$1.4
Nor’easter
Midwest Flooding
Texas Flooding
$2.3
$30.2
$1.4
CA Wildfires
W Fire Season
$1.4
$1.4
Climate & Infra_ed_4August 10/02/2010 15:06 Page 36
CASE STUDY THE IMPACT OF CLIMATE CHANGE IN ALASKA Over the past 50 years, Alaska has warmed at more than twice the rate of the rest of the United States. In fact, no place on Earth is warming faster. As a result, the impacts of climate change are much more pronounced there. Due to the influence that the Earth’s polar region has on the climate and oceans across the globe, Alaska’s plight has gained widespread interest from the US and world leaders. Global warming is causing a number of worrying changes to take place in Alaska. Over the past 30 years, there has been a sharp reduction in the extent and duration of snow-cover, shorter river- and lake-ice seasons, melting of mountain glaciers, sea-ice retreat and thinning, permafrost retreat, and increased depth of summer thaw. The main consequences of these changes are increased coastal erosion, landslides, and sinking of the ground surface, and consequent disruption and damage to forests, buildings, infrastructure, and coastal communities. Permafrost underlies most of Alaska and projections state that thawing will accelerate with a predicted 10 to 30 feet of permafrost thawing by 2100. Recent studies have also estimated that over the past few decades there has been an arctic-wide reduction in annual average sea-ice extent of about five to 10 percent and a reduction in average thickness of about 10 to 15 percent. The retreat of sea ice has dangerous consequences as it allows larger storm surges to develop, increasing the risk of inundation and increasing erosion on coasts already made vulnerable by permafrost thawing. At 33,000 miles, Alaska has more coastline than the other 49 states put together. Increases in the frequency and intensity of storm surges and the
Home villagesodfeSstroyed by coas hishmaref tal errosio n in Alask
an
resulting coastal erosion puts many coastal villages at extreme risk. The General Accountability Office (GAO) estimates that 86 percent of native Alaskan villages are threatened by erosion and flooding. Many of these coastal towns are now facing the prospect of relocation at great expense. A study by the National Commission on Energy Policy, estimates that the cost of maintaining Alaska’s public infrastructure will rise by 10 to 20 percent by 2030, costing the state an additional $4 to $6 billion. However, the report also states that by 2030, strategic adaptation could reduce the costs imposed by warming from 0 to 13 percent, depending on the extent of warming. Strategic adaptation is therefore of paramount importance in Alaska.
Billion dollar US weather disasters 1995-2004 (Damage amounts in billions of dollars and costs normalized to 2007 dollars using GNP Inflation/Wealth Index)
1995
1996
1997
1998
CA Flooding
Blizzard/Flooding
New England Ice Storm
Hurricane Bonnie
$4.1
$4
Midwest Flood/ Tornadoes
$1.8
$1.3
SE Severe Wx
Hurricane Georges
$1.3
$7.4
MN Severe Storms/Hail
Texas Flooding
$1.9
$1.3
S Drought/Heat Wave
California Freeze
$9.5
$3.2
SE/SW Severe Wx
Pacific NW Flooding
$7.5
$1.3
Hurricane Marilyn
S Plains Drought
$2.9
$6.8
Hurricane Opal
Hurricane Fran
$4.1
$6.6
$1.3 N Plains Flooding
$4.8 W Coast Flooding
$3.9
Climate & Infra_ed_4August 10/02/2010 15:06 Page 37
Come rain or shine
Rising temperatures will also exert pressure on our infrastructure, both the structures themselves and their operational capabilities. Pavements will suffer from rutting, shoving and potholes whilst rail lines may buckle on very hot days. Airports will also fall victim to temperature rises as many will find that they lack the necessary runway length to take off on hot days when lift is decreased. High altitude airports will suffer most.
A further consequence of global warming will be changes in annual precipitation, which will not be consistent across the United States. In some areas there will be increased precipitation and therefore flooding, which could render stormwater facilities inadequate, degrade water infrastructure and lead to deteriorating water quality due to run-off and sedimentation. Conversely, in areas where precipitation decreases we will see a drying and shrinking of soil, which will affect the base under pavements and the foundations of many buildings. These changes in precipitation levels will also have adverse effects on much of the nation’s energy infrastructure. Large quantities of water are used
Nor’easter
$2.2
Ice storms
$5.9
Blizzards
$11.9
Freezes
$18.6
Fires
$21.2
Non-tropical floods
Storms have been taking their toll since time immemorial, but it is undeniable that recent years have seen an increase in the severity of storms and destruction caused. From hurricanes and tornadoes to tropical storms, all of these phenomena have the potential to damage and destroy our critical infrastructure. One of the most serious consequences of these There have been 90 weather related disasters causing more than $1 billion in storms can be the implication for emergency mandamages.Total damages have exceeded agement. The increased need to evacuate large portions of the local population from areas at risk from storm damage will inevitably require additional resources. Storms also pose a threat to our power and energy infrastructure. Onshore pipelines suffer disruptions at the hands of storm-induced power outages. Offshore pipelines, particularly those in shallower waters can also be at risk from the wave action and seabed erosion caused by hurricanes.
$711.5 billion
$70.5
Heatwaves / Droughts
$180.2
Severe weather
$33.7
Hurricanes / Tropical storms
Normalized damages (billions)
$367.3
400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0
Weathering the storm
Meltdown for hydroelectric power production, steam production, and for cooling of power plants. Energy is also used by the water sector for pumping, drinking water, and wastewater treatment. As climate continues to change, and water becomes increasingly scarce in many areas, competition for water will heat up. Meanwhile, as the climate continues to warm, demand for electricity will increase, particularly in the Southwest where the US population is increasing fastest. Ninety percent of our nation’s electricity is currently generated in coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants that require large amounts of water for cooling. This will put our energy infrastructure under a great amount of strain.
Climate change will also have a significant impact on freeze-thaw cycles, which will most likely shift in location and duration. Whilst areas that currently suffer damage from freeze-thaw effects will benefit to some extent from the warmer temperatures, there are other areas that will need to invest more in maintenance and repair as temperatures more often cross the freezing point as part of the daily temperature cycle. Some areas of the US are already experiencing far greater consequences of climate change, in particular the Arctic regions, which are warming at an alarming pace in comparison with the rest of the country. These northern latitudes must confront shorter winters, which result in the thawing of perContinued on page 39
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
AR – TN Tornadoes
Drought/ Heat Wave
Tropical Storm Allison
30-State Drought
Severe Winds/Hail
Hurricane Charley
OK – KS Tornadoes
$4.8
$5.6
$11.4
$1.8
$2.0
Western Fires
Midwest/OH ValleyHail/ Tornadoes
Western Fires
Severe Winds/ Tornadoes
$2.2
Severe Winds/ Tornadoes
$1.6
E Drought/Heat Wave
$1.2 Hurricane Floyd
$7.4
$2.4
$2.3 $1.9
$3.8
$16.5 Hurricane Frances
$9.9 Hurricane Ivan
$15.4 S California Wildfires
Hurricane Jeanne
$2.8
$7.7
Climate & Infra_ed_4August 10/02/2010 15:06 Page 38
CASE STUDY THE IMPACT OF CLIMATE CHANGE ON CALIFORNIA’S ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE California is also experiencing climate change impacts, including sea level rise, increasing temperatures, shifting precipitation trends, extreme weather conditions, increasing size and duration of wild fires, and earlier melting of the Sierra Nevada snowpack. All of these impacts have a great effect on the energy infrastructure of California, including supply, demand, conversion, delivery and use of energy. During the past century the sea-level along the coast of California has risen by about seven inches. Sea level rises are predicted to accelerate at significantly higher rates than previously expected. Recent estimates indicate that by 2050 sea-level rise could range from 11 to 18 inches higher than 2000 and by 2100 levels could be 23 to 55 inches higher than 2000. According to the US Geological Survey’s Coastal Vulnerability Index, many of California’s open coastal areas are rated as having ‘high’ or ‘very high’ vulnerability to sea level rise. Many of California’s power plants are at risk from climate change either through sea level rise, which could flood low-lying
facilities, or through increased storm frequency or intensity, which could affect offshore water intake and discharge pipes. Rising ambient temperatures could also decrease the efficiency of conventional, fossil-fuel burning power plants as well as the efficiency of transmission and distribution lines. Although transmission lines in California are designed to withstand high temperatures, the forecast increase of wild fires in the region could affect the import and transmission of electricity from remote areas – California imports 30 to 35 percent of its electricity from remote regions and current energy policies are expected to increase these levels. Increases in remote generation coupled with increased likelihood of wildfires could create significant vulnerability in California’s transmission infrastructure. Hydro-electric plants will also suffer as a
Damaged lin
es hang ove
r an ice-co
vered road
warming climate could result in a 19 percent reduction in power generation. The generation of renewable energy will also be affected by climate change depending on the availability of water, biomass, solar radiation and the intensity of wind patterns. As temperatures rise in California, energy demand will also increase as people rely more often on air conditioning. This will put increasing pressure on energy infrastructure and could lead to power outages.
Billion dollar US weather disasters 2005-2008 (Damage amounts in billions of dollars and costs normalized to 2007 dollars using GNP Inflation/Wealth Index)
2005
2006
Hurricane Dennis
Numerous Wildfires Northeast Flooding
2007
$2.1
$1.0
$1.0
Hurricane Katrina
Widespread Drought
MW/SE Tornadoes
Hurricane Rita
$6.2
$1.5
$17.1
Severe Storms Tornadoes
MW/Ohio Valley Tornadoes
$1.0
$1.1
$133.8 Midwest Drought
$1.1 Hurricane Wilma
$17.1
Great Plains/East Drought
East/South Severe Weather
$5.0
$1.5
Western Wildfires
California Freeze
$1.0
$1.4
Spring Freeze
$2.0
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mafrost and therefore the destabilization of the foundations of many infrastructure assets. This is already causing major damage to roads, airports, railways and other critical infrastructure assets.
Adaptation for the nation It is evident that given the poor condition that the majority of our country’s aging infrastructure is already in, action must be taken to protect it. Infrastructure has enormous value, not only as a capital asset but also as an essential contributor to our economic productivity. The good news is that this value has been recognized and infrastructure investment is now a key recipient of funding via the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Furthermore, some of the funding already achas been allocated to the Army Corps of Engineers for counts for the impact of climate change on infraupgrades to ood protection structure operation and demand. Much of the infrastructure investments are focused on renewable technologies and the implementation of a smart grid and $4.5 billion has been allocated to the Army Corps of Engineers for upgrades to flood protection infrastructure. Although this funding is a step in the right direction, much of it has been allocated in ways that can quickly stimulate spending on shovel-ready projects. However, if investments in infrastructure are to offer more long-term protection against the stresses of climate change there needs to be an adaptation and resiliency strategy that incorporates important changes in policies and practices. A December 2009 report from bipartisan think tank Resources for the The Mississippi Department of Transport (DOT) spent an Future, suggests three particular mechanisms and processes to better prepare estimated $1 billion on the removal of debris, the repair of public infrastructure for the stresses of climate change. Firstly, the adoption a bridges and highways and the rebuilding of the Biloxi and formal asset management approach that could incorporate climate forecasts Bay St. Louis bridges in the four years following Hurricane and enhance our adaptive capacity. Katrina. The rebuilding of 30 miles of destroyed railway line cost CSX $250 million. The second suggestion is that we reconsider the location of new and updated infrastructure investments. As the infrastructure, particularly in coastal areas, becomes increasingly at risk from heightened sea-levels and storm surges, investments in these areas must be carefully through out. The third suggestion is that investment in updating design standards One thing that needs to be taken into consideration is the fact that adaptshould be a longer-term policy goal. A further study that was conducted by ing to climate stresses is more cost effective during the design phase of a Cambridge Systematics Inc in 2006 concluded that by 2100 temperatures will project than as a retrofit. be approaching those of current design standards and therefore design changes
4.5 BILLION
2008 Southeast/Midwest Tornadoes
$1.0 MW/Ohio Valley Severe Wind/ Tornadoes
$2.4
US WildďŹ res
$2.0 Hurricane Dolly
$1.2 Hurricane Gustav
$5.0 MW/Ohio Valley Severe Wind/Tornadoes
Hurricane Ike
$1.1
$27.0
Midwest Flood
Widespread Drought
$15.0
should be made now to enable facilities to cope with the higher temperatures of the future. The study also concludes that highways in some regions should be redesigned in order to accommodate the predicted sea-level changes as part of a comprehensive urban redesign strategy. Likewise, efforts to identify and protect bridges at risk from intense storms should be a major priority, particularly as bridges have much longer lifecycles than a lot of other infrastructure assets. It is therefore vital that the planning and design stages take into account the predicted effects of climate change and not just historical data. Investment in new infrastructure assets and the maintenance of existing assets need to focus on the changing climate we face in the future. Only by incorporating adjustments in infrastructure planning, design, construction, operation and maintenance can we significantly enhance our adaptive capability. n
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SMART GRID
US Infrastructure speaks to Andres Carvallo about how Austin Energy’s aggressive pursuit of new smart grid technologies has put it at the forefront of the utility revolution.
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M
odernizing the country’s electrical grid has become an urgent national priority. Population growth and increased energy demand, mounting concerns over energy security, an aging transmission infrastructure and the need to integrate new sources of renewable energy into the already overburdened national grid are all problems that demand an innovative new solution. Implementing new smart grid technologies will help to revolutionize the production, transmission, and consumption of energy in the United States, and increase the reliability, efficiency, and security of the country’s electrical system. Whilst many utilities around the country have announced plans to deploy smart grid technology and are working towards this aim, Austin Energy has had its very own fully operational smart grid deployed since October 2009. The landmark project comprises the seamless integration of the electric grid, a communications network, and the hardware and soft ware needed to monitor, control and manage the creation, delivery and energy consumption of all Austin Energy’s customers. It took five years to deploy the full solution at a cost of approximately $150 million. As its competitors try to play catch up, the Texan energy giant is already forging ahead with a newer more aggressive phase of its smart grid plan. Named after its namesake web 2.0, which is commonly associated with web applications that facilitate interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design, and collaboration on the internet, development of smart grid 2.0 is already in full swing. For Carvallo, there is no doubt in his mind why Austin Energy is so far ahead of the pack. “We started in 2003 before anybody knew what it was. I would say that our closest competitors would be Encore and Centerpoint in Texas, and they’re supposed to be fi nished sometime in 2012, 2014, and then in California the closest companies will be PG, Southern Cal Edison in San Diego, Gas and Electric, and I think their timeframe is pretty similar, 2012, 2014. So you could argue that we are three to five years ahead.” Back in 2003 when Austin Energy embarked on their smart grid development project, they started by deploying smart meters to one third of their service territory. There followed replacement and transformation of the infrastructure behind the utility. As Carvallo puts it, one thing led to another. “We found ourselves basically working on intelligence on the grid at all levels. The company had a vision back then that the creative utility needed to go beyond the utility itself. Our vision of the smart grid has always been farther ahead than most in terms of the fact that it encompasses not just the utility infrastructure itself, but the buildings and the transportation sector,” explains Carvallo. “Aggressive” is how Carvallo describes Austin Energy’s approach to their smart grid activities and he believes that what they are trying to do is much broader than the idea that most people have of what an intelligent grid is. “The smart grid is a combination of electric network, communications network plus a lot of hardware and soft ware configured and deployed in a way that allows you uniquely to monitor, control and manage how you create, distribute, and consume energy,” he says. Traditionally the grid has been intelligent from the central power plant to the substation he says, blind from the substation to the premise. The main focus is now about putting the intelligence from the substation to the premise, which essentially means putting sensors and actuators in the distribution structure, around transformers, feeders, switches, capacitors, relays of all kinds and then installing a smart meter at the site of the premise. Inside the premise there will be smart appliances and distributed generation. “So the grid needs to become self-healing,” he says. “Meaning no human interaction, lots of rules engine and correlation engines deployed on a hierarchical nested network infrastructure.”
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The Pecan Street project will contain 1000 homes and 75 businesses. The area will be turned into a state of the art smart grid
Streets ahead In December 2008, Austin Energy embarked on an initiative called the Pecan Street Project. In anticipation of completing its smart grid 1.0 in 2009, Austin Energy reached out to the city of Austin, the University of Texas, the Chamber of Commerce, and teamed up to create Austin’s next generation smart grid implementation. Other companies also partnered Austin Energy in this ambitious project to explore smart grid 2.0, including Applied Materials, Cisco, Dell, Freescale Semiconductor, GE, GridPoint, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, the SEMATECH consortium and the Environmental Defense Fund. Austin Energy’s goal in creating the Pecan Street Project is to transform into the urban power system of the future while making the City of Austin and its local partners a model clean energy laboratory and hub for the world’s emerging clean tech sector. In doing so, Austin Energy is seeking to prove that it is possible
to transform the way we traditionally produce, use, store and trade energy. For the project, Austin Energy has targeted a specific neighborhood, some 300 acres in the east side of town where 1000 homes and 75 businesses will be built. The area will be turned into a state of the art smart grid 2.0 where every property will have solar rooftop, energy storage, smart appliances, and electric vehicles all connected to the smart grid. The project has a timeframe of five years and will be used to explore a lot of things that haven’t yet been achieved or tested with smart grid 1.0; real time pricing, time of use pricing, demand response programs and energy rebates. As the results of these different pilots and programs come to bear success, they will then be translated into the rest of the service territory. Basically if a project is successful then it could be rolled out within 90 days to six months of finishing the pilot.
Due to the increase in the magnitude of data and the amount of devices that the smart grid will necessitate it is no longer possible for a human to manage the grid. “When we move towards smart grid we’re adding half a million devices on top of the 5000 elements already in the grid. In order to manage half a million devices it is just not possible for a human being to sit in a control and look at a screen and alarms coming for 500,000 devices non-stop and be able to discern and make choices.” But this self-healing smart grid of the future will offer many advantages to utility customers. Like web 2.0, the smart grid will be far more interactive and user-centered and will allow a two-way communication between the utility and the consumer. “For the fi rst time it would be a platform that allows for the sharing of information with the consumer at different timeframes,” he says. Th is means that the consumer can see the data on their energy consumption the day after, or even on an hourly basis, rather than simply when they receive their monthly bill. Smart grid will also provide the consumer with a variety of ways to access their data such
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as having the information pushed toward a messaging system on their iPhone or their Blackberry, or an in-home display of some sort either through the web or some hardware device. Th is should give the customer a better understanding of how they are consuming energy and also how their actions may be causing a waste of energy. Carvallo explains how the smart grid should also foster stronger relationships between the utilities and both private and business customers, particularly in the realms of conservation and energy efficiency. Many schemes are already offering rebates enabling consumers and companies to upgrade their equipment, such as air conditioning units or pool pumps, in favour of more energy efficient alternatives. In the past, he says, there were no real ways to gage if such an investment has achieved the expected gains, elbut with smart grid and intelligent metering there is now a baseline of what occurs in your property which enables what Carvallo calls “a true verification of your investment.” However, the smart grid will also provide bens, efits for the utilities themselves, i l particularly in terms of operational efficiency, which should in turn translate to increased customer satisfaction. “Instead of waiting for customers to call us and tell us their power is out, we know the moment it is out. Even if customers are out, we can send
an SMS message to their smartphone alerting them to outages and also letting them know once it has been fi xed so it never actually has to impact them,” he says. “So the technology is going to move from being very reactive to being very proactive and
it does maintenance of its equipment,” explains Carvallo. The benefits for both businesses and consumers are clear but smart grid also plays an important role in helping to meet our renewable energy targets. “The Smart Grid is an enabler.
“Consumers can see the data on their energy consumption the day after, or even on an hourly basis, rather than simply when they receive their monthly bill” it would change the whole customer experience. It would really make customers far more trusting of the utility and far more relaxed about tthe service they get from the ut utility. That in itself will be a huge benefit.” Another advantage for the utility is the fact that smart grid will allow a streamlining of operations because of its ability to be more prescriptive and precise about any sy system failures. As the utiliity will know immediately what is wrong, they will also know how to fi x it and what equipment is required to do the job and who they should send to make the necessary repairs. “So the utility will be more efficient and more effective in how it uses resources and how it manages inventory and how
New Mercedes Benz Blue Zero electric car at the Internationale Automobil Ausstellung in September 2009 in Frankfurt, Germany.
Without it there’s no way that you can reach any significant energy efficiency and any significant penetration of renewable energy,” says Carvallo. “The smart grid is a conduit to enabling and accelerating more energy efficiency and accelerating renewable energy at the central power plant level, but also more importantly at the distribution level, meaning distributed generation, solar rooftops and micro wind turbines in homes. You need the smart grid for all that to come together.” Smart grid, it would appear, will revolutionize not only the way we consume energy but also the way that utilities interact with their customers. The industry is making good progress and in the next few years we should expect to see smart grid technology being deployed throughout the country. If Austin Energy’s vision of the smart grid of the future is fully realized we will see the impacts not only affecting our homes and our businesses but also our means of transport. If the other utilities are to keep up, Carvallo suggests that they may need to look beyond the parameters of smart grid 1.0. “The thing that is really going to drive the point home about the need for this market will be the proliferation of electric vehicles and solar rooftops,” he says. “As electric vehicles become a reality – and they seem to be coming at us fast and furious – the electric utilities across the globe are going to have to make an investment in smart grid technology, because if these vehicles show up in their service territory and they don’t have the intelligence to deal with it, they will have some serious reliability problems.” Andres Carvallo is the Chief Information Offi cer at Austin Energy
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ROUNDTABLE
Two-way conversation US Infrastructure grills the experts on the benefits of smart grid technologies and their power to revolutionize the relationship between utilities and their customers. As energy demands increase how can smart grid technologies help to optimize the delivery and use of energy? Maureen Coveney. With a smart grid, energy companies can more easily see where energy is going and influence how it is being used, while also giving consumers greater control over their own energy consumption. The smart grid’s ‘nervous system’ is the IT network that monitors and controls the power grid. Advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) is a crucial piece of this smart grid technology, as it provides the basic infrastructure required to help with the delivery and usage of energy. AMI is the enabler for consumers to assist in the reduction of localized peak capacity that will have a direct and measurable impact on energy consumption.
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Utilities are now working to select and implement the required infrastructure, which includes hardware, software, communication networks, customer associated systems and data management software, which will allow consumers to contribute to load reduction. Cyber security is also a mandatory requirement. Equally important is designing end-to-end utility business processes to exploit the capabilities of this new infrastructure so that utility energy portfolio goals can be met. Malcolm Unsworth. The smart grid is creating new ways to understand energy use and behaviors. With this comes the development of new roles – from the utility executive to the end use customer. But what does this all mean?
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THE PANEL Maureen Coveney is Executive Industry Director/Senior Principal, Utilities, at SAP. Working with utility customers and industry stakeholders, Coveney leads industry-focused initiatives and promotes SAP’s utility solutions through thought leadership activities. Jack Danahy is a Security Executive at IBM. He holds five patents and has additional patents pending in secure distributed computing, kernel security, software vulnerability analysis, and secure systems management. He currently authors two blogs: Suitable Security and Smart Grid Security. Dr. Patrick Kennedy, is CEO and founder of OSIsoft., LLC. Previously Dr. Kennedy worked as an engineer for Shell Development Company and Taylor Instrument Company. Dr. Kennedy attended the University of Kansas where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering and a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering. Don Troxell is an Industry Solution Practice Manager supporting both AT&T wireline and wireless accounts and account teams leading the consulting effort and business development for the utilities market. Malcolm Unsworth is a highly respected executive both domestically and internationally, with broad experience throughout the utility industry. He was named Chief Executive Officer of Itron in March 2009. Prior to his post as CEO, he was Itron’s President and Chief Operating Officer. He was elected to its board of directors in December 2008
We have moved from a one-way process to a two-way conversation. No longer will utilities send out energy and then collect data back to be used solely for issuing a bill. The smart grid allows us to deliver not just energy, but also pricing information, load data, and knowledge to help consumers make smart, informed decisions. Utilities will gather not only billing information but also data about patterns of use, consumer preferences, and much more. The information and data being delivered today is moving the needle towards changing behavior and ultimately shifting the way we think about and use energy.
“Demand management programs will allow utilities to experience lower peak demand fluctuations” Jack Danahy Patrick Kennedy. As prices increase and resources become scarce, the need will increase for optimization of the grid and between the grid and demand. The ideas today are about the use of market prices to control the peak load, permanent load shifting and demand response, but a larger effect could be a more efficient use of resources. The loading order of a grid is generally nukes, base load units, normal power stations with frequency control provided by hydro and peaker units. The efficiency of
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these varies – a micro turbine on a building is 22 to 26 percent efficient and the most efficient combined cycle unit made is 60 percent. However, if you can use the heat, a combined heat and power (CHP) can attain as much as 85 percent efficiency. One goal of the smart grid is to use intelligence from the grid (e.g. congestion, peak load) and the demand context (e.g. production flexibility) to balance the load and increase efficiency. The smart grid is the enabler of intelligence at the edge, similar to telecom. This will not only improve our efficiency of fuel use, it will create many new industries and jobs. Jack Danahy. Smart grid technologies provide the necessary enablers to connect a much wider array of devices to the power system. Whether the increasing demand is intended to be compensated for by increasing types and instances of generation, or if it is intended to be mitigated by more efficient use and management of the existing capacity, a new level of intelligence and interactivity is needed. Similarly, as with all complex systems, there is a need to increase the amount of information that is communicated among the participants if the full value of the interaction is to be achieved. By enabling distributed generation, the core grid will depend less on long distance transport of electricity from centralized generators subject to 10-20 percent line losses. By giving homeowners more insight into their usage patterns via AMI and smart meters, customers are incentivized to lower demand during expensive high demand periods. These demand management programs will allow utilities to experience lower peak demand fluctuations, meaning they don’t have to keep as much spare capacity on-line in the form of ‘peaker’ generators.
level, and the ability to manage consumption of energy, balancing energy need with utilization during hours when energy is cheaper. Additional customer benefits include the option to set usage preferences that allow the utility to provide energy to appliances based on user-defined thresholds and priority levels, and shorter energy outage duration and less frequent outages. How do your solutions enable utilities to improve cost efficiencies and enhance their operational performance? MU. Smart metering and smart grid technology lowers the cost per read. Having frequent meter readings and on-demand readings can eliminate the need for field service calls and reduce insurance, repair and maintenance costs. This level of data can also speed up resolution of customer service telephone calls.
“The smart grid is creating new ways to understand energy use and behaviors” Malcolm Unsworth
Don Troxell. Most people don’t realize that the utility usually does not know you have lost service until you call and report the outage. AT&T will proactively identify outages, collect real time data regarding power load throughout the grid, manage power distribution, and perform rerouting of energy resources to minimize outages. In addition, AT&T will interconnect multiple sources of power to the common energy grid (coal, solar, hydroelectric, nuclear, wind) for availability to consumers. Ultimately, this will create more flexible and customized service plans for consumers and drive customer behavior. AT&T customer benefits include the option to choose the type of energy you would like to receive, tracking of usage and cost down to the appliance
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PK. OSIsoft’s PI System manages real-time data for metering, operational and external information (e.g. weather) to enable new solutions. Operational performance is a minute to minute, not a daily or monthly phenomenon. Our solutions allow applications to obtain timely high fidelity data directly from the equipment to enable optimization, demand shaping and efficiency. Utilities have used the PI System in all sectors including condition based maintenance, optimization of station operations, reducing cost of turbine startups, meter data management, distribution optimization, management of renewables and carbon footprint, and environmental reporting. AMI Integration with the OSIsoft MDUS product means we will provide timely and accurate data for Customer Support and Maintenance, including billing and event management reducing the cost of operation by communicating from the head-end system directly to SAP.
JD. As utilities come to rely increasingly on IT and two-way internet and other communications technologies to conduct their everyday business, they, by definition, open themselves up to a whole new spectrum of potential adversaries and attack vectors. Attackers find themselves with new options for bringing financial pain to utilities, and may even find ways to impact reliability, the success metric against which all other performance measures pale. IBM Rational’s ability to harden new AMI and smart grid applications against attack, as well as to secure the fragile juncture points where IT and operations systems interconnect, saves utilities and their customers time and money helping to ensure that private data remains private and that the lights stay on. DT. AT&T provides enabling, self-healing connectivity to many smart grid solutions throughout the utility enterprise. AT&T may save the utility capital and operational dollars from displacing the need to build additional communications infrastructure while providing reduced maintenance and operational costs from owning their own networks. MC. From the standpoint of cost and operational efficiencies, utilities should not make sacrifices in the area of front or back office integration. The success
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(and total cost of ownership) of future, progressive utility programs will directly correspond to the strength of integration to business platforms and the degree to which a utility can begin with the end in mind. To help utilities accomplish this, SAP formed the SAP AMI Lighthouse Council – made up of companies that use SAP for Utilities for customer management, energy data management, and billing, as well as SAP ERP – as a forum of co-innovation for the integration of AMI systems with SAP for Utilities. Their conclusions led SAP, the SAP AMI Lighthouse Council, and SAP partners to embark on an extensive development project, the result of which is the new SAP AMI Integration for Utilities software. This software has been available since November 2008. One of the main features of a smart grid is its ability to allow a greater level of interaction between utilities and their customers. In what ways do your services enhance this interactivity? PK. OSIsoft MDUS with SAP for Utilities will allow the customer to do on demand reads directly to their meter. The OSIsoft MDUS will deliver a detailed history of usage for a customer so they can examine time of use data and make decisions about their operation. Industrial customers like Kodak, academic institutions etc. have used real time energy data from the PI System to monitor their operational practices and redesign their energy use. Providing time of use data will facilitate building and utility management whether it is an industrial customer, academic institution, data center or the home user. OSIsoft customers are pursuing the Microgrid design. Tomorrow’s homes and businesses will be generating energy and putting it back on the grid or using it to avoid pulling from the grid. The PI System has already been integrated into products being used to store energy for permanent load shifting. The Microgrid requires a greater level of interaction and access to internal context and knowledge from the grid. OSIsoft is unique, we have substantial installed bases in all parts of the energy supply and use including mining, gas pipeline, generation, transmission, distribution, metering and users.
MC. Many of today’s consumers only know that their electricity comes from a socket. They know little about the origins of that energy, or the many processes involved in bringing it to their home or business. To help customers embrace a shift toward energy efficiency, the utility industry must be able to show customers just how reduced energy consumption will save them money. Enabling energy efficiency through smart grid technology requires an investment by energy companies and a shift in how they have traditionally done business. Cooperation and co-innovation among energy providers, energy distributors, and all those who touch the energy sales process have become more important than ever. Toward that end, SAP offers SAP AMI Integration for Utilities, along with its robust CRM 7.0 capabilities that include marketing, sales, and billing functionality supporting the delivery of new energy products and services that encourage consumers to save energy. SAP also provides the tools necessary to interact with customers via web portals and integration with interactive voice recognition (IVR) technology.
“Smart meters will measure energy consumption electronically and provide a high level of detail about energy usage that can be shared with customers” Maureen Coveney
JD. Without security, many of the management, balancing, and billing functions cannot be created or used. Absent the ability to ensure that two-way transactions and other interactions can be conducted in a secure manner, and utilities will have to greatly curtail their aspirations for increased engagement with their customer base, and will be unable to credibly provide the types of configurability and access to information that the smart grid is designed to provide. By simplifying the process of securing the creation and deployment of the new software that drives the smart grid, Rational provides developers and development teams with the opportunity to create much more secure applications from the start. Build and integration level checking combined with pre-deployment scanning for vulnerabilities can create much more reliable and trustworthy experiences for both customer-to-utility and utility-to-utility communication.
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DT. With our wire line and wireless networks we provide essential operational connectivity for critical smart grid solutions allowing them to have real-time information which enables the solutions to be of the greatest benefit to the end users (customers) and the utility alike, especially for outage management systems, safety, emergencies, restorations, real time billing and energy purchasing etc. AT&T also has a long history of staying in touch with its millions of customers, providing detailed usage and billing information down to the number of minutes talked, the number called, determining the customer rate plan instantaneously and applying that data accordingly, and so on. We also offer web portals providing customers with near real-time data on their usage, and give them the ability to text to get updates on their accounts. We can also text individuals with warnings when they go over their data limit and reach other parameters. Basically we provide customers with access to near real-time data on their account almost anywhere, anytime, through a variety of mediums. This is an area that may be challenging for utilities and where companies such as AT&T can provide assistance in a number of ways.
MU. Itron smart grid technologies enable utilities to connect with their customers in new ways to manage energy demand through greater consumer choice and control, as well as by supporting new smart grid applications such
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as distribution automation. The other key component in connecting with consumers is home area network (HAN), which allows real-time usage information to be transmitted wirelessly from the meter to devices in the home. Having the ability to monitor their usage in real time, using a device like an inhome display (IHD), gives the consumer meaningful feedback on how their habits or behavior ultimately impact their electricity bill, and provide them with the opportunity to make more informed decisions about how and when they consume electricity.
Internet marketplaces will allow private energy producers to trade energy that they generate. To meet these demands, SAP is in the process of researching and developing new product solutions focused on demand-side management, PHeV support and related infrastructure support, and additional ‘high touch’ customer-focused solutions that will be part of the extended AMI Integration, Analytics and CRM functionality.
What are the main developments you envisage for the future of smart grid technology? JD. Perhaps the biggest development we’re all looking to is utility scale electricity storage. Whether it comes in the form of high-tech batteries, fly-wheel farms, or eventually, thousands or millions of electric car batteries in a Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) topology, mass storage will make the grid safe for renewables and be the clean tech, load balancing icing on the cake that will truly usher in the 21st century smart grid we’re all working towards. Remembering that this ability to store will drive the attractiveness of the ability to generate, security is obviously a key characteristic. Being able to follow the trail of electrical breadcrumbs so as to pay generators, and to bill consumers of stored power is just another enabling feat that security will empower.
“Tomorrow’s homes and businesses will be generating energy and putting it back on the grid or using it to avoid pulling from the grid” Dr. Patrick Kennedy
DT. We envision an explosion of IP addressable smart devices in all areas of our life that will be inclusive of end user, in home, and mobile solutions that will enhance our way of life; such as smart home technologies, plug in hybrid vehicles, and energy saving appliances as an example. This IP enablement will provide an explosion of applications that will be made available to the utility and to the consumer, providing capabilities not even thought of today – similar to the type of application explosion that developed with the advent of the iPhone. MC. As energy companies continue to develop smart grids, certain visions will soon become reality. Smart meters will measure energy consumption electronically and provide a high level of detail about energy usage that can be shared with customers. Customers that reduce energy usage will be rewarded with lower rates. Imminent or current power failures will be identified immediately and the affected area will automatically be pinpointed. Consumers will be able to allow an independent system operator to automatically switch off or reduce the power being used by certain devices that consume a high level of energy. Renewable energy sources – like windmills or solar fields – will be connected to the grid and become part of the overall energy supply system.
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MU. The 20th century began with mass production and the promise of automobiles. It ended with the mass adoption of cell phones and the internet. The 21st century promises an even more rapid technological evolution. The management of our planet’s most precious resources and stewardship of our environment will be at the center of this transformation. This demands new thinking, new tools and the right partners to ensure success. Energy efficiency is no longer optional. Investment in renewable energy sources will grow exponentially, water scarcity issues will demand technology-driven conservation and consumers will become empowered in new ways. The means and the speed at which utilities and consumers use data will intensify. The success of the smart grid will be based on its ability to keep pace with these demands and keep pace with rapid change.
PK. There are many areas where developments will be taking place for the smart grid. These include standards, security, smart meters, in-home devices and communication networks. However OSIsoft’s specialty is in the area of real-time data collections and storage and our biggest contribution to the challenge is scale of streaming data. The amount of information available is increasing exponentially. AMI programs are collecting as much as 20 points per meter today. In the future HAN, facilities and industrial could provide hundreds of sensors behind every meter and the number of smart meters will have grown. We have now deployed five million point real time systems and we are working to increase both this number and the tools to make multiple systems work within a collective. The systems must be easily managed and self-configurable. The data must be accessible by standard technologies with real-time response over secure networks. n
“IP enablement will provide an explosion of applications that will be made available to the utility and to the consumer” Don Troxell
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FUNDING
POWER POLICY Will the American public embrace smart grid technologies or will they be a waste of millions of taxpayer dollars?
H
ow exactly the federal government will execute its overhaul of America’s energy infrastructure is a wellworn debate, and nothing less than controversial. The ambiguous ‘smart grid’ has become a symbol of America’s cleaner, greener future and the Obama Administration has made great strides with an early announcement of funding for installation of both grid upgrades and advanced customer meter systems. Yet, despite the incessant buzz, there is much uncertainty as to how this shiny new technology will fit into the current infrastructure’s allegedly aging and broken system. More importantly, there is great speculation as to whether
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it will be understood by the American public; will they care enough about its benefits to want to use it? Despite public opinion so far measuring low in terms of interest, the federal government is plowing on, certain of public enthusiasm once they see the benefits for themselves.
Federal funding The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), passed in early 2009, paved the way for the development of a smart electricity grid, promising an $11 billion fund. Following the historic blackout of August 2003, the government was keen to revitalize its reliability and empower consumers, reiterating its commitment during the GridWeek 2009 Conference.
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Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner (2-L), with Energy Secretary Steven Chu (3-L) and executives from renewable energy companies, delivers remarks after granting awards under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act program in Washington, DC, 22 September 2009.
In a keynote speech at the conference on September 21, Energy Secretary Steven Chu provided some long-awaited details for the smart grid program. He announced a portion of the ARRA funding to be allocated to utilities for smart grid: more than $144 million would be provided for the electric power sector, $44 million of which was to be awarded to state public utility commissions and $100 million for smart grid workforce training programs. “America cannot build a 21st century energy economy with a mid 20th century electricity system. This is why the Obama Administration is investing in projects that will lay the foundation for a modernized, resilient electrical grid,” said Chu. “By working with industry leaders and the private sector we can drive the evolution to a clean, smart, national electricity system that will create jobs, reduce energy use, expand renewable energy production and cut carbon pollution.” Yet, how exactly this money was to be portioned, to whom and how much became a much talked about question. With almost every utility wanting a slice of the pie and submitting proposals, the Department of Energy (DOE) became inundated with requests. Utilities across the US are excited about the future of smart grid, and rightly so, but this is a com-
petitive playground; the entrants are multiple and, more importantly, involve a lot of big players. And it’s not just utilities competing for the prize; large solution providers, such as IBM, Accenture and General Electric have also bid for funding, making the smart grid program three times oversubscribed. So how will the funding be apportioned? The Obama Administration announced 100 smart grid grants on October 28, with an expected investment of more than $3.4 billion into development of the grid. The Department of Energy followed by stating that grants between $400,000 to $200 million will see the installation of more than 18 million advanced digital meters, bringing the nation’s total to approximately 40 million. Prior to the announcement, Steve Mitnick, a partner with Oliver Wyman’s energy and utility consulting practice, predicted that the allocation of funding would be based on a combination of the innovation of the utilities’ projects and politics. “You can’t leave the politics out of this, no matter how hard the DOE is endeavoring to,” he explained. “Naturally, the funding will be spread among states, among different types of utilities, of different geographies and different sizes.”
“We’re looking for operational readiness and innovation” Matt Rogers
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He was right. Out of the 400 projects that applied for funding, 100 received awards, spread across 42 states – in a clear attempt to diplomatically distribute the funding. Electric systems distribution funding is generally scattered across the northern states and integrated and/or cross-cutting systems funding generally along the south; and those central and southern parts of the country not awarded funding for electric transmission systems are provided with advanced metering infrastructure investment grants. However, the development stage of the projects was also a major influence in determining who required what. Matt Rogers, a colleague of Mitnick’s during their years at McKinsey & Co. and senior advisor to Steven Chu, describes these innovative projects as being “shovel-ready”: projects that are up and ready to go, needing only funding to move forward. However, Rogers explains that in return for funding, it is also the company’s responsibility to raise a certain proportion of capital, depending upon that company’s net profit and size. “We’re looking for technological readiness. A number of folks have great ideas but don't have technologies that are ready to scale. We’re looking for market acceptance,” says Rogers. “We’re looking for operational readiness and innovation.” Returning to Mitnick’s discussion of political influence, it is not necessarily those companies that are shovel-ready that have been awarded the government funding. In an attempt to keep the peace, the project awards appear to have been distributed on a geographic basis; but spreading the money too thinly may have a diluted effect on those breakthrough projects in need of greater funding and lessen technological progress.
BIG NUMBERS
“If all you cared about was shovel readiness and ‘moving the needle’ then you would come up with one set of winners. If you throw politics into that mix you come up with a different set; realistically it will be a little of both. For example, it’s not politically doable for the list of awards to come out and there to be very few winners in Republican-leaning states,” says Mitnick. The question arises as to where this leaves the smaller utilities. The precedent seems to have been set that the more capital raised, the more money will be awarded. The DOE’s funding to Solyndra of $535 million was only given
“You can’t leave the politics out of this, no matter how hard the DOE is endeavoring to” Steve Mitnick after the company raised $198 million, with a similar request to A123Systems. Analyst Eileen O’Grady reports that a dozen large utilities, including American Electric Power, CenterPoint Energy and Consolidated Edison, are asking for more than $2.6 billion, which exceed the $2 billion set for ‘big’ grants of $20- $200 million. Mitnick also notes that most large awards went to large utilities, but several large utilities did come up empty. Smaller utilities did receive funding too, but many lost to larger neighbors within their states. The rolling out of funding has been a relatively short process, surprising many who believed it would be long and arduous for the DOE. Despite the DOE’s commitment to announce the funding in fall 2009, many believed it would take longer because there was no precedent for a program of this scale. The DOE has never handled so many proposals or had so much money to be awarded at this pace in such a short timeframe.
Criticism It is less than a year since Obama’s inauguration and the
$3.4 billion
Expected federal investment into development of the smart grid
100 million
Number of smart grid grants announced by Obama Administration on October 28
18 million
Number of advanced digital meters that will be installed under the scheme
40 million
Total projected number of smart meters in the US as a result of the funding
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number of those waiting for him to trip up remains high, which he noted in his awareness of the presence of opposition to the scheme: “The closer we get to this new energy future, the harder the opposition’s going to fight, the more we’re going to hear from special interests and lobbyists in Washington whose interests are contrary to the interests of the American people,” he said. The opponents of the stimulus package are watching to see what blunders will be made in handling such a huge task. Among them are Republicans but also the general public. The Republicans in Congress and the states have criticized the administration for various reasons – as Mitnick puts it, “they’re looking for red meat, for serious missteps.” The DOE is certainly well aware of this. Moving fast whilst remaining cautious is a very hard balance to strike. Criticism of the program does not remain only within the walls of Congress, however. The polls have shown that the public is becoming increasingly skeptical of the stimulus programs, not just within the energy sector but also in healthcare. A poll by Real Clear Politics taken in October 2009 showed that the number of average Americans who believe Obama is leading
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the country in the right direction has dramatically fallen to 38.6 percent. So is the administration doing the right thing pushing this smart grid program through? The end result of providing the funds for the smart grid initiatives is, after all, the increasing of green consciousness in America’s homes and businesses, educating the country’s public in a bid to change how they consume power at different points of the day. “We can go through with all this great technology at the distribution level with advanced meters and smart appliances, but if at the end of the day the end-users in households and businesses remain relatively indifferent, then all that great information is not going to have much of an impact on consumption and peak demand,” explains Mitnick. “That’s the mega question. The question is out and there’s reason for some cynicism and skepticism, although there is going to be a lot of money spent trying to make this work.”
Green collar Having the public visibly see the benefits of the stimulus program is Obama’s golden ticket for approval. Tagged onto the end of the billion-dollar utility fund is the federal commitment to expand employment opportunities, adding greater weight to the President’s plans for a greener America, whilst simultaneously fighting the unemployment rates caused by the recession. During his unveiling of the ‘New Energy for America Plan’ in December 2008, Obama pledged to ‘strategically invest’ $150 billion into creating five million new green collar jobs. Mitnick notes that the money for these projects will be available within different sectors of the energy industry and for a number of years to come. The complete stimulus package funding will not be spent solely on smart grid. “Undoubtedly there are going to be a lot of people working in different parts of the value chain, and you are certainly creating jobs through the energy efficiency monies. There are over $5 billion from ARRA funds for energy efficiency, as well as some of the other project areas, which amounts to a number of jobs,” he explains. Tom King, Director of the Energy Efficiency, Renewables and Electricity program at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, explains that a number of individuals can be trained to install PV panels on commercial buildings or residential homes. King advises that Obama’s $150 budget for green collar jobs would best be spent on smart grid implementation: “If there were the initial funding to look at smart grid operations and deploy these technologies, then consequently staff would have to be trained to install those. This would work hand in hand with an increase in manufacturing demand, so there would also be such companies having to produce the smart meters.” But whether the creation of green jobs will ease the American public into consuming energy more efficiently remains to be seen. We will not know for quite a number of years if Obama’s Administration is revolutionizing the country’s energy infrastructure and changing the philosophy of how energy is perceived and used, or, to borrow a phrase used by Mitnick, whether they are simply building bridges to nowhere. When the speeches have died out and the policies have lost their novelty, only then will the value of all the money that has been spent be properly evaluated. What was the value of adding so much intelligence and information at the distribution level available to customers about their energy consumption? Did customers make use of that information and significantly change their energy usage habits? “Those are the big questions,” explains Mitnick. “The price of natural gas has moderated in the US. Natural gas prices dictate the price of electricity to
a large extent, especially how the price of electricity varies from the peak of the day to the middle of the night. If you have moderate natural gas prices, then the price of electricity won’t really vary as much between the peak of the day and the middle of the night. Consumers will see this information, but will that make them even more reticent to change their habits and moderate their energy use during the peak of the day?” Obama’s smart grid policy is no longer the issue; it has been approved and will be implemented soon enough. However, not everyone is convinced. The jury is still out and only the American public themselves will decide whether or not the program has been a waste of millions of their tax dollars. How well the program is implemented is also very much the responsibility of the state regulators who will deem whether or not the utilities can charge different prices for electricity in the peak of the day versus at other times. So far, regulators have generally been reluctant to allow variation in electricity prices, and as Mitnick notes, “You can have all the advanced meters you want, but if the price of electricity doesn’t vary, the customer can do little with that meter information.” How the smart grid stimulus program will fare is not an analysis or judgment that can successfully be made right now. Unfortunately the Administration must implement in full its program before we can see if it is understood and accepted by the public. And during this time, it is not only the Republicans in Congress that will be watching to see if the Obama Administration is successful, but also the entirety of America and the rest of the world. n
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INFOGRAPHIC 56
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SMART GRID It is currently difďŹ cult for consumers to see how much electricity they are using. Smart grid devices are being developed to help consumers monitor and cut back their electricity usage, allowing them to cut down their energy bills and pinpoint off-peak hours in which to run their energy-intensive machines.
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EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW
Fully automatic Automation through wireless information technology has the potential to generate important cost savings in the way we manage, maintain and run our infrastructure assets, says Matt Nelson. How are new technologies and techniques affecting the development of new infrastructures in the US? Matt Nelson. Newer technologies are always under development and always being introduced into the marketplace. The recent increase in demand for smart grid technologies has created a positive environment for entrepreneurs in the United States. These new technologies and techniques have the potential to affect US infrastructure in terms of cost, performance and functionality. Through the combination of information technology and wireless technology, remote data collection and remote control of infrastructure systems are currently experiencing a revolutionary change. With these technologies more data can be collected and better decisions can be made in the management of any infrastructure system. What influence have increasing regulatory, public and environmental pressures had on the way infrastructures are being rolled out? Why is there a concern? MN. Recently increased federal spending for alternative energy and smart grid technologies has been a catalyst for increased activity in the United States infrastructure industry. However, with the increased federal spending there has also been increased regulatory restrictions. Many of the regulatory restrictions have the potential to slow the rollout of new technology that could greatly benefit both the industry and the consumers. Technology and technology companies typically move much faster than state, local and federal government organizations. Regarding environmental pressures, the current social and economic climate should enable improvements in US infrastructure. Most smart city and smart grid technologies are positioned to improve environmental conditions. What recommendations would you make to companies looking to improve infrastructures, and where does your company fit into the picture? MN. In the current economic environment many companies are looking for ways to improve their expense structure. It will be beneficial for all companies small and large, to investigate and determine whether or not infrastructure automation has the potential to generate cost savings. My company, AvaLAN
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Wireless Systems, has developed robust and reliable proprietary wireless technology that enables many of the new data collection and remote control applications. AvaLAN Wireless radio modules are in use today in a multitude of applications including: IP surveillance cameras, outdoor lighting control systems, irrigation and watershed management, SCADA, remote monitoring, remote control and wireless meters. What differentiates your products from others in the industry? MN. AvaLAN Wireless Systems has been building radio modules for outdoor, long range, robust and reliable connectivity for the past five years. Many wireless technologies that most people are familiar with were not designed for harsh outdoor environments or for the demanding reliability of many industrial applications. AvaLAN’s wireless technology focuses on robustness and reliability first. Our products work where many other wireless technologies seem to fail. AvaLAN has also focused on ethernet interface technologies to enable the connection of many different types of devices at the network’s edge. AvaLAN believes that ethernet technology is the interface and protocol of choice for all information technology and that is where AvaLAN has focused their industrial wireless technology products.
Matt Nelson is the CEO and President of AvaLAN Wireless Systems. He has over 20 years of high-tech experience working for Avocent, Time Domain, Motorola and 3COM. Nelson holds a patent for wireless computing, a Bachelors degree in computer information systems and a Masters degree in business administration from Regis University.
How do you see this sector developing over the next five to 10 years? MN. Over the next five to 10 years smart cities and smart grid technology will be implemented and will transform the way US infrastructure is managed, maintained and run. With all the data that is being collected, better efficiencies can be gained and determined. Resources will be better allocated and directed. Alternative energy will become increasingly more abundant and more available. Highways and roads will be modified to become more efficient. Waterways and water systems will become better utilized and improved. The potential of greatly improving US infrastructure has a far reaching impact on the United States both today globally and tomorrow for future generations. n
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CYBER SECURITY
Virtual reality Larry Clinton explains that critical infrastructure protection is not just a physical security issue.
O
n May 29, 2009, the Federal government issued a report that stated that, between 2008 and 2009, American business losses due to cyber attacks had grown to more than $1 trillion worth of intellectual property. In critical infrastructure sectors, where one might hope to see more encouraging statistics, the story is much the same. According to In the Crossfire: Critical Infrastructure in the Age of Cyber Security a survey conducted by CSIS for McAfee and released 28 January 2010 “critical infrastructure owners and operators report their IT networks are under repeated cyber attack…the impact of such attacks is often severe and their cost high.” A majority of the executives polled believed that foreign governments were already involved in the attacks on their network systems.
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The statistics in the report are telling. Nearly 90 percent of respondents reported being infected with virus or malware and 60 percent were the victims of sophisticated DNS poisoning (where web traffic is redirected), with nearly half reporting multiple monthly attacks. Denials of service attacks were also common with two thirds reporting that these attacks were effecting operations. In addition, theft of service attacks were common, as was extortion. Some critical sectors were especially hard hit. For example the oil and gas sector reporting that 71 percent had experienced some form of stealthy intrusion on their systems with one third of the sector reporting multiple intrusions every month. The data about SCADA or Industrial Control Systems (ICS) was equally alarming. More than 75 percent of those with responsibility for such systems reported that they were connected to the internet or some other IP network with about half acknowledging that this created an “unresolved security issue.” Overall the study revealed that “One third of respondents say their sector is unprepared to deal with major cyber attacks or stealthy intrusions… by nearly two to one respondents said the vulnerability of their cyber systems had increased over the past year outnumbered those show said it had decreased…40 percent of the executives expected a major
cyber security incident (one causing an outage of at least 24 hours, loss of life or failure of the company) within the next year. 80 percent predicted such an event in the next five years.” Just as chilling as the extent of cyber attacks is our widespread lack of investment in addressing this critical threat. The 2009 PricewaterhouseCoopers Global Information Security Survey found that, notwithstanding the increasing cyber threat and the attendant publicity to the threat, that nearly half (47 percent) of respondents reported that were actually deferring or reducing their investments in cyber security. The results from 2010 CSIS study are even worse reporting that 66 percent of the US critical infrastructure owners and operators surveyed reported that they were reducing investment in cyber security and 27 percent said these reductions were significant (greater than 15 percent). Even our most sophisticated organizations, both public and private, are struggling with this problem. On 26 January 2010 the New York Times reported on a recent exercise in which senior Pentagon leaders were asked how they would respond to a cyber attack: “The results were dispiriting. The enemy had all the advantages stealth, anonymity and unpredictability. No one could pinpoint where the attack had come from so there was no way to deter further damage with retaliation…. especially because it was
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never clear if the attack was an act of vandalism, an attempt at commercial theft or a state sponsored effort to cripple the US….What some participants knew – and others did not – was that a version of their nightmare had just played out in real life, not at the pentagon….but at Google.” The reasons why cyber attacks are growing at such an alarming rate is simple. The economic incentives equation for cyber security massively favors the attackers. Cyber attacks are comparatively easy and cheap to launch. The amount that can be stolen is enormous both in fi nancial terms and in the theft of corporate or national secretes. And, the chances of getting caught are miniscule. On the other hand, cyber defenders are inherently a generation behind the attackers. The perimeter one needs to defend is virtually limitless. And, it’s very difficult to demonstrate a return on investment to cyber security. Both the private sector and the government must rethink, and reorganize, their fundamental approach to cyber security. Th is needs to begin by realizing that cyber security is not an “IT” issue. At the governmental level cyber security has been treated primarily as a technical and operational issue rather than as the strategic and economic issue it truly is. At the corporate level cyber security needs to be seen as an enterprise wide, risk management issue which has critical links to each area of the organization including legal, operational, human resources, communications and fi nance as well, of course, as IT. Several recent studies have noted the organizational problems within enterprises which militate against taking the needed enterprise wide approach to cyber security. Deloitte’s 2008 Enterprise Risk study concluded that, in 95 percent of US companies, the CFO is not directly involved in the management of information security risks, and that 75 percent of US companies do not have a Chief Risk Officer. Sixty-fi ve percent of US companies have neither a documented process through which to assess cyber risk, or a person in charge of the assessment process currently in place (which, functionally, translates into having no plan for cyber risk at all). A 2008 Carnegie Mellon study concluded: “There is still a gap between IT and enterprise risk management. Boards and senior executives are not adequately involved in key areas related to the governance of enterprise security.” At the launch of the CSIS Infrastructure report one of its main authors Adam Rice answered a question as to why in the face of the increasing cyber threat, investment was dropping. “When it comes to budgeting in most organizations cyber security costs are loaded into the IT department and that section is generally viewed as a cost center. Most organizations simply don’t translate IT security spending into a factor addressing the overall health of the organization and as a result the budgeting is simple not there.” The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in conjunction with the Internet Security Alliance (ISA) conducted a two year long program analyzing this issue resulting in a framework for addressing this structural problem Th e Financial management of Cyber
Risk: 50 Questions Every CFO Should Ask, which, came up with the same conclusion. “By now virtually every corporation in America has calculated the positive aspects of digitalization into their corporate business plans. Unfortunately that has generally failed to properly account for the fi nancial downside resulting from the risks to their cyber systems. To successfully manage fi nancial cyber risk will require a dialogue sparked by a series of pointed questions to all stakeholders …and supervised by the CFO.” While the private sector needs to look within itself for to address its own structural problems, the federal government must also take an increasing role, but it too must abandon its Cold War era assumptions about national defense and the role the private sector plays in the digital era. The attacks against Google and the conviction of the majority of infrastructure executives that foreign governments are already attacking these privately owned systems illustrate that the private sector is now on the front lines of the cyber wars. Government needs to launch a new form of partnership with industry that reaches beyond the beltway and connects at the business plan level. To harden our defenses against digital attacks the federal government needs to provide market incentives to generate the investment required to harden private systems at a level that may well be beyond what is required by their current business plan and instead also appreciates its role in protecting the nation as a whole. The history of the phone and power utilities provides a pathway that ought to be considered. At the beginning of the last century, policy makers perceived the public policy need for private investment in universal phone and power service and thus essentially guaranteed the return on private investment in these businesses and thus created the public utility operated by privet fi rms. We now have a similar situation wherein upgrading our infrastructure for universal cyber security that is in the national interest. Government has numerous tools, procurement, loans, and awards programs insurance, liability caps not to mention tax incentives which it already uses in other areas of the economy to generate pro-social investment. These tools need to now be harnessed to address our grouping cyber security needs in a new social contract for national security The good news is we already know a great deal about how to mitigate most cyber attacks. Independent research as well as testimony from the NSA and CIA all agree we can stop 80-90 percent of cyber attacks just by implementing the standards and practices we already have. The primary obstacle to doing so is cost. A government incentive program tying market incentives to the voluntary compliance with these security practices could go along way toward creating a 21st century model of national security.
80-90% of cyber attacks could be prevented by current standards
Larry Clinton is President and CEO of the Internet Security Alliance. For more information visit www.isalliance.org
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www.MeetTheBoss.tv
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Where Future Leaders Learn
8/2/10 16:02:37
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INDUSTRY INSIGHT
Reliance on compliance Mike Brown outlines how the security of operations in the bulk electric system depends largely on the ability to comply with reliability standards.
ew people associated with the electric tems or corporate tools that are being forced grid in North America have yet to hear onto the plant floor. In order to properly manof the pending NERC regulations. age a CIP compliance program, the standard, National catastrophes such as the blackits intention, and the environment it regulates out of 2003 and the events of 9/11 have led to all need to be taken into consideration. countless resources being spent on security for The first stage of any CIP compliance prothe process control networks of North American gram is to define a Critical Asset and a Critical utility companies. The goal is to Cyber Asset. All other asensure the reliable operation of pects of the program point the bulk electric system. back to this list. Therefore, it Perhaps the most discussed would follow that the best and most ambitious of the relipossible approach for manability standards is the Critical aging compliance would also Infrastructure Protection (CIP) be an asset-based or bottom security standard, CIP 002-009. up approach to compliance This particular standard focusmanagement. es on areas that many utilities We must always rememhave never even bothered to ber that the environment implement. The plant floor lags being monitored and manbehind corporate IT in terms of aged is a production environup-to-date patching of control ment. The network is more Mike Brown, Vice-President systems and intrusion detection critical, potentially more fragNorth America Solutions, programs. Nonetheless, this ile (from an automated, true Matrikon Inc., has over 20 years experience of process control standard is on its way to being IT lockdown and manageengineering and experience in industrial IT networks for implemented and soon to be ment perspective) and the performance monitoring enforced. number of Windows-based projects. He manages the
F
Achieving compliance
Operational Excellence portfolio for plant performance improvement, which includes compliance-based applications such as Alarm Management, Industrial Network Security and NERC CIP, and Plant Regulatory Reporting.
Most discussion up to now has been centered on interpreting, applying, and establishing the various components of the standard within the context of the bulk electric system in North America. Companies are primarily focused on the first phase of NERC CIP compliance: achieving compliance. The second phase of CIP compliance – maintenance – is just starting to become the new challenge. Many companies purport to offer compliance management packages, but most are retooled Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) sys-
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systems typically outnumbers the users by an order of magnitude. Therefore any program that does not report in real or near-real time while simultaneously being mindful of production systems, proprietary protocols, and other plant floor restrictions, is similarly flawed. The CIP standard is complex and specific interpretation does not exist in simple document management or workflow programs. Multiple data sources being cross-referenced against the specific language of the standard is the only way to truly track and monitor your program for on-going compliance.
Existing Offerings There is no shortage of retooled SOX offerings but they fail to integrate with the assets. Corporate IT has tools but they don’t work on the plant floor or have the document management capabilities required for massive NERC CIP documentation. Similarly there are excellent solutions in the plant that solve specific sections of NERC CIP, like Incident Response, OS and Application Patching, and anti-virus, but they fail to integrate information from other systems.
“The best possible approach for managing compliance would also be an asset-based or bottom up approach to compliance management” The ideal solution is one that incorporates safe and reliable (i.e., proven) access to assets, fed into a system that provides document management and workflow capabilities, and then integrated with multiple data sources and the capability to provide NERC CIP-specific interpretation of the information. With this compiled information and the near real time status of your compliance program, you will truly have a valuable compliance management tool. Matrikon is working with our valued clients in the power industry to bring to market just such an offering. Matrikon Imperium is the first tool that will provide near real-time monitoring of your Critical Cyber Assets and provide the information in conjunction with your other data sources and give you the necessary context to manage and maintain your CIP compliance program. n
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BIG INTERVIEW
Keeping it real As CEO of America’s largest electricity generator, Michael Morris takes a pragmatic approach to building our renewable energy future. By Natalie Brandweiner
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A
ccording to recent forecasts, the US energy grid will be adding 20 percent more users in the next 10 years. With its 39,000 miles of territory, American Electric Power will have a major role to play, and AEP CEO Michael Morris believes the grid to currently be in a state to handle these demands. He notes the mistakes made by previous energy growth forecasts, and the likelihood that those being made now have just as much potential for inaccuracy. “Whether they’re wrong on the high side or wrong on the low side is important, but if they miss it by a small amount, the grid will be fi ne,” he says. “There are some very important subsets, though, to what we need to do. When we had the 2003 outage, a lot of people said we had a Third World grid. That just isn’t accurate. What we have is a very bifurcated grid. It was not built regionally, it was built very locally as each utility served their own needs, and ultimately over time we have knitted that together. “The American Electric Power 765 backbone grid serves 10 percent of all the energy that flows through the Eastern Interconnect, which is everything east of the Rocky Mountain region. American Electric Power’s transmission grid also handles about 10 percent of all the electricity that flows across Texas, so we will be a major player, no matter how this unfolds. Therefore, it’s very important to our customers, very important to the states we serve and very important to our shareholders because we see it as a real potential growth opportunity in an earning sense,” Morris explains. However, the question as to whether the grid should be regulated at federal or state level is no longer the primary issue. During the 1930s the interstate gas companies were forced to abide by federal regulation while the electric companies, under the Federal Power Act, chose to be continually regulated by the states. Th is was then hard to change because of the footprint already established within the utility industry, says Morris. “The benefit of an interstate electric transmission grid will be to the benefit of everyone who lives in the country, so why shouldn’t you spread it across the entirety of the gigawatt hours that the system is able to handle? If you do that and you have federal control over it, you’ll see a tremendous amount of transmission capacity added to the system, which will bring renewables into play and also change the way that we build power production facilities. “You take a region of the country where you think you may need four or five stations to be built. If the grid were truly interconnected, you might only need to build two or three of those stations. Today a new clean coal plant or a new nuclear station may cost as much as $7 billion. Build three of them instead of five and you’ve saved the US economy a tremendous amount of money. So, yes, it should be federally regulated.”
New infrastructure Morris fully endorses the restructuring of the current generation and transmission system and advocates the benefits it can provide. Surely such an overhaul and those jobs created would also provide federal benefits, helping President Obama reach his self-set target of creating five million new green collar jobs. “If we’re ultimately going to make the country greener and less dependent on fossil-based fuels, it’s essential. Federal legislative control and cost allocation authority will take down the barriers that are holding back the capital investment needed,” he adds.
He notes the current activities of Senator Jeff Bingaman and the work he is currently undertaking with one of the principal committees in the Senate as a move towards this, describing it as, “A pushback from the Republicans, oddly enough. “It’s a states’ rights issue versus federal government intervention. It’s the cost allocation. Why would somebody in New Jersey want to pay for a transmission line built in North Dakota to bring wind to the Twin Cities? That’s no different from asking why would someone in Columbus want to pay for a bridge spanning Tampa Bay in Florida? But that’s the way the federal policy has always worked. “Governor Pataki has been helping us on this issue, and he’s got two great analogies that are absolutely irrefutable. At the turn of the 20th century, De Witt Clinton, the mayor of New York City, suggested that they fund the Erie Canal. He had no idea it would make New York the fi nancial capital of the world for decades, and it has. “Dwight Eisenhower, when he was President, for different reasons believed very strongly in putting together an interstate highway system. He had no idea it would make California the eighth largest economy in the world, but it did. So the point here is if we built the electric grid in the same way we built the interstate highway system, we would build out a technology-enhanced greener footprint that is a less carbon intensive, less costly undertaking for the country, which would allow us to continue to have technological advantages over all the countries that we compete against.”
“Almost everywhere where I bump into politicians, they always want to sell happy dust, the whole notion that we can do this without any pain. Wouldn’t you love to believe that? But you know it’s not true” Shareholder growth Addressing AEP growth at a recent shareholder meeting, Michael Morris said that actions taken in late 2008 and early 2009 were aimed at assuring the company’s stability in these weak economic conditions and have it positioned to resume growth when the economy recovers. BP CEO Tony Hayward recently faced the task of publicly denying that the company had turned its back on renewables, as it reported a loss of 53 percent in second quarter profits. Renewable energy is not a fast ensurer of ROI, and so how can Morris be so sure that his investments are sturdy? “Well, there’s a lot of credit here to the finance committee of the board of directors as well as our Chief Financial Officer and those inside of the finance group that we were early to move to take down lines of credit that we had negotiated back in the 2005/2006 timeline,” he replies. “We were fearful. We are an A2P2 credit rated utility as it pertains to commercial paper. Companies like ours and other utilities around the United States depend substantially on commercial paper to fund the day-to-day operations of a business for paycheck, to pay for coal as it’s delivered, to pay the transporters, their bills as they send them to us, the entire business.
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“Worried that that might not sustain through an extended credit crunch if it came, we took down those lines of credit. And what was predicted to happen did. A2P2 commercial paper was unavailable toward the latter part of the fourth quarter of 2008 and totally unavailable in the fi rst half of Q1 2009. That’s beginning to ease some now, but that gave us some fi nancial flexibility. “We then moved quickly into the equity markets in Q1 2009 to take advantage of what we saw as an opportunity to put additional equity into the system, help to balance out the debt-equity ratio in our balance sheet and support more strongly the notion that our ratings from the three principal rating agencies are not only right but sustainable now and into the near-term future. “As many people know from our earnings call and updates, we’ve cut our capital budget to $1.8 billion for 2010. If times were different, we would have that capital investment up The John E. Amos Plant, a coal-fired plant in West Virginia, has a generating capacity of 2,900 in the $2.5 billion to $3 billion range because that’s the kind megawatts. Amos is AEP’s largest generating plant. of money that needs to be spent on the system to make sure that we continue to provide reliable, cost-effective power to our customers,” he asserts. to that same conclusion. I received enough emails back from the folks in Morris admits there was an internal focus on cost savings, but not at this company that led me to believe they understood that. Was anybody the expense of compromising technological innovation. He gives as an happy, me included? No, of course not. Everyone thinks every year you example the Turk coal-fired plant that the company is currently building ought to make more money, but the truth is that saved us a tremendous in Arkansas, describing it as, “ultra super-critical, higher temperatures, amount of revenue going forward. The 2008 plan did pay off, and we higher pressures, less carbon footprint than any coal-fi red power plant in were honest about it, and we calculated the incentive compensation that the United States, and in the entire Western Hemisphere – a technological everyone earned and everyone got it. breakthrough that no other utility here in the United States has done.” “There are 21,640 men and women who have dedicated their lives He compares managing his Fortune-ranked 196 company and the to keeping the lights on in the 11 states that we do business. They're organization of his staff through the current economic downturn to the bright people. They want to be told the truth, and that’s what we do,” running of a general household. “You all have an economy that you run. he explains. It’s called your household. Ours is no different than your household. It’s just a few more zeros,” says Morris. In the mix Morris was recently quoted as saying of the energy mix, “There is an issue here that is larger than many of us think. There are answers, but the cost of energy is going to go up. I hate it when I hear Democrats and Republicans saying we need wind, we need solar, we need nuclear, and costs will come down. The politicians think it is going to be free. It isn’t.” It’s not a comfortable message for these times of increased focus on the benefits of renewables. “The American people are bright, and all you need to do is tell them “I’m sure that every one of our employees has throttled back some the truth. Politicians on both sides of the aisle – at the local level, at the vacation planning or new car purchases or some of those things, probstate level, at the federal level – almost everywhere I bump into politiably saving more than they did historically. All of those things, paying cians, they always want to sell happy dust, the whole notion that we can down credit cards more rapidly than they did before, making sure their do this without any pain. It’s like the commercials on TV: ‘You can lose mortgage is in good shape, renegotiating it to lower the cost if they can. 30 pounds and eat all the chocolate cake you like.’ Wouldn’t you love to That honest conversation is essential. The trust and confidence that I believe that? But you know it’s not true.” hope the men and women of this company have in me and the leadership He notes the Energy Information Administration and the data they team – and I get plenty of indication that it’s there – has a lot to do with release as being “typically wrong.” Statistics such as ‘Wind is 15 cents us being honest and frank. a kilowatt hour; biomass is 12 cents a kilowatt hour; a well-run fossil “In the latter part of the third quarter last year, early end of fourth plant with all of the paraphernalia, even with carbon capture, is approxiquarter, we told everybody no salary increases in 2009, the first utility to mately six or seven cents a kilowatt hour.’ As the expenses of functioning make that statement, and around 70 percent of corporate America came the way we have been continue to increase, Morris emphasizes that the
“Honesty rings well in the ear of the Americans, no different than it does in the employees of American Electric Power”
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American people need to become more aware of this, need to be given a more honest message.
Carbon capture Ever the technologist, Morris’ solution has been to embrace renewables, but to do so with realistic and viable methods. Coal, one of AEP’s major energy sources, accounts for over 50 percent of this nation’s electricity and over 32 percent of its carbon emissions. To combat the problem of the utility’s emissions, AEP’s Mountaineer Carbon Capture and Storage Project, is built to remove between 100,000 and 300,000 tons of CO2, a significant amount but still less than four percent of the plant’s total annual emissions. Morris will need all of his expertise to manage the transition period when the technology is almost there, but not quite. “That’s the other side of the honest equation of, again, I want to lose weight, but I still want to eat my chocolate cake. The fact of the matter is we’re improving the technology. Th is is so different from the Clean Air Act. In the 1980s and 1990s we all knew how to capture sulphur, we all knew how to capture nitrous oxides. We knew the technology was out there, but it hadn’t been tested. “We all want to do this. I don’t think there’s a utility in the United States that doesn’t. The technology is just beginning to get laid out and beginning to be scaled up. Again, we think at AEP it’s essential for our customers and for our shareholders, because we’re the largest coal burner in the United States, that we push that technology, and we are.
“However, you wouldn’t want, nor would you expect, us to spend $1 billion, maybe even $1.2 billion, to retrofit the entirety of the station to find out after that we never did enough advancement of the technology. This is too big; it doesn’t work. So our plan is to do the small step this September and be in operation. Everything’s being built: the wells have been drilled, the pipes have been laid, and the capture technology is being constructed even as I sit here. We hope by 2011, 2012 we’ll upscale that to commercial size, 1300 megawatts, at Mountaineer. That means I need four of the commercially available technologies deployed at that station. “We believe it’ll be shovel-ready, in today’s phraseology, in 2015 or so and deployable, not only for our system but other systems. And again, equally important, employable around the world. If we as a people don’t retrofit the current stations that supply – China’s 70 percent coal, India’s 64 percent coal, Russia’s 60 percent coal – we need to retrofit that existing fleet or the lights are going to go out and the economy goes down all over the world. Believe me, today’s economic recession/depression is nothing compared to where we’d be if we didn’t have energy to fuel the massive productivity of the world,” he states. Some environmental think tanks say that there is in fact no investment to back up the carbon emission promises. Morris says that while that may be true of some companies, is is not true of AEP. The Mountaineer Project has a price tag of approximately $100 million, which the company is deeply invested in, with its ultimate expansion being in the order of $400 million. “We’re working with our checkbook rather than with our mouth,” says Morris.
The Pickens Plan
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n alternative energy plan put forward by T. Boone Pickens, Founder and Chairman of BP Capital Management, which alls for building new wind generation facilities that will produce 20 percent of our electricity while using our domestic natural gas supply as a transportation fuel as well as for power generation. It aims to: • Create millions of new jobs by building out the capacity to generate up to 22 percent of our electricity from wind, with additional solar generation capacity. • Build a 21st century backbone electrical transmission grid • Provide incentives for homeowners and the owners of commercial buildings to upgrade their insulation and other energy saving options • Use America’s natural gas to replace imported oil as a transportation fuel in addition to its other uses in power generation, chemicals, etc.
Source: www.pickensplan.com
T. Boone Pi
ckens
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Realistic goals
Coal Natural Gas Oil Nuclear Hydro Wind Solar Geothermal The greater good A secure energyfuture is going to require some compromise. Understanding the grid and how to make it a more efficient tool for both the utilities and their customers seems to be the missing link in terms of transmission and distribution. Morris notes that despite an abundance of wind in certain areas of the US, because very few people live in those areas, this resource is not used as effectively as it could be. The most logical conclusion in light of the current recession, and one reiterated across the industry, would be to rebuild the infrastructure – creating jobs and simultaneously reorganizing power transmission and distribution. Morris notes that this issue receives no federal oversight control or cost allocation decisions, and as a result is being swept under the administrative carpet. “We always use it as a poster child – and it’s a bit out of date only because it was in a different era, a different timeline – but the last line that our company built, which was about 100 miles long from West Virginia into Virginia, took 18 years from the time we originally developed the need and the time that we actually energized the line. It was 16 and a half years to get the permits and 18 months to build the line,” he says. The NIMBY attitude adopted by so many Americans is an added challenge to those already mounting against renewable growth. “There is an attitude in the country of ‘nothing in my backyard’,” says Morris. “We all want energy. We want all of it that we can get. We want it cheap and we want it clean, and we want no opportunity to see where it came from. We hear, ‘I don’t want to see the plant, the transformers, the transmission or the substations. I just want it to appear magically.’ “That’s not the way it works. The wall socket is really an intriguing piece of equipment –behind it are trillions of dollars of equipment across the world that make it work, but people don’t want to see it. That’s part of the problem,” he says.
Despite these technological advancements, utilities may be unable to keep up with the demands imposed upon them by the federal carbon emissions targets. As public awareness of climate change continues to grow, it is expected that people and politicians will want instant change on carbon reduction; but do these perceptions need to be reset in terms of realistic timelines and procedures? “The current plan is that we’ll begin to make some serious reductions by 2020,” Morris says. “Right now the plan calls for reductions that technologically won’t be achievable. The latest work out of the house has us reducing by 17 percent by 2020 rather than the 20 percent, which was the original plan, so we’re making progress.” Morris explains a more realistic number to be somewhere in the region of between 10 and 15 percent. “I’m a big believer in the men and women of AEP. When we said that we would begin the build-out of a lot of clean air things and have them done in three or four years, everyone said, ‘I don’t know how we’ll do that, Mike,’ but we did it, so I love visionary goals, but I like them to be realistic rather than just political phrases that get you a big buzz and then nothing happens. “If you look at Kyoto, it’s a perfect example. The entire world supposedly signed on to Kyoto. As you know, we and Australia and a couple of other countries, for obvious reasons, said, ‘Wait a second. There are only two or three nations out of the entire world that will hit their 2012 requirement.’ So great political phrases are always tainted by political reality. “California is a great example. In 2010 California was supposed to be free of internal combustion engines on laws that were passed back in the 1980s and 1990s. Last time I was there, there were a lot of internal combustion engines on those freeways. Far too many, as a matter of fact.” AEP is also exploring the avenue of cleaner and more independent energy as a partner in The Pickens Plan – the alternative energy plan put forward by well-known businessman T. Boone Pickens, which includes the establishment of an extra high voltage transmission superhighway. “There’s nobody better to win the hearts and minds of the people of this country than Boone Pickens,” laughs Morris. “I’ve known him for a long, long time, and he truly is an iconic American. He’s a fi rm believer in the creativity of the men and women of this country, and he’s lived that life. “He started out as a geologist and created Mesa Petroleum and turned it into a real juggernaut and then moved on to help restructure corporate America where he thought it was headed in the wrong direction, particularly in the energy development business, He says it simply, ‘Either you’re with me or against me.’ If you're against him, that means you're for foreign oil, and if you’re with him, that means you're for domestic production of natural gas and oil. “His theory is quite simply this: if we don’t do something about transportation fuel in a competitive sense, then we, as a nation, will continue to be an importer from countries that don’t think much of us; in fact, countries that would just as soon see many of us not around anymore if they had a chance to do that. His statement is very simply that. We’re out joining him everywhere that we can: we had a public forum recently where we had hundreds of people at a town hall meeting here, and we played off of each other and did well, and we continue to do that.
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Morris points out that Pickens has put a lot of his personal money into an advertising campaign promoting the use of natural gas in big vehicles and putting plug-in electric hybrids in day-to-day travel business. “Next year Nissan will have a viable SUV in this country that you’ll be able to plug in. Colleagues of mine at Northeast Utilities are already working on building plug-in stations at different locations throughout part of their service territory. We’ll start doing those kinds of things at American Electric Power as well. “Since the fi rst embargo of 1973, this country has said we need to be energy-independent. If we don’t do something about transportation fuels, we’ll never be energy-independent other than going back to foot pedal and bicycle pedal and horse transportation, which clearly isn’t going to happen. So we’re big believers in it. The other piece of it that works for us is if you’re going to have plug-in electrics and you’re going to have an electric grid that’s able to handle that on a national basis, again, you go back to federal regulation and federal cost allocation.”
Legacy Michael Morris has been involved in the utilities industry since the 1970s and has held the position of CEO not only at AEP but also at Northeast Utilities System and Consumers Energy, and has witnessed some of the industry’s most innovative moments, with the latest round of innovation emerging with Obama’s Plan for America. However, his involvement in the industry is coming to an end, and for many he will be known for his
work behind the scenes, leading up the future structural reform. “My timeline will be up in 2011, and that’s pretty sad because, quite honestly, there’s no better time to be in this business. I’ve seen lots of ups and downs, lots of challenges, but we’re there. I had a chance to do what we call the University Listening Tour throughout much of 2008, and I went to campuses from MIT in the East, Stanford in the West and many in between. The young men and women who are being educated on campus today see this as a challenge. They are technologically advanced compared to where my generation is, and they are up to the challenge. So I’m a firm believer in the creativity of the American way of doing business. “Silicon Valley is working on solar power, which is great news. It’s
“Today’s economic recession/ depression is nothing compared to where we’d be if we didn’t have energy to fuel the massive productivity of the world” currently working on retrofitting existing transportation vehicles to make them plug-in viable or multi-fuel viable. You're seeing a tremendous amount of capital being invested in renewables and a lot of capital being invested in what to do with carbon when you capture it. The whole capture storage idea is logical, but it’s silly when you think of it. You ought to capture it; you ought to take the CO2. O2 is very viable and valuable; C is very viable and valuable. Let’s figure out the energy equation because today it’s more energy to split them than it is to capture them and store them, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be that way tomorrow. As I call them out of due respect, ‘the kids’ on campus will help solve these problems as we go forward, so it’s a great time to be in the business. “I’ve had the enjoyment of four very unique, different career stops along the way,” he says. “I had 12 years in the gas business. To this day, people will bump into colleagues and say, ‘Oh, I knew Mike back at American Natural Resources, and he was always a fair dealer and honest guy,’ and those kinds of things. And then three utilities: the biggest utility in Michigan, Consumers Energy; the biggest utility in New England, Northeast Utilities; and now the biggest utility in the United States. If along those ways I’ve touched some lives and made some difference, that’s plenty of legacy for me.” Michael G. Morris is Chairman, President and CEO of American Electric Power Co., Inc.
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INDUSTRY INSIGHT
READING BETWEEN THE LINES Improved transmission technologies and a fully implemented smart grid are essential to America’s renewable energy ambitions, says Barry Batson.
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n the United States we continue to work toward reducing our dependence on foreign oils and fossil fuels for power. Renewable Energy Standards and US Federal Tax Credits are among many government incentives that have helped push us along on our journey toward renewable energy solutions. As a country, we have installed many sources of renewable energy generating facilities such as wind energy turbines, solar power systems, geothermal power plants and many others. In addition to our renewable energy interests, we are continuing to engineer more efficient conventional power plants and also looking at constructing new nuclear base load plants. Electric use continues to grow in America. More electric production means new and/or improved transmission systems are needed to carry electricity to the populated areas where it will be used. Today many of the transmission systems in the US are more than 40 years old and operating at or near capacity. The electric blackout in the northeastern United States in 2003 highlighted our antiquated electric grid. Recent public focus on renewable energy, specifically wind energy generation has brought an ‘energy bottleneck’ fact to the forefront.
Wind farms are typically built in rural, remote areas or on mountain ridges where wind blows for long durations. These areas are often hundreds of miles from population centers where electric usage is high. New transmission lines are desperately needed. In Texas the Public Service Commission developed CREZ-Competitive Renewable Electric Zones and devoted $5 billion toward new transmission lines; including approximately 2300 miles of 345 KV lines. Th is initiative and many more throughout the country have triggered the creation of standalone transmission companies whose assets are primarily transmission lines and substations. Several
“Smart grid technology will allow consumers to have more control and more options on how and when to use electricity” large, multi-state transmission lines are in the planning/licensing stages; projects like Green Mountain Express, Montana Alberta Tie Ltd. (MATL), High Plains Express, Gateway Project, Northern Lights, Prairie Wind and ITC Great Plains. It’s an extremely complex issue to address when dealing with electricity crossing multi-state jurisdictions and involving the
FERC for rates, often taking to plan, license, permit and construct new transmission lines and their associated substations. Advances have also become apparent in transmission line technology. For example, conductors made of composite material may someday replace today’s traditional steel conductors and revolutionize transmission design. These composites list advantages including greater ampacity and lighter weight, and could therefore be used on existing structures to carry more power. Furthermore, the evolution of smart grid technology continues to move forward. Smart grid technology will allow consumers to have more control and more options on how and when to use electricity. Transmission systems will be able to generate more power through existing systems by optimizing them, reducing power flow waste and maximizing the distribution of lowest cost generation sources. Th is will require upgrade in substations and dispatch centers as well as communication systems. Enhanced equipment includes; phasor measuring units, distributed superconducting magnetic energy storage devices, digital sensing relays, phase shift ing transformers. Utilities will have more information to perform dynamic modeling of the transmission system to further optimize. Once in place smart grid technologies can help utilities make better decisions on use of their resources and increase reliability of the grid. Barry Batson is the Vice President of Business Development at MasTec, Inc. MasTec, and subsidiary company Wanzek Construction, work together to provide complete solutions for the design and construction of wind farms, transmission lines, substations and smart grid technologies.
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SOLAR POWER
A perfect ďŹ t Rhone Resch of the Solar Energy Industries Association explains how solar slots into the energy puzzle.
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American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Top solar provisions included in the bill, which was signed on February 17, 2009: • Creation of a Department of Treasury Grant Program • Improvement to the investment tax credit by eliminating ITC penalties for subsidized energy financing • A new DOE Loan Guarantee Program • Creation of tax incentives for manufacturing by offering accelerated depreciation and a 30 percent refundable tax credit for the purchase of manufacturing equipment used to produce solar material and components for all solar technologies Source: www.seia.org
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ong before the arrival of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Rhone Resch and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) were working behind the scenes to highlight solar as a viable solution to America’s energy worries. With some of the world’s best solar resources, the US is well placed to create energy from the sun and has the opportunity to leverage solar to play a pivotal role within the country’s energy mix. However, Resch does admit that solar currently has some shortcomings. “Although solar isn’t more cost-effective at the moment, it certainly has the potential to be much more cost-effective than traditional sources of fossil fuels,” he says. “In large part it’s because you manufacture solar. You don’t mine it or drill for it, and because of that you’re able to scale up the manufacturing and drive down costs per unit; and as we do, so you will see the price of solar continue to go lower and lower while the traditional forms of energy continue to go higher.”
New jobs Solar’s emergence as a viable alternative energy source is already beginning to show across the US. Attempting to kill two birds with one stone, President Obama’s tactic of deploying further jobs into the solar industry will hopefully meet the need of America’s rising unemployment rate. Obama has pledged to invest $150 billion into creating five million new ‘green collar’ jobs – solar manufacturing and installation forming an important part of that number. Resch notes that those states that have been hardest hit by the recession – Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Illinois – are those that are now creating and fi lling solar employment positions. Workers made unemployed in the automotive or other manufacturing sectors are now turning to solar, while tradesmen are being employed to install solar units. “When you install solar you’re using the tradesmen, the backbone of our economy,” says Resch. “We’re re-employing those who have been let go by industries that can no longer survive in the United States; and we’re giving new opportunities in an industry that is sustainable, that provides good quality, well-paying jobs for the future.” Despite this, integrating solar as a vital part of the country’s energy mix is no easy task. In the second quarter of 2009, the SEIA spent $54,000 lobbying the government on solar power, whereas Chevron spent $6 million to further its own interests. The capital funds of fossil fuel corporations are much greater and have traditionally held the lobbying power in Congress. Key to overcoming this is presence, explains Resch. He notes that every quarter the association is increasing its presence and educating Congress on the value of solar energy. “It’s important to not necessarily just look at the numbers of dollars spent, but to look at some of the accomplishments that we’ve achieved over the last year and to see the return on the investment of those dollars. “For example, in the bailout bill in October of last year we got a long-term extension and expansion of the tax credits for solar energy in the United States, and that’s a 30 percent tax credit for businesses. It was expanded to be a 30 percent tax credit for homeowners as well, which is an eight-year extension, so that’s a huge victory providing stability for our industry to grow in the United States.”
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He also points to the 19 provisions in the stimulus bill for solar energy companies, significantly more than the oil and gas industry. The SEIA has been very strategic in working with Congress to ensure its policies and incentives are heard, and the market is likely to expand quickly. “What’s critical is that we’re getting the industry engaged to appreciate the role that Washington can play in the energy sector,” says Resch. “That means inviting their congressmen out to ribbon cuttings or openings of new factories. To invite senators to briefi ngs on energy. To visit them when they come to Washington and tell them about the new employees that they’re hiring and the new technologies that they’re developing. Combined, what this creates is a grassroots capability that has the potential to be second to none, and is absolutely critical if we are going to be successful in Washington.” Since the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was announced, the DOE has systematically been providing awards and funding for solar, for R&D projects or university partnerships to addresses the technology barriers that create the high cost of solar usage. The number of solar awardees for the funds is high, but Resch explains that the technologies aren’t commercial yet. “We certainly can expect the R&D investment to result in new products in the next few years,” he says. He notes the success of the provisions of the stimulus bill for the solar industry, which are now starting to pay dividends, such as making the investment tax credit refundable. By turning it into a grant, applicants can now receive a check from the federal government for 30 percent of the cost of the system, rather than a 30 percent tax credit. As well as this, the stimulus bill also created an expanded loan guarantee program and a new tax credit for manufacturing. “All of these are critical to address some of the challenges we face in a recession economy. Specifically, that those companies who used to invest in solar projects last year may not this year, because either they’re not loaning money on the debt fi nancing or they don’t have the tax equity on the tax side, and subsequently we found at this time last year that investment dollars were drying up for the solar industry. We were able to address both of those issues in the stimulus bill and we’re starting to see the demand for solar increase significantly in the third quarter due to these new programs,” he says.
Solar transmission One of the worries surrounding a big change in America’s fuel mix is how the various types of renewable sources will fit into the grid, given that the transmission structure was built for the traditionally dominant fossil fuel resources. Resch explains that solar fits in many ways, one being distributed generation capacity. “Solar generates electricity at the point of consumption. By putting solar on your roof, you’re putting a small power plant on your home or your business that will provide a substantial amount of its energy, so it relieves some of the stress on the grid because those electrons come from the solar panels on your roof rather than a power plant that may be 100 miles away. “So greater use of distributed generation certainly helps to alleviate stress on the grid and cuts down on the need for major expansions. The second is that solar can be used by utilities to alleviate some of the
hot spots: certain areas of the grid have more congestion than others. By strategically putting solar on buildings in those areas, you can alleviate that stress on the grid. “The third is that you can build solar farms in the desert, on landfi lls, on brown field spaces or other areas and can directly connect to interstate transmission lines. These solar farms could range from five megawatts to 500 megawatts, and depending on the transmission infrastructure you can connect some smaller projects to existing transmission lines that have the capacity to absorb more electrons. Now, you may not be able to build a 500 megawatt power plant on that line, but you certainly can build a 50 megawatt power plant on that line. You will see solar start to improve the efficiency of transmission by making sure that the transmission lines are being as fully utilized as possible. “Finally, in the long run, we need to build new transmission in the United States. We have partnered with the American Wind Energy Association and developed a study and recommendations called Green Power Super Highways. It outlines all of the recommendations that are necessary in order to build new transmission in this country. It takes more than 10 years to build a new transmission line, and we cannot wait 10 years before we start to generate electricity from solar farms in the southwest. We cannot wait 10 years before we start to address climate change, so the siting, fi nancing and permitting of these new transmission lines is critical,” he says. Resch believes that it won’t be long before solar reaches a par with traditional fossil fuels. Solar is already cost competitive in certain areas of the country and is a viable cost alternative for natural gas. Natural gas is used to generate peak electricity, as well as base loads, and aligned with the time that solar can be maximized. He notes that solar is displacing the most expensive electrons to consumers: “Peak prices in California vary depending where you are, but in PG&E they’re $0.37 per kilowatt hour and in San Diego Gas and Electric in the south, they’re $0.42 per kilowatt hour. “Solar is the lowest cost option in those areas already. It is critical is that state governments create an accurate price signal for electricity that not all electrons are the same. Th at you can’t have the same rate 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Rather, when the utility is paying more for its electricity, consumers should pay more for their electricity. That becomes a very clear price signal in the marketplace that will allow solar to compete more with traditional fossil fuels.” Public attitudes have long supported solar; promoting its benefits to the legislatures is the hard part. A recent poll conducted by Kelton Research on behalf of the SEIA showed that 92 percent of the American public want the US to use more solar energy. Support from solar transcends party lines and economic strata. “People strongly support greater use of solar energy – there are not many things in the world that achieve a 92 percent public support rate. It’s putting us up in a category with puppy dogs and ice cream in terms of popularity and that is fantastic, but what we also need to do is to be smart about it and to make sure that it’s not just a technology that people like, but a technology that people start to utilize and that we get Congress and the state governments to support greater use of solar energy.” Rhone Resch is the President and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association.
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ASK THE EXPERT
Here comes the sun
Going green is a business imperative. Pete Resler explains the key considerations for businesses planning to go solar.
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or most businesses, especially consumer-facing businesses, the advantages of going green are becoming more and more evident. The public is in tune with our climate challenges and the need for sustainable alternatives to meet energy needs. They are demanding that business leaders step up and start doing something to make a difference. Especially for retailers, going green is no longer simply a differentiator, it is the price of admission to access the market ruled by environmentally aware consumers. Today, that is virtually all consumers. The initial decision to adopt a solar power solution is relatively simple for large retailers and others who have extensive roof space and the desire to go green. The greater challenge is figuring out how to get it done.
Choosing your system Among the many options available in the marketplace, it is tempting to look for the lowest initial cost to purchase, your solar system. But the more important consideration is the lifetime value of the system. Th is includes the up-front cost as well as the energy
system, fi nancing it themselves or securing third party fi nancing, many are choosing to stick to what they know, and simply buy the power under a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA). Companies are fi nding that going green does not necessarily require that they become solar experts, but they do need a trusted partner. When Wal-Mart, a recognized leader in sustainability, made the decision to add solar systems to some of their California stores, they didn’t want to be in the solar business – they just wanted green power at a competitive price. That’s what they got when they partnered with BP Solar, who designs, builds, maintains and operates the rooftop systems, selling the power to Wal-Mart through a PPA. Similarly, FedEx Ground, the small-package shipping unit of FedEx Corp. selected BP Solar to install and operate the solar system on its distribution hub in New Jersey. It is the nation’s largest rooftop solar installation. Under a PPA, the green power produced will provide up to 30 percent of the hub’s annual energy needs.
Making solar make sense to your shareholders it produces over its life which can vary significantly between systems and is influenced by factors including degradation rates, reliability and quality. The best solar suppliers back their products with solid warranties. Choosing an experienced system designer and highly trained installer is critical to the proper operation, efficiency and safety of your system. Be certain that you select experts that have a solid track record designing, installing and maintaining solar systems similar to yours. You want a solar company that understands and honors your need to continue your operations without interruption or distraction during the installation – a partner that understands your operational requirements and has a sharp focus on quality and safety. Talk to others in your business segment about their experience with solar companies to fi nd out who delivers on their promises.
Sticking with what you know Decide what level of direct involvement works best for you in the design, installation and ongoing operation of your solar system. While some companies opt to own the solar
Modern investors are keen on green and place additional value on companies that can implement a green strategy that is cost neutral or positive. Never before has solar energy been such an attractive and viable solution. A rooftop with a well-designed, installed and managed solar installation that delivers lowcost electricity over a long period of time makes good business sense. Companies with a big brand to protect are not interested in ‘green washing’. They know that consumers are far too savvy to fall for anything that looks like an attempt to just appear environmentally responsible. What they do has to be real and stand up to scrutiny. They want brand synergy and the peace of mind that comes with partnering with another big brand. BP Solar, with nearly 40 years of success in the solar sector and backed by BP’s strong reputation and balance sheet, fits the bill. Our success is built upon meeting customer needs through dependability, offering highest lifetime value, providing a complete range of solar solutions, and our global reputation as a strategic partner. Pete Resler is Communications and External Affairs Manager at BP Solar.
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WATER
Current risks Dawn Kristof Champney of WWEMA explains how aging water infrastructure, public health concerns and funding legislation make water a matter of national security.
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What is WWEMA? Water and Wastewater Equipment Manufacturers Association (WWEMA) is a national non-profit trade association formed in 1908 to represent the interests of companies that manufacture and supply products and technologies used in the water supply and the wastewater treatment industry. For 101 years WWEMA has been the voice of the water and wastewater equipment industry, at the government level for advocacy efforts and education efforts, and in advancing the interests of the industry and helping its members position themselves to be most profitable in serving that industry.
hen ASCE awarded a grade of D- for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure in its 2009 report card, it was a stark warning that the security of the nation’s water infrastructure is at considerable risk. Numerous figures have also been released detailing the plight of our water infrastructure and how much funding is actually required in order to bring it up to standard. Combine this with the effects of the global economic crisis and the outlook appears to be very bleak indeed. That is until you speak to Dawn Kristof Champney, President of the Water and Wastewater Equipment Manufacturers Association (WWEMA), who has a remarkably optimistic take on the state of affairs. “I think most would agree that our industry is really quite a resilient one when it comes to economic conditions,” she says. “Water is a prerequisite of life and that doesn’t change. The needs are so enormous that they cannot be ignored. If you look at the water and wastewater industry compared with a number of other industrial sectors that have seen significant negative growth in the last several years, our industry continues to see growth. It may be very conservative right now, in the two to three percent range, but it’s still growth.” But this optimism by no means negates the fact that the industry is facing some tough challenges right now. One of the main areas of concern is of course the need to repair and replace existing water infrastructure, much of which has already exceeded its useful life. The majority of wastewater treatment plants were built in the 1970s, so for the most part, they have already exceeded their useful life. Reinvesting in repairing and replacing existing infrastructure is, and will continue to be, the number one priority. Leaking water pipes is one example cited by Kristof Champney: “The amount of water we lose in our drinking water pipes is enormous and the cost savings we could make if we could capture that water and not have to find alternative sources of water supply would be a significant return on investment, but we have to be willing to make that investment,” she stresses. With much of the water infrastructure being in such poor condition already, huge doubts are cast over its ability to cope with the tougher conditions we face in the future. This is one of the main challenges that the industry will need to face in the coming years. Climate change will certainly test the resiliency of water infrastructure and as populations become more urbanized existing infrastructure will need to be expanded to cope with these new demands. These issues pose very real and very serious threats to our existing water infrastructure. As does the issue of the water/energy nexus, explains Kristof Champney: “This is certainly an issue that is being debated throughout the halls of Congress and among all facets of the industry at the moment. The quantity of water that we need to provide our energy and the cost of the energy that we require to provide water to our communities is intrinsically linked.”
Public health These issues are clearly something that has the industry on edge, but there are also concerns that directly regard consumers and these are related to matters of public health.
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WATER INFRASTRUCTURE IN NUMBERS • The nation’s water supply system serves some 300 MILLION AMERICANS • The United States uses 408 BILLION GALLONS of water each day • The vast majority of the nation’s pipes were laid in three phases: in the late 1800s, the 1920s and just after World War II and were designed to last 50-75 years • The American drinking water infrastructure network spans over 700,000 MILES, more than four times longer than the National Highway System • 72,000 MILES of mains and sewer pipes were installed over 80 years ago • Leaking distribution systems account for 9000 OLYMPIC-SIZE SWIMMING POOLS worth of water being lost daily • 240,000 water pipe breaks occur across America each year • The American Water Works Association estimates that water utilities will have to invest $250 BILLION over the next 30 years to replace aging pipes. The cost of pipes for new developments, security upgrades, advanced treatment methods and other needs may increase this bill to $500 BILLION • The US Environmental Protection Agency and others estimate that water and wastewater infrastructure repair costs may be as much as $745 BILLION to $1 TRILLION over the next 20 years
“We have a whole new area of concern with regard to emerging compounds. We are just now starting to identify endocrine disrupters in our water supplies and we’re trying to understand how much is in there, what the public health risk is, and what the combined risk is when all these compounds come together,” says Kristof Champney. “Trying to find out to what degree our wastewater treatment plants are capable of actually preventing those compounds from being released into our water supplies is an area of heightened interest, and will continue to grow as we further research and analyze what we need to do on the wastewater treatment side to try to keep those compounds from getting into our drinking water supplies.” She also believes that under the current administration tightened standards will continue to be the trend. Stricter regulations will be brought in regarding discharges from industry and on the non-point source. Discharge from agriculture in particular is something that Kristof Champney says will become a huge public policy debate in the next five years or so as there is so much that can be done about non-point source discharge. Urban runoff is also one of the biggest contributors to wastewater treatment problems.
“Trying to find out to what degree our wastewater treatment plants are capable of actually preventing those compounds from being released into our water supplies is an area of heightened interest”
On this matter of wastewater treatment and public health Kristof Champney is adamant that the main stumbling block to overcoming these risks is not the lack of technology. “The manufacturers of water and wastewater equipment are very industrious and capable of providing solutions where there is the need, where there is a demand. Technology either exists or will come into play to serve and to treat these new contaminants that we have to deal with,” she says. “It’s more a matter of the cost and the demand, the need to actually make these investments to install more advanced treatment technologies. If the demand is there, the technology will be there, the supplier will provide the solutions. But there has to be a very real, defined need, and willingness to invest, to provide, and to make the necessary investments in advanced technologies. That’s the big unknown.”
Consumer education The temptation is to believe that this desire to invest that Kristof Champney is referring to is something that must come from the federal level and that it is the government who needs to invest more in the water infrastructure. Whilst this does hold true, the consumer needs to bear the responsibility here too, she says, and must be willing to make the necessary investments. “I think we all need to do more, both at the federal, state, local, and consumer level, that there is a greater need for all parties to play in trying to bring the needed capital to our industry,” she says. “The contribution of the federal government to our industry has waned over the last decade, but it certainly is turning around now and there has been a substantial increase in financial investment in water and wastewater infrastructure in the last two years. Under the Obama administration, I see that continuing.
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BUY AMERICAN The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA) provides significant levels of funding for States to finance high priority infrastructure projects needed to ensure clean water and safe drinking water. The Act also includes Buy American provisions in section 1605 that require Clean Water State Revolving Loan Fund (CWSRF) and Drinking Water State Revolving Loan Fund (DWSRF) assistance recipients of these ARRA funds to use domestic iron, steel and manufactured goods that are produced in the United States. Exceptions to the Buy American provision are allowed in the following cases: “But at the same time, that’s still a drop in the bucket compared to what the needs are, and there’s nothing our federal government can do to fill those needs. It’s really going to end up having to come from the end user by starting to charge them the true cost of providing the service. That’s been the biggest void that we have, and I think that’s where we have suffered the most in that we have failed to educate the consumer as to the true cost of providing that service, and we have failed to stand up and face the political challenges of charging the rates that need to be charged to meet our current and future needs. That inevitably has to change,” explains Kristof Champney. “As public consumers and policy makers become more aware of the challenges we’re facing and the risks of not making those investments, that is what is going to drive us to actually invest in the future and not just trying to bandaid the present. I suspect in the next decade we are going to see revolutionary changes taking place in our industry now that we have come to realize that we cannot wait any longer,” she predicts.
• where the head of the federal agency concerned determines adherence would be “inconsistent with the public interest”, • where iron/steel/manufactured goods are not produced in the US in sufficient and available quantities, or • inclusion of US-produced products would increase overall project cost by 25 percent In addition, the ARRA also includes other specific conditions like the one requiring all water infrastructure projects to be under contract or in construction by February 17, 2010. Any States that fail to meet this deadline will have their remaining funding reallocated to those States who have already managed to allocate their financial aid.
Federal funding When talking about the financial aid that the industry has received through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), Kristof Champney is a little less enthusiastic. She tends to believe that the funding has provided some nominal assistance to communities, but at the same time she is not convinced that the money that the stimulus program has allocated to water and wastewater has not simply supplanted what the communities would have invested on their own had they not received funding. Something that she feels particularly strongly about is that certain requirements of the ARRA are actually doing more harm than good. “The Buy American rule that accompanied the stimulus funding for our industry has basically crippled our ability to move forward with many projects. The whole premise of the stimulus funds was to provide monies to shovel ready projects that had already been designed. But nobody had designed projects with the idea that they had to comply with a new Buy American requirement,” she says. “All this has achieved is to make shovel ready projects go back to the drawing board to be redesigned in order to comply with the Buy American rule. It had a crippling impact for the first three quarters of last year in getting the money spent. By December 22 only 50 percent of the money had gone into projects under construction and we only have until February 17 of this year to spend the rest of that money.” For Kristof Champney it has been a very painful year of trying to educate policy makers as to the damage that they have created. She believes that when
this law was passed, policy makers did not fully understand its implications for the municipalities who can now no longer do business with their international trade partners like the UK, Mexico and Canada, which are major trading partners. Negotiations are already underway to get an exemption for Canada, as many US companies have operations there, which means that by complying with this law many US companies are being harmed. But as far as the future is concerned, Kristof Champney is optimistic that more money will be available for the necessary infrastructure upgrades. “There is legislation currently being considered on Capitol Hill that would substantially increase the money that the federal government will give to the states each year, through the State Revolving Fund program, to assist their infrastructure needs,” she says. However, discussions over the development of a national infrastructure bank and removing the state caps on private activity bonds, therefore providing additional private investment in the industry, could also provide a brighter outlook for the future and are key legislative initiatives that WWEMA is in support of. “We don’t depend on our federal government to have to bail out our communities, it is a local responsibility. We just have to have the political will to step up to the plate, to make our case, to have the facts to defend what we need to get done, and move forward. We can get it done, without question.” n
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ASK THE EXPERT
cise acoustic leak equipment can be brought in to find, isolate and repair leaks. Precision accurate water metering with integral smart intelligence built in at each point of consumption is the key to extending the life of existing water infrastructure. This is why metering can no longer be about basic consumption data alone. We must layer greater value into the information, so that consumption data becomes actionable through highlights to usage trends and water loss patterns within defined time frames. With this data, utilities can better plan for and address the real problems in their infrastructure that may require significant capital outlay.
Winning the water war Better informed decision making through the use of smart technology is the key to water preservation, says Ian Macleod.
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an has battled over oil – a vital component of a nation’s economy – for decades. Now, we must step up and focus our battle to shore up and protect another vital resource – water. Utilities are stepping up with a tactical approach aimed at tightening their grip on water supply, increasing operational efficiencies and prioritizing their capital infrastructure upgrades with smart intel providing new data analysis.
Smart grid for water The technology migration path for most utilities begins with an upgrade in meter technology. Smart meters are making the job easier and new forms of data collection are improving efficiencies. ROI is a key driver that meter technology partners can help utilities project and prove through efficiency gains and reduced operational costs. The move in read technology is toward fixed network water meter systems that shorten the time gap between utility management and actionable field intel. With fixed network, managers no longer have to wait for monthly collected reads to be armed with data. Real-time data drives better informed decision making, faster response to alerts of loss, and overall greater control of water.
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Preservation responsibility falls on both sides of the meter – both for customers and the utility. Smart metering solutions can give customers better insight into their consumption so that they can make smarter decisions on their own use. Master Meter’s residential meters capture rich data capable of delivering a usage profile in 15minute detail. Should customers be alarmed with use or have a billing dispute these profiles can be used to help pinpoint the exact time and date of consumption. Both the utility and customer are better informed to manage their response and prevent the problem in the future.
Preventing large losses District Metered Areas (DMA) bring greater governance in proactively managing system-wide leaks, and can help pre-empt disruptive and costly water main breaks. With a DMAs water is measured at every point of consumption within a zone and compared against total volume of water delivered into that zone. Any discrepancy in total measured use versus delivery will indicate infrastructure or delivery system loss – which could be a sizable loss for the utility that was previously undetected. When a specific zone shows abnormal variance in measured flows within the zone, pre-
“Smart meters are making the job easier and new forms of data collection are improving efficiencies” Taking the battle into the future Aerial drone technology is now giving utilities a way to collect data available through smarter 3G water meters without additional infrastructure, such as repeaters and network towers. Master Meter’s 3G AirLinx uses battle-proven military technology to collect reads via a GPS self-guided drone. AirLinx collects not just raw consumption data, but alerts and alarms that represent attacks against accurate measurement including leaks, tamper and theft. The drone can be launched daily to provide management with robust field intel and help portray an accurate picture of what’s going on without placing more boots on the ground. In the end, winning the war for water preservation comes down to informed decision making. Smart data informing utilities, improving efficiencies and allowing utilities to better inform customers so they can make better decisions about their own use. Technology will provide the key information for success; our decisions will win the war. n
Ian Macleod is Director of Marketing for Master Meter, Inc. and also serves as an advisor for key industry conferences. Master Meter is a North American water meter manufacturer and leading AMR/AMI technology innovator.
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and mining. Hach WIMS software automatically provides critical reports on any recurring time basis, ensuring accurate data and saving utilities extensive labor hours in preparation, assembly and submission to State authorities. It enables managers to more quickly recognize utility issues and determine necessary budget trends, while also pointing them to ways to save money and upgrade processes for the future.
Responding to EPA mandates
Data on tap Chuck Scholpp explains how sustainable water information management solutions can help reduce risks to public safety, cut costs and identify necessary process upgrades.
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cientific research indicates that as many as 20 million Americans may become ill each year due to the parasites, viruses and bacteria in drinking water. This does not include the thousands of toxic chemicals that are also found in our public water systems. Utilities do their best to manage a very important and complex problem, but it can be overwhelming. Hach Water Information Management Solutions (Hach WIMS) software is a tool designed to make it easier for municipalities to manage and utilize the large amount of data that is generated each day. Public safety is a primary concern of our city leaders; however, with constantly tightened budgets, it becomes more difficult to address these concerns. Utilities are faced with increasingly complex regulations, escalating costs, aging infrastructures, a changing workforce, and security concerns. How do you balance these conflicting needs in a cost effective way?
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Sustainable water information management solutions are imperative. Hach WIMS software allows you to optimally manage your organization. Designed to work with drinking water and wastewater systems of any size, Hach WIMS software provides streamlined reporting, user-defined alerts and powerful charting, graphing and mapping tools to provide data quickly to decision makers. Built-in tools provide security and ensure the data is accurate and useful so you can make the best decisions possible for your community.
Increasing public safety Due to the amount of information that is typically compiled, an organization cannot possibly look at every piece of data. Termed “Management by Exception”, Hach WIMS software allows an organization to review only relevant impactful data, enabling users to spend their time and energy on value-added activities rather than on data gathering
With the EPA planning to crack down on violators starting in 2010, strong management of this vital resource becomes even more important to city governments. Common typing or transcription errors can have a domino effect causing miscalculations and reporting inaccuracies. A typical fine for an effluent violation can be as much as $50,000. The power of Hach WIMS software is its flexibility. Data can be captured automatically or entered manually to build a variety of different reports. The software even provides an audit trail along with a data compliance and verification engine. Knowing that the data you receive and record is accurate gives you peace of mind when reporting to the regulatory agencies and making important decisions. In Colorado, the Littleton/Englewood Wastewater Treatment Plant saved time and money by using the accurate reporting features. The City of Salem, Oregon used the product to address their environmental management needs. South Carolina used the program to streamline processes and locate efficiencies. Whatever your initial need may be, the benefits are many. “Hach WIMS is central to everything that the LEWWTP does,” said Brenna Durkin, Littleton/Englewood Wastewater Treatment Plant DBA Specialist. “The Hach WIMS product has been instrumental in the collection of relevant data,” said Stephanie Eisner, NRS Project Coordinator. “Its data capture and reporting capabilities have provided us a comprehensive analysis of the wetlands pilot project.” n
Chuck Scholpp directs Hach’s Integrated Information Management business, developing integrated solutions that leverage instrumentation, communications, people, and software. He holds a BS in Industrial Engineering, an MS in Engineering Management, and an MBA.
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WATER INFRASTRUCTURE
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Cynthia Dougherty, Director of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water, talks about the state of the nation’s water infrastructure, effective protection against microbial pathogen contamination and violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act. What are the current methods available for protecting against microbial pathogens in public water systems and what advances can be seen in the technology used for preventing contamination? CD. There are two general approaches for addressing pathogens in source water. The first is physical removal/filtration, in which the pathogen is removed from the water. There are a wide variety of existing, proven technologies that are used – the choice is up to the individual public water system (with State consultation). Systems select particular technologies based on many factors, such as source water quality (level and variability of turbidity, temperature, contaminants other than pathogens, levels of organic and inorganic materials, etc.), existing (in-place) treatment, regulatory requirements that apply to the system, cost, operator expertise, availability of land for new processes, water quantity needed, and ability to dispose of residuals (sludge, reject water from membrane processes, etc.). Widely used removal technologies include conventional filtration (including flocculation, coagulation, sedimentation), direct filtration, slow sand
filtration, diatomaceous earth filtration, cartridge and bag filtration, membranes (reverse osmosis, nanofiltration, ultrafiltration, microfiltration) and riverbank/bank filtration. Each of these processes have advantages and disadvantages. The second is disinfection/inactivation, in which a chemical disinfectant (chlorine, chloramine, ozone, chlorine dioxide) or ultraviolet rays are used to ‘kill’ the pathogens, rendering them non-infectious. As with filtration, the selection of technology is up to the system, in consultation with the State. Each of the processes has advantages and disadvantages. Systems use many of the same considerations as they use to select a filtration technology. Nearly all surface water systems – and some ground water systems – use a combination of both filtration and inactivation. This provides a multiple barrier and better addresses the wide variety of pathogens and other contaminants. These technologies are designed to control not only regulated pathogens, but unregulated pathogens. Continued on page 91
Weathering the storm Cynthia Dougherty explains what measures are in place to protect against contamination following events such as floods and hurricanes.
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Natural disasters, given their potentially overwhelming destructive power, can defeat even the most robust plans to protect sources of water and the critical infrastructure that treats, stores, and delivers this water to communities. Therefore, EPA's water security program emphasizes a multibarrier approach in preparing for such events, which includes both prevention and response/recovery activities. Preventive actions, for example, could consist of constructing a berm around a treatment plant or relocating infrastructure outside of a potential flood zone. Recovery and response actions, for example, could involve installing back-up power generators at pump stations and implementing the facility's emergency response plan. Also, EPA and partners have, through training and other forms of assistance, encouraged states and their water systems to form mutual aid and assistance compacts, called Water Agency Response Networks, under which water systems provide emergency personnel, equipment, and even water to other water systems. Although the efficacy of these preventive and recovery countermeasures will vary depending on a range of factors, the impacts from climate change will pose an increasing challenge to the public health mission of many water systems.
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Water is only as good as the facilities that process and deliver it. Cynthia Dougherty details why more investment in infrastructure is a necessity.
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The condition of the drinking water infrastructure in the United States in 2009 has allowed 89 percent of community water systems to deliver water to their customers that met all health-based standards all year in 2008. Ninety-two percent of the US population receives these drinking waters meeting all healthbased standards. However, the capital investment needed to maintain this service into the future is great. Treatment plants typically have an expected useful life of 20 to 50 years before they require expansion or rehabilitation. Pipes have lifecycles that can range from 15 to well over 100 years. Historically, pipe installation in major cities was greatest between 1960 and 1970 and has since declined. In 2002, EPA projected that we are currently on a path of increasing need for pipe replacement and rehabilitation and the need is expected to rise until about 2040. Additionally, treatment plants will need to be replaced and even upgraded for treating more recently identified contaminants. The latest Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey identified a need of $335 billion for the 20-year period 2007-2026. Of this amount, 60 percent will be needed for transmission and distribution, 22 percent for treatment, 11 percent for storage, six percent for source, and less than one percent for other infrastructure. The Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF) is an important tool through which the EPA and the states provide funding to utilities for infrastructure projects. Since its inception in 1997, the DWSRF has provided almost $15 billion in low-interest loans to public water systems. The new administration recognizes the importance of drinking water infrastructure investment not only to provide public health protection but also to provide the foundation for future economic growth and development. Congress significantly increased DWSRF funding in FY2010, and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act put nearly $2 billion in additional funds toward infrastructure needs. These funds take a big step in the right direction, but the infrastructure investment need is still substantial. Meeting this need will call for a local, state, and federal partnership. To be sustainable, a system must have the capacity to address existing needs as well as be prepared for the long term, so they can continue to provide safe water today, tomorrow, and in the future. Several key aspects to making this happen are incorporating pricing strategies that recover the full cost of providing service, and asset management to minimize operating costs and plan for future needs. EPA is working to help systems address these issues and the Agency is working to help ensure that all water systems have the resources and support necessary to build financial, technical and managerial capacity. Within this framework, we provide training, technical assistance, and other tools to promote sustainability and the protection of public health.
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Finally, surface water systems and some ground water systems – especially larger ones – maintain a disinfectant residual within the water distribution system to control microbial regrowth. This residual, in addition to a well-designed flushing program, proper storage tank operation, pipe maintenance/repair and replacement, and good design and construction, helps to ensure that the water produced at the treatment plant maintains its quality on the way to the consumer. Just as the past 20 years have brought new, improved processes (e.g. membranes, ultraviolet disinfection) and more effective ways to operate existing technologies, the next 20 years will bring more progress. In addition to new technologies, there is an increasing awareness of the need to reduce the levels of both regulated and unregulated contaminants entering our water sources. Better quality source water is an essential component of any program to improve drinking water quality. Do you believe that heavier environmental disinfection systems are needed to protect drinking water from microbial infection? CD. Two EPA rules finalized in 2006 – Long Term 2 Enhanced Surface Water Treatment Rule (LT2ESWTR), which applies to surface water systems and those using ground water under the direct influence of surface water; and Ground Water Rule (GWR), which applies to ground water systems – will provide greater protection from pathogens. Under the LT2ESWTR, systems were required to monitor to determine whether pathogen levels were higher than levels typically seen and already protected against by earlier rules. Systems with higher pathogen levels are required to install additional treatment or use a better quality source water. Under the GWR, systems not already providing a high level of pathogen treatment are required to evaluate their source water to determine whether additional treatment is required to address contamination. Systems in compliance with these and other drinking water rules provide properly treated water to their consumers. While these and earlier rules provide a high level of protection, EPA will continue to evaluate the need for additional pathogen protection under the review provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act.
ditional compliance monitoring required under the GWR. This monitoring is designed to identify whether source waters are fecally contaminated. While there is no compliance information available yet on GWR effectiveness, many systems and States have spent the past three years evaluating their water sources to determine whether corrective actions are needed and making necessary changes. According to a New York Times analysis of federal data, more than 20 percent of the nation's water treatment systems have violated key provisions of the Safe Drinking Water Act over the last five years. Is this correct and if so how has this been allowed to happen? What is the EPA strategy for ensuring that violations are kept to an absolute minimum in the future? CD. The vast majority of Americans receive water that is safe to drink. The statistic cited by The New York Times includes a range of violation types, many of which don’t indicate an exposure to dangerous contaminants. For example, many drinking water standards are based on health effects that occur over the long term, and a single violation does not represent increased risk. Other violations are indicators that systems may need to take additional action but do not necessarily indicate that a contaminant has been detected at dangerous levels. We still have work ahead of us, though. ninety-six percent of health-based violations occur at systems that serve less than 10,000 people. These systems face unique challenges in providing safe drinking water. A lack of effective system management, trained operators and financial resources often leads to compliance problems. Access to safe drinking water should not be based on ability to pay and we have developed a new Agency approach to ensure that small system customers get the full public health protection of the Safe Drinking Water Act. There is no single solution to the challenges small systems face and a variety of strategies will need to be employed, but EPA believes that robust use of the tools provided in the SDWA can achieve our goal that all Americans have safe drinking water. The new approach will focus SDWA resources on the specific challenges small systems face, from regulatory compliance to sustainability. The components of this plan are designed to facilitate use of SDWA tools to achieve the greatest benefit, by reducing difficulties and providing states with active oversight, guidance, and technical assistance. State programs are the key to this approach and we will work to help them link federal infrastructure funding to public health improvements and target technical assistance to strengthen the capacity of individual water systems. EPA has also developed a new Enforcement Response Plan in order to use enforcement tools most effectively and to better target enforcement actions to systems in significant non-compliance. n
“Better quality source water is an essential component of any program to improve drinking water quality”
How effective has the Ground Water Rule been in achieving its objective? CD. The Safe Drinking Water Act provides three years for implementation of regulations under most circumstances (including for the Ground Water Rule). In accordance with the SDWA requirements, the Ground Water Rule (GWR) provided States and systems time to implement the rule before compliance to determine how the rule applies, conduct analyses, fund and make capital improvements needed for compliance, and get the upgrades operating properly. As a result, in December 2009, public water supply systems began the ad-
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INDUSTRY INSIGHT
Water in the spotlight Jennifer Muller gives an insight into innovative products and applications for municipal water recycling and reducing the environmental impact of wastewater disinfection.
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nnovation, inspired ideas and cutting edge technology have all helped businesses thrive and attain reputable status. Truly great ideas not only change the way we work, but the best thinking also changes the way we live. In most cases, ideas that change our world are initially responses to the biggest problems at the time. Today, the pressing issues of environmental protection and sustainability are two key driving forces behind innovation in many major industries. Water scarcity is set to dominate the sustainability agenda in the 21st century. Population growth, climate change and increasing demand for water mean we have to do more with less. Urban areas are especially vulnerable and recent trends in rainwater harvesting and water reuse will become mainstream. As municipalities face the pressing issue of water scarcity, Trojan Technologies has led the way providing solutions using environmentally responsible, cost-effective ultraviolet (UV) light for water recycling and disinfection applications. Water sources we rely upon every day are becoming increasingly impacted by natural and man-made contaminants such as pesticides, fuel additives, volatile organic compounds and nitrosamines. UV light alone, or in conjunction with hydrogen peroxide, can safely destroy these biological chemical contaminants in water, helping to restore its natural condition and making the water safe for reuse or for release back to the environment. Wastewater treatment plants have traditionally used chlorine gas or liquid bleach to disinfect treated sewage before discharge into rivers and streams. Chlorine, while an effective disinfectant, is a toxic, hazardous chemical that can be deadly in the event of a leak or spill. The chlorination process can also create carcinogenic byproducts harmful to the environment and aquatic life. Today, large US cities including Atlanta, Birmingham, Hono-
lulu, and Las Vegas have adopted environmentally friendly Trojan UV disinfection for their wastewater treatment plants. Climate change, growing populations and the resulting water stress are driving forces for wastewater reuse in arid states such as Florida, Arizona and California. A water reuse plan that augments fresh water supplies, either directly or indirectly, is a viable option for municipalities of any size or location. Recycled and disinfected water is commonly used for irrigation of golf courses, landscapes and commercial properties. Demands on the city’s drinking water supplies are also reduced when recycled water is used for cooling, fi rewater, service and other processes. The Orange County Groundwater Replenishment System in California is the world’s largest Indirect Potable Reuse (IPR) system
larger carbon footprint due to transportation of chemicals to the treatment plant. Similarly, Trojan Technologies performed a Life Cycle Assessment on various disinfection processes to determine the overall environmental impact of UV and chlorine. It was shown that UV had the least environmental impact in all categories (e.g. global warming potential, human health effects, ecotoxicity, ozone depletion, etc.). As sources of electricity become more renewable, UV’s overall impact on the environment will continue to decrease. Reuse of wastewater, now recognized as an ecological and economic necessity, is increasingly practiced not only in the United States, but globally in water scarce regions such as Australia, Spain and Italy. For over two decades ultraviolet radiation has been successfully used to disinfect reuse water in a
“Water scarcity is set to dominate the sustainability agenda in the 21st century”
– capable of recycling 100 million gallons of wastewater per day. The fi nished water, treated with a TrojanUVPhox UV-oxidation system, is used to recharge groundwater aquifers and prevent seawater intrusion. The Orange County facility is an award-winning example of how advanced treatment can cost-effectively convert wastewater back to a quality that exceeds drinking water standards. Some insist on calling it ‘toilet to tap’ – I call it socially responsible engineering in challenging times. The City of Palo Alto, California conducted a detailed carbon footprint analysis concluding that chlorine disinfection has a
cost-effective manner. UV is a non-chemical disinfection technology that protects the public against pathogenic micro-organisms including protozoa, bacteria and viruses. In comparison to chemical disinfection, UV does not produce harmful by-products, is non-toxic to the environment and has the lowest environmental impact making it truly a ‘green’ solution. Jennifer Muller is a professional engineer and expert in the field of water and wastewater UV disinfection. As Municipal UV Marketing Director for Trojan Technologies, she commercializes technology and product innovations to help municipalities install sustainable and costeffective water treatment solutions.
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WATER INFRASTRUCTURE
Pipe dreams
In its 2009 Report Card for Infrastructure, The American Society of Civil Engineers, scored drinking and wastewater a D-. Wayne Klotz explains why the US water system is in such poor shape and what needs to be done to turn things around. 94 www.americainfra.com
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THE FACTS
Q
uite simply, the biggest issue with our drinking water systems is that we are not even maintaining what we have, much less providing for the increased demands of a growing population and a more water hungry economy. If you don’t take care of what you have and you’re putting greater demands on aging infrastructure, what happens is you experience more and more frequent failure. In the US about seven billion gallons of treated water a day leak out of pipes. We’ve seen some spectacular failures you making headlines and disrupting lifestyles all across the country. The one thing that people can’t live without is drinking water. We could even live without roads, as terrible as that would be, but if you can’t get water you’re simply not going to survive. A lot of our current problems have to do with changing priorities over the last 30 or so years. Back in the 50’s and 60’s the United States spent a great deal of money building not just our water systems, but wastewater and roadway systems. We really built an exemplary infrastructure system. In those days governments would have investment in infrastructure anywhere from six to eight percent of their annual budgets. Somewhere along the line in the 70’s people began to feel like this work was pretty much done and we began to shift more and more of our public resources into other programs. We developed other priorities to the point where instead of investing six to eight percent of their budgets, most governments in the US, including the federal government, are investing just one to 1.5 percent. It’s just not sustainable. On one hand people say they’re willing to pay for this investment, but on the other we are chasing increasingly scarce public resources. Currently, elected officials are just simply not giving water infrastructure the priority that it deserves. The fact of the matter is, failing infrastructure cannot support a healthy economy. While we’ve had this massive debate on healthcare in the United States over the last two years I continue to contend that the number one conversation we should be having about healthcare has to do with clean water. In the history of the world, clean water is the primary reason that civilizations move from chronic illness to good health. While we’re all running around worrying about insurance, the real issue is are we maintaining our water systems so that there is a safe and dependable source of water. This infrastructure underlies everything we do. We need to do a much better job communicating that and get the public to demand better. We are literally to the point now where I believe that we’re not just compromising our quality of life, we’ve neglected this for so long that the health and safety of some people is being jeopardized because of our unwillingness to deal with the problem. Aside from the potential risks to human health, broken water infrastructure has some concrete financial costs too. Water has to be collected and there is a huge cost there. There’s an energy cost in moving that water from its original source to a place where it’s treated. There is an energy cost, chemical cost and a labor cost in those treatment facilities. Then you pressurize the water to put it into pipes to deliver it to where it’s being used. That has a huge energy cost and an incredible capital cost in the pipe system. Every gallon costs a certain amount to produce. Take that seven billion gallons a day that’s literally just poured on the ground at a dollar per thousand in production costs and that’s how many dollars a day we’re just blowing away. Unfortunately we live in a time where if you can’t get your message down to a sound bite it’s very difficult to be heard over the shouting
Estimated five year funding requirements for drinking water and wastewater Total investment needs
$255 BILLION Estimated spending
$146.4 BILLION Projected shortfall
$108.6 BILLION
TURNING UP THE VOLUME US water infrastructure has struggled to keep pace with rising demand
POPULATION
159% RISE
1950 93.4 MILLION
2000 242 MILLION
USAGE
207% RISE
1950 14 BILLION
2000 43 BILLION
GALLONS PER DAY GALLONS PER DAY Source: EPA
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“Clean water is the primary reason that civilizations move from chronic illness to good health”
of everybody else who wants their message heard. The amazing thing is that when you have a chance to talk to the citizens, they get it. But we just haven’t been able to convert that into national action. The US currently operates what we at ASCE call a ‘patch and pray’ approach to infrastructure planning, which is leave it alone, wait until it breaks, patch it up, and then you pray that nothing else goes wrong. That’s a fool’s errand, you’ll never get anywhere with that approach.
Partnership The idea of private business getting more involved in these challenges is an interesting one. With regards to water, the reason that government is involved in most of these things is that the projects are so massive and the costs so significant that usually it does take some sort of a public financing mechanism. It’s very difficult for private industry to be able to do that. However, if you look at the history in the United States almost every water system was developed initially as a private concern. They got bigger and demand kept rising, so slowly but surely all the private systems rolled over into being public systems. Now that we’ve reached the point where the systems are stressed and are beginning to show signs of failure, there’s a push back toward private investment and private enterprise. It’s been interesting to watch that ebb and flow over the last 200, 250 years, but there is certainly a place for private investment. I think that now public private partnerships are essential. It’s a way to get more capital into the systems. The one thing that I think needs to be remembered is that there’s a compelling public interest in not allowing the price of water to get so expensive that the average person or poorer people can’t access an adequate supply. That’s not good public policy. But at the same time if a private interest comes and invests millions and millions of dollars, it is only reasonable that they should expect a reasonable return. Some of the early efforts at public private partnership were basically just turning the system over to the private entity. Those experienced mixed success simply because of the need for the private entity to have a return on investment, so therefore some of the pricing got out of hand. The more effective
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ones are the ones where it is a true public and private partnership. Here both the public interests and the private interests express their expectations and enumerate that in appropriate contracts. It’s all done transparently. The public wins because private interest has injected resources into an arena the public could not fund, while private interest wins because they’re able to put a significant amount of capital in an investment that’s pretty safe. The fact of the matter is, unlike the auto industry where people can go and get their car fixed and run it for another year, people have got to have water every day. There is a very predictable revenue stream, and one of the things that ASCE has proposed in our last infrastructure Report Card is that we strongly support the idea of proper public private partnerships. We believe that all the stakeholders need to increase their investments. So that means the federal sector needs to increase their investment, the state governments need to increase their investment, the local governments need to increase their investment, and private interests that are dependable should be allowed into the system because the needs are that great.
Moving forward As well as closing the funding gap, one of the things that really needs to happen is that there has to be a better long range planning effort. Right now we have a lot of overlapping jurisdictions. For example, in Texas where I live the federal government establishes certain criteria, they provide urban funding, then the state government actually administers all of the dams and reservoirs. The state of Texas owns all of the surface water rights and they allocate those back out. Local governments then are responsible for building the facilities, the pump stations, the pipes, and all those sort of things. They don’t all work well together. We need to realize that if we want to improve our water delivery from source to tap, it’s a system. So we’re promoting a much better effort at working together in regional planning. We also have to be honest about maintaining the systems we have. When I say maintaining I’m not just talking about putting grease on bearings, replacing the packing on valves and things like that. Maintenance is a routine replacement program as systems reach their age. Even in Texas we’ve got places where water pipes in the ground are 100 years old, those pipes were not intended to last that long when they were put in. Nowadays we use much better materials and techniques that last a lot longer, but nothing lasts forever. We’ve got to build in and adequately fund a program to keep the systems that we have functioning properly in a dependable fashion. On top of that, we need to plan for where and how additional demand comes in; where are people moving to, how much water are they using and what is that doing to systems? We are working diligently to come up with energy savings, so hopefully those dollars would be allowed to stay in the water systems and move over into the capital side. We’re looking at using new materials that are more environmentally sensitive that may be lighter and easier to handle, materials that have longer lives and less impact on the environment. n Wayne Klotz is past President of the ASCE and is President of architectural, engineering, planning and environmental firm Klotz Associates.
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FUTURE TRANSPORT
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TIME Home to both the first powered flight and the first mass-produced automobile, the US has often been at the forefront in transport innovation. But as we move deeper into the new millennium, the strains placed upon the nation’s infrastructure become ever more severe. Congestion, pollution, rising fuel costs and sheer lack of space are all testing the ingenuity of a new generation of planners. There is no shortage of possible solutions, but which are genuinely viable and which are little more than pipe dreams? Over the next 13 pages, US Infrastructure takes a closer look at some of the biggest ideas for America’s transport future.
100 Mixed signals?
104 Plane sailing
108 No strings attached?
For the administration, it’s a bold and essential move in the development of US transportation. For critics, it’s a boondoggle that will cost too much and achieve too little. We catch up with the high-speed rail debate.
Could the unlikely vision of an airport floating off the California coast offer a blueprint for 21st century offshore infrastructure?
As the world goes wireless, is the cable car the answer to America’s urban transit challenges?
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RAIL
MIXED SIGNALS? O As the administration unveils its plans for high-speed rail, Huw Thomas asks whether the reality can live up to the rhetoric. n May 10, 1869 at Promontory Summit in Utah, a gathering of railway workers, railroad owners and a handful of reporters bore witness to one of the pivotal moments in the development of the modern United States. As the final spike was driven in the nation’s first transcontinental railway line, a new chapter of history opened. This period would see the departure of the slow and often dangerous wagon train, previously the most common method of traversing America’s vast interior. In its place was a means of transport that allowed goods and people to cross the country at far greater speed and in far greater comfort. This new ease of movement united East and West as never before and was a key driver of economic growth in the years that followed. Since it’s 19th century heyday, the train has faded in significance. The arrival of interstate highways and ever cheaper air travel has reduced the popularity of riding the rails. Now however, moves are afoot to bring back the golden age of rail, with support coming straight from the top. As part of the Obama Administration’s $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the President has set aside $8 billion, plus an annual $1 billion over the next five years, to finance a new high-speed rail network. It’s evidently a plan with major ambitions. “By making investments across the country, we'll lay a new foundation for our economic competitiveness and contribute to smart
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urban and rural growth,” President Obama stated when announcing the scheme. “We'll create highly-skilled construction and operating jobs that can't be outsourced, and generate demand for technology that gives a new generation of innovators and entrepreneurs the opportunity to step up and lead the way in the 21st century. We'll move to cleaner energy and a cleaner environment, we'll reduce our need for foreign oil by millions of barrels a year, and eliminate more than six billion pounds of carbon dioxide emissions annually – equal to removing one million cars from our roads.” Announcing details of where the stimulus money would be going in Tampa on January 28, 2010, the president reiterated the need to look forward in how the US approaches transportation and also asked an important question. If HSR can be a success in Europe, Japan and China, why shouldn’t the same be true in America? So often the leader in transportation technology, from the first powered flight to the first mass-produced automobile, the US is lagging far behind much of the rest of the world when it comes to high-speed rail. Japan began operating its Tōkaidō Shinkansen as far back as 1964. Even then this train was capable of carrying passengers between Tokyo and Osaka at speeds of 130 mph. Europe soon followed suit, France’s TGV network being perhaps the most well known high-speed system. Today, the continent is crisscrossed with high-speed lines, with even the notoriously reticent UK now boasting one of its own.
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RIGHT LINES Building an effective high-speed line between two locations requires several different criteria to be satisfied. Cities with larger populations are favored and the distance between the two needs to lie somewhere between 100 and 500 miles. There also need to be existing transit systems that can be integrated with the new routes. GDP and urban density are also key factors. The list below details the 10 most suitable US city pairs for high-speed rail, based on these considerations.
1. NEW YORK – WASHINGTON 2. PHILADELPHIA – WASHINGTON 3. BOSTON – NEW YORK 4. BALTIMORE – NEW YORK
Foundation. “There’s a lot of rhetoric about the benefits of high speed rail which really are not very well connected to the actual impacts.” The most significant hurdle to setting up a European-style HSR network in the US is a simple matter of scale. The distance between Madrid and Barcelona is little over 300 miles. Between New York and Los Angeles, that figure is a shade under 2500 miles. Not even the most futuristic train could compete with air travel over such an expanse. Obviously, there is no suggestion that new HSR investments will attempt to recreate rail’s glory days of transcontinental travel. Rather, attention will be focused on transit corridors in areas of comparatively high population density. The hope would be
“Despite the positive impacts HSR has had elsewhere in the world, there is a concern that America is just too different for those effects to be felt here”
5. LOS ANGELES – SAN FRANCISCO 6. BOSTON – PHILADELPHIA
that HSR would offer a viable alternative to short-haul flights and their myriad irritations. President Obama painted an arresting picture of America’s HSR future when he announced the plans. “Imagine boarding a train in the center of a city,” he said. “No racing to an airport and across a terminal, no delays, no sitting on the tarmac, no lost luggage, no taking off your shoes. Imagine whisking through towns at speeds over 100 miles an hour, walking only a few steps to public transportation, and ending up just blocks from your destination. Imagine what a great project that would be to rebuild America.” But some remain to be convinced. Despite the positive Source: America 2050 impacts HSR has had elsewhere in the world, there is a concern that America is just too different for those effects Spanish lessons to be felt here. Compared to Europe for example, the US’s But it is Spain’s Alt Velocidad Espagnola (AVE) built environment is considerably less dense and more cost of achieving that provides the most striking inspiration for an decentralized, something that is reflected in the nation’s high-speed in US America seeking to reinvent its rail system. A little over travel patterns. “In most urban areas in the US, we’re real20 years ago, Spain had no high-speed lines. Today, its netly talking about midsize cities that have pretty decentralized work stretches to 990 miles, with a further 1200 under conemployment and residential patterns, which don’t lend themstruction and another 1000 in the planning stage. This rapid selves to the kind of development impacts that you see in Europe development has obviously been enabled by a huge amount of government or in countries that are less wealthy,” Staley says. “We simply don’t have investment, but it is already proving its worth. The ability to travel from the densities you see in Japan or Taiwan, and over the period of time in Madrid to Barcelona in less than three hours, without the hassle of passing which we would amortize the financial investment in a high speed rail netthrough airport security, has shown itself to be a big draw for inter-city travwork, we will not have those kind of densities. Even in Europe, the ellers. Passengers on this route surged by 28 percent in 2008. In the same peChannel Tunnel can connect London and Paris within an hour and a half. riod the number of people taking domestic flights within Spain dropped by Outside the northeast corridor we simply don’t have those concentrations.” 20 percent. The need for speed In light of figures like this, pursuing high-speed rail for America seems Amid all the talk, it is sometimes easy to overlook exactly what is meant like a no brainer. However, the project has drawn considerable criticism from by HSR. Compared with other systems, the technical specifications of the US’s certain quarters that dispute both the need for HSR and the wider economic proposed routes seem rather underwhelming. Many of the projects to receive benefits its is designed to bring. “Many of the justifications for high speed rail money in the first round of funding are aiming for speeds of around 110 just are inconsistent with the reality, not only of the built environment in the mph. Florida’s Orlando-Tampa line should reach 168 mph, while the proUnited States, but also the potential demand,” says Sam Staley, Director of jected Orlando-Miami route has aspirations of 186 mph. By contrast travUrban Growth and Land Use Policy at the free market supporting Reason
7. LOS ANGELES – SAN DIEGO 8. LOS ANGELES – SAN JOSE
9. BOSTON – WASHINGTON 10. DALLAS – HOUSTON
$100-$700
BILLION
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elers in Spain can expect to hit speeds of 217 mph and in Japan can go as fast as 267 mph on lines that have been operational for years. Even if HSR takes off in the states, it’s going to be a long time before it can catch up to its much quicker cousins around the world. As a counterpoint to those who believe that the government is spending too much on HSR, there are many who believe that the funding is insufficient. While it is acknowledged that the $15 billion over the next five years is ‘seed money’, it is hard to see how the administration can hope to achieve its goals without investment that is higher by a considerable order of magnitude. Spain has already spent $30 billion on its network with a further $150 billion to follow over the next 15 years. China is going even further (see Eastern promise). Estimates of what it will cost for the US to achieve true highspeed range from upwards of $100 billion to as much as $700 billion. There is clearly neither the funds nor the political will to make such a big gamble. Perhaps the most worrying scenario is that we will end up with an inadequate system that will nonetheless cost billions of dollars at a time when public finances are stretched to breaking point. But if HSR isn’t the answer, California - $2.344 billion where should resources go? “I Preliminary work on CASHR, think the numbers make it very plus improvements to Capitol clear,” says Sam Staley. “Both in and Pacific Surfliner routes. terms of congestion and mobility we are far better off spending that Illinois - $1.133 billion money on improving circulation Increase speed to 110 mph on and mobility within our major Chicago to St Louis route, plus urban areas: Los Angeles, service improvements through Chicago, almost the entire northMissouri to Kansas City. east corridor, New York City, Washington DC, Houston. The Florida - $1.25 billion focus really should be on a regionBuild 84 miles of new track al, on a metropolitan level. Those between Tampa and Orlando investments should be in putting with speeds of up to 168 mph. the right capacity in the right place, and experimenting with new technology that allows us to optimize the use of the existing network, which means more use of tolling, distance and congestion based charging for roads, expanding new capacity, and in the right places with the right cities, transit investment.” Most defenders of HSR would counter that, rather than being one side of an either/or proposition, the kind of developments detailed above have to go hand in hand with the creation of a viable high-speed network. The argument can also be made that backing HSR is a long-term investment that will really begin to pay off in America’s future. Today, while air travel and gas is com-
HSR – THE BIG WINNERS
EASTERN PROMISE Demonstrating the ambition that is cementing its place as the 21st century superpower, China is also putting itself out in front of highspeed rail. Opened at the end of 2009, the Wuhan-Guangzhou (WuGuang) railway is currently the fastest passenger train on Earth. Previously a journey of nearly 11 hours, the new train covers the 620 miles between Wuhan and Guangzhou in around three hours, traveling at speeds of over 235 mph. It’s an impressive achievement and one that is all the more striking when you consider that China’s first high-speed rail line only opened in 2004. Should the WuGuang line prove a success, the Chinese government plans to build another 8000 miles of high-speed lines in the next three years. On the face of it, China seems to offer an ideal template should the US really get serious about high-speed. However, there is one major stumbling block: the price. The cost of the WuGuang project alone comes to some $16 billion, one billion more than has so far been earmarked for projects all over America. China will eventually spend $300 billion on its expanding high-speed system. Whatever its positive social, economic and environmental benefits, it is hard to see the American people sanctioning a similar expenditure on a 21st century railway of its own.
paratively cheap, it will be harder to convince people to abandon short haul flights and the comfort of their cars. However, as sources of oil become harder to find, the costs of these forms of transport will inevitably rise. Might it not be better to start building an alternative now, rather than wait until it becomes a matter of urgency? There are many questions that still need to be answered about the exact shape HSR will take in the US, but that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be pursued. Government has spent something in the region of $200 billion bailing out failing banks, so $15 billion on a HSR system doesn’t seem too big a price to pay. The same sense of adventure that resulted in the nation’s first transcontinental train line all those years ago should be encouraged. The challenges we face today are very different from those of the 19th century, but that is no excuse for abandoning our ambition. n
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AIR
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PLANE
SAILING Adam Englund talks to Stacey Sheppard about his futuristic vision of an offshore floating airport for San Diego.
S
ince air transportation became a reality the movement of people and cargo by air has grown more than anticipated. According to Boeing, the world air cargo market has grown by seven percent a year since 1970, whilst we have seen a five percent annual growth in passenger traffic. However, problems have arisen in recent years, as many airports are no longer able to keep up with this demand. The much needed expansion of airports is often limited by the fact that they are situated in densely populated areas that lack the necessary land for further development. In order to meet future demand it has become necessary to look at alternative options whereby the expansion does not depend upon the availability of land. This has led to some rather unconventional suggestions as to where the airports of the future should be sited. Only 29 percent of the Earth’s surface is in fact made up of land, with the remaining 71 percent being covered by ocean and this vast body of water is where attention is now being focused. One such innovative project is for the development of a new offshore floating airport for San Diego, which is being championed by Adam Englund, lawyer and President of Euphlotea, a company dedicated to researching and educating
on the development and civilization of the ocean. Englund is an interesting character who is clearly very passionate about the idea of open ocean colonization and his background has prepared him well to be a pioneer in this particular area. In 1971 he worked at the Oceanic Institute in Hawaii, which was, at the time, working on its Floating Cities program, an ocean project federally funded through the University of Hawaii. At that time he had set his sights on being a floating city builder. He went to college and got a liberal arts degree and then went to law school. He wrote his International Law thesis at Cambridge University on the jurisdictional and administrative issues raised by artificial islands and floating cities. It was eventually a project devised by Float Incorporated to tackle San Diego’s difficult airport relocation problem that caught Englund’s attention. It was submitting a proposal to the Airport Authority for a new airport, which would be situated offshore on a maritime platform. When this concept was rejected by the Airport Authority, Englund thought the idea was too good to simply give up on, so he picked up the baton and he’s been running with it ever since. “San Diego presents a number of economic and geographic considerations that make it a prime candidate. First of all, the airport here is ex-
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tremely restricted and will reach congestion in the next five to 12 years. The region stands to lose $100 billion in lost economic opportunity and there’s no expansion capability,” says Englund. “The Airport Authority conducted a $20 million study and found that there was no other appropriate place in the county, the one last hope they had was the centrally located military base which is controlled by the federal government. But the voters rejected this option by two to one. So the only place left was in the ocean.” As would be expected, the idea of an airport in the ocean was something a little too novel for the Airport Authority to accept with any real con-
adventurous travellers, particularly as incidences of hurricanes, tsunamis and other extreme weather conditions are on the rise. But Englund says that such a structure is relatively resistant to seismic activity. “The largest wave on record here is 38 feet and the 2000 year wave is 78 feet. If you bring all these modules into a monolithic structure it will be extremely stable. It will actually be the safest place to be during seismic activity,” he explains. The airport would have other advantages over traditional land-based facilities and would for example, be even be better placed to withstand the dangerous effects of global warming, such as in-
“San Diego has the opportunity to be the global leader in ocean infrastructure and have an iconic architectural marvel that attracts tourists from around the world”
“In addition to that we’d also surround the platform with giant kelp, which is indigenous macro algae here in San Diego. It is the fastest growing plant in the world and we could possibly use that for biofuels. There is a group in San Diego that is developing a microalgae that can be turned directly into jet fuel, and with unlimited water and sun we should be able to supply the jet fuel needs for the facility,” says Englund optimistically. He is also confident that all of the other energy demands of the facility could be met by extracting the power from the ocean itself in terms of winds, waves, currents, tides, thermal gradients and solidity gradients. “The most amazing thing about this project,” says Englund, “is that it may be positive for the environment. Where we have overstayed our welcome on land, this gives us the opportunity to let the Earth breathe a little bit and handle our human processes with the resources of the ocean.”
More facilities viction, despite the fact that numerous examples of offshore airports have already proven to be successful. In Okinawa, Kansai Airport went through a similar process to San Diego also having exceeded its capacity for expansion. It ended up relocating its airport to a more convenient offshore location in the bay. Admittedly this was not a floating airport, but it did prove that that the concept of an offshore airport could be a success. Englund stresses that the fact that his proposal is for a floating airport, as opposed to a landfill airport, should not affect its chances of success as the technology to achieve such a structure already exists. “Actually the technology was first proposed in 1913 by Edward Armstrong to cross the Atlantic with a series of refueling stations for airplanes. Charles Lindberg’s flight across the Atlantic obviated that need,” says Englund. “But he then turned that technology to the oil industry and had the first patented semi-submersible platforms for the oil industry. So over the last 50 to 80 years that technology has been well proven and those semi-submersible platforms, of which it would take about 200 to compile this structure, will continue operating in 40 foot seas and they’re designed to withstand 90 to 130 foot waves and 100 knot winds.” However, the idea of an airport out at sea will inevitably strike fear into the hearts of some less
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creases in sea levels and flooding, as it would merely rise with the ocean, whereas a number of inland airports would end up under water. The existing San Diego airport is only 17 feet above sea level.
Environmental concerns One of the main concerns of the project’s opponents is the possible damage that such a structure could inflict on the environment and particularly the natural habitat that the ocean provides for the many species that live within it. However, Englund is quick to dispel such worries and reassure sceptics. “It doesn't have the environmental impacts that a landfill does and in fact it provides a substrate for new habitat that didn’t exist before. So environmentally it’s a much more acceptable and possibly even a positive shift for the environment,” he says. An important consideration when putting a platform over water is the fact that it will block sunlight and in shallower waters, like those in San Francisco Bay or even in Tokyo, this would potentially destroy the natural habitat there. But Englund explains that when a platform is placed over deep water, the water itself creates a shadow. “So by creating a structure on the surface, you’re actually creating an artificial reef, which allows these organisms to continue to get the sunlight they need to grow.
One of the most important resources that the ocean provides in this instance is of course the luxury of space, which would allow the airport the expansion it so badly needs. “It allows for a multi-purpose facility,” says Englund. “There is a flight deck and then four decks beneath that. We need that kind of thickness in the structure just to have integrity over the three square miles it covers. But if you look at that as space, over four stories it turns out to be 12 square miles. Even if you take a third of that away, you still have 220 million square feet of useable space and that is off the water by about 30 or 40 feet.” Englund explains that this extra space could be used for all sorts of activities such as heavy industry, light manufacturing, shipping facilities, conference centers, hotels, casinos and universities. “All these things can take place there and when you have 25 million passengers a year passing through the facility, that is the kind of activity and human commerce that promotes a city,” he says. However, those exact passenger numbers could also raise the question of security on such a structure. As we know, airport security has continued to rise up the agenda since 9/11 and a floating airport would need to ensure that it could meet increasingly stricter security requirements.
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THE PLAN: Offshore floating airport for San Diego
There are four decks beneath the flightdeck that could be used for heavy industry, light manufacturing, shipping facilities, conference centers, hotels, casinos and universities.
The floating airfield would be big enough to accommodate the largest aircraft, such as the Airbus A380.
But here also, Englund is convinced that such a facility actually provides a more secure situation than a traditional land-based airport. “With the terminals being onshore, passengers would go through security onshore and then once again offshore and it’s the redundancy and layers of security that really provides serious security. There would also be underwater robotics, surface robotics, and we have the Sixth Fleet here with three nuclear aircraft carrier groups. We have the Coast Guard and the Port Authority. The local police would be on board too so there’s a substantial ability to secure the facility,” says Englund with great confidence.
Engineering challenges At this point it seems like Englund has all the answers and the concept of a floating offshore airport appears to be relatively easy to realize. But there are indeed challenges that will need to be
The platform would be surrounded with giant kelp, which could be used to make biofuels. A group in San Diego is developing a microalgae that can be turned directly into jet fuel. The facility would be positioned eight-13 miles offshore, in water 1150-3280 feet deep.
The energy demands of the facility could be met by extracting power from the ocean in terms of winds, waves, currents, tides, thermal gradients and solidity gradients.
overcome if such a structure is to be a viable option. “The real engineering challenges regard access,” says Englund. “It’s creating that umbilical between the shore and the deep ocean and transiting the coastal zone.” And he admits that some people will be sceptical in their reaction to such a passenger experience. “We’re looking at a submerged floating tunnel with light rail, so if you look at examples like the Chunnel or BART in San Francisco, people get on it and they don’t even realize that they are going under water in either case. And yet once they’ve done it, it is not so much of a consideration. Ultimately the passenger experience should be seamless,” he says. But a semi-submersible tunnel is not the only option that passengers will have. For those who don’t feel comfortable getting to the airport under water, there will also be a fleet of fast ferries that will take passengers from up to 13 ports along the
The runway would be 12,000 ft in length and allow for simultaneous landings and take offs.
shoreline to the facility. “The opportunity to use mass transit in a positive way is, I think, pretty compelling,” says Englund. In reality, the whole concept is pretty compelling and Englund can’t stress enough what an opportunity this would be for San Diego. “The population of the world has tripled in my lifetime and continues to grow exponentially. In addition, the population is pressing to the coasts and people need water and all the resources it can bring. I believe that ocean infrastructure will occur and it will occur this century. “San Diego has the opportunity to be the global leader in ocean infrastructure and have an iconic architectural marvel that attracts tourists from around the world. But it really comes down to the state of mind of the people in the community. If they’re ready for it it’ll happen here,” he says. “But it’ll happen somewhere else if San Diego doesn’t step up.” n
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CABLE
NO STRINGS ATTACHED? Could cable driven vehicles really be the answer to the 21st century city’s urban transport challenges? Ti Singh investigates.
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raditionally cable cars are only found at ski resorts or to take tourists to the top of mountains, but many believe this form of transport could be of use in the urban environment enabling commuters to travel around cities without using congested roads or crowded undergrounds. Steven Dale is the founder of Creative Urban Projects (CUP Projects) and an expert on cable-propelled transit. He recently discussed the potential for such systems in an article entitled Off the Road and Into the Skies, where he theorized that major cities could benefit from such transport schemes. The idea of major cities utilizing cable-propelled transit as a form of transport is an intriguing one, especially with more and more people giving up their cars in favor of public transport. Be it concern for the environment or the cost of gas, people are increasingly embracing public transport, forcing local governments to invest in rail and bus systems. But what are the benefits of cable transport over these well established transport systems? “It's very hard to make a direct comparison,” Dale said when we caught up with him. “Generally speaking, I would say that the qualities that are exemplified by cable are most competitive with something like light rail or streetcar systems. Of course, it doesn't have the cost effectiveness of a bus system, but at the same time most don't like the aesthetics of buses. It’s far cheaper than subways or underground technology, but it doesn't move quite as many people as that technology can. However on a per rider basis it does come out far cheaper than underground technology, and there are cable systems around the world that have been installed in underground tunnels.
“Because there's zero chance of a derailment you actually don't need to build two separate tunnels, which is what we currently do. When we build our undergrounds we build multiple tunnels so in case of an emergency people can get out and go in another direction, you don't have to do that with cable. So that saves you one of your major costs of building underground.”
Cable cars in New York? The fact that cable-propelled transit can also be used underground immediately widens its potential, especially for those that assumed it is only used for 'in the air' cable cars, such as the Roosevelt Island Tram. But could such a system be implemented in a major city such as New York? There have been plans to construct a cable transport system as a possible alternative to the current commuter rail route going from Brooklyn to Governor's Island to Manhattan and New York Airport. The biggest questions are about the technology’s readiness and its likely cost. “It's a very complicated subject matter,” says Dale. “One of the difficulties with educating people about this is that when they hear light rail they know what it is, there's only one form of it. When they hear subway they know what it is. When you're dealing with cable, there are probably about 12 different forms that it takes. “So each one is different, each one is more or less suited in a particular environment. I've seen cable systems installed for as little as $5 million per kilometer, and I've seen cable systems installed for $50 million per kilometer. But at the same time, even at the absolutely highest end of $50 million, you
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Safety first
find that it’s still much cheaper, or at least competitive with most light rail technology.” When it comes to a possible system in New York, Dale estimates a ballpark cost somewhere in the region of $300-400 million. “In terms of viability, it's not even a question from a technology perspective,” he continues. “The technology is sound, it's safe, it's proven; it would be a non-issue. From a political standpoint it might be a little more difficult, especially if the planners who were involved in something like that, made the mistake of flying vehicles over people's backyards. Never go over people's backyards, it's just a disaster waiting to happen.”
Commuter popularity However, despite the obvious aesthetic properties of cable cars floating through the metropolis, would commuters require transport with a bit more speed? According to Dale, the fact that many think the underground will rocket them to their destination is all in their head and as such, cable might be able to get you there just as fast. “The thing is about underground technology, there's a myth about the speed. The myth is very simple, it has a high maximum speed, but the overall line speed is dependent upon a lot of different things, including the number of stations, the distance between the stations, and the rate of acceleration and the rate of deceleration. “So most transit agencies are going to ballpark their average underground speed at around 25 to 35 kilometers per hour. When you look at something like light rail, for instance, light rail almost never goes above 20 kilometers per hour. We have systems in Toronto that are street cars, they're built to go 100 kilometers per hour, but they average 12.”
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Of course, a thought at the forefront of every one's mind is safety. With the foiled Christmas Day bombing and attacks on public transport links in Madrid and London over the past decade, surely hovering hundreds of feet in the air is a disaster waiting to happen? After all, in 2006 the Roosevelt Island Tram lost power stranding those in inside for several hours. Despite this incident being a one-off, the thought of being stranded in a cable car for several hours out will not be far from many peoples minds. “Generally speaking, the best philosophy in terms of safety is – except in the absolute most dire situation – not to remove people from a vehicle in midair. The best thing to do, and most of the systems now have this, is to have backup diesel engines in each station. So if there is an electrical failure or a power outage, the diesel engine can click on and they can basically manually pull the vehicles into the station and then get people out in,” says Dale. “In the case of the Roosevelt Island tram, the system is 25 years old and doesn’t have a great maintenance history. It uses something called aerial tram technology, which is a very outdated technology. And also, ironically, aerial trams are the most expensive of the cable technologies, but also the ones that provide the lowest level of service. “I'm not necessarily in favor, at least in an urban setting, of having incredibly high systems. I think that keeping them lower to the ground where they have more interaction with the urban fabric is better, and also rescue efforts are easier. But again, the most important thing for people to realize is that, except in the most dire circumstances, rescues occur in the stations.”
The future of urban transport? So with the technology seemingly ready to go, a CO2 footprint smaller than other forms of public transport and the financial savings compared to rail services, why aren't cities around the world embracing cable-propelled transit? Well, some cities have. Perugia in Italy has a fully automated, bottom support cable car system that has 50-person vehicles every minute and runs above ground, below ground, and at ground level. Medellin in Columbia has a gondola system fully integrated into their metro system that was so successful it has spawned a second and third line and plans to expand the original line are underway. With major cities such as Vancouver and Toronto planning similar schemes, it would appear that cable-propelled transit is beginning to take off. “It's in a place that you would never possibly believe that it actually is there. It's out there, people are talking about it, and most importantly there are cities in the world that are using this as public transit.” n Steven Dale is the founder of Creative Urban Projects (CUP Projects) in Toronto, Canada. He is an expert on Cable-Propelled Transit, with several years of experience researching and consulting on the subject. Dale recently launched The Gondola Project, an information campaign in support of CPT. For more information, visit www.gondolaproject.com or www.creativeurbanprojects.com
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EXECUTIVE INTERVIEW
Transportation transformation Scott Belcher, President and CEO of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America, puts his questions to Bryan Boettger of PIPS Technology. Scott Belcher. Should the gas tax be phased out? And if so, replaced by what? Bryan Boettger. It’s no secret. The gas tax is no longer sufficient to fill the widening budget gap needed to finance repairs, improvements and expansion of the nation’s transportation infrastructure. Since it’s not inflation adjusted, the purchasing power of the gas tax has decreased nearly 33 percent since 1993. Demands placed on road infrastructure in terms of miles driven are significantly outpacing the rate of new-road growth, with spending for maintenance and expansion declining almost 50 percent since the 1960s. The National Surface Transportation Infrastructure Financing Commission reports that all government revenue for capital investment will total approximately one-third of the $200 billion annually necessary to maintain and improve the nation’s aging transportation infrastructure. Road-user charging appears to be the most equitable and practical method for financing the future needs of the nation’s transportation infrastructure. Among the potential solutions are VMT (vehicle miles traveled) tolls, congestion charges and express-lane premiums. SB. Should the public be concerned with privacy as we begin to see more widespread deployment of intelligent transportation systems? Or is this a red herring issue? BB. Clearly we need to respect and protect the privacy of those using the transportation network to the greatest extent possible. By the same token, the issue must be put in context. These are, after all, public roadways. When you consider that citizens are routinely captured on camera entering a mall, airport or downtown business district, why should expectations be any different on a public roadway? Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) systems such as PIPS Technology from Federal Signal, radio frequency identification, and intelligent loops for vehicle classification are now commonly employed technologies for road-use fee charging and traffic data collection. These technologies do not inherently collect personally identifiable information. They are used primarily to identify vehicles that have registered to use a service or receive some benefit such as High Occupancy Toll Lane; identify illegal, suspicious or criminal behavior; or collect generic information for better decision making.
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SB. What do you see as the future of vehicle communications? And what are some of the potential applications that no one is talking about? BB. Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII), or vehicle communications in the more generic sense, will undoubtedly play a vital role in future systems for road user safety, transportation management and planning. Since it is expected that future vehicles will be equipped with VII, it is not difficult to envision how it will ultimately evolve as a key component in support of road user charging and traffic data collection applications. Important to consider is the fact that there will also be the need for independent systems of vehicle identification or classification. These systems are needed to manage those exceptions (such as those that try to go around the system through some means), and to mitigate the privacy concerns previously discussed through the use of technologies that are not linked to personally identifiable information, such as license plate recognition and other intelligent sensors. SB. Should state and federal agencies be required to establish performance goals in areas such as safety, mobility and the environment? And if so, what should they be? And why are they important? BB. Metrics should be a central component to Bryan Boettger any strategy designed to implement user fee based systems for transportation infrastructure financing. Not only will the incorporation of metrics support quantitative evaluation of system performance, they will also provide an invaluable tool for identifying areas for future improvement. Intelligent transportation systems are put in place to improve the overall efficiency of the network. These efficiencies range from faster travel times, increased highway speeds, lower emissions and improved air quality, to elimination of bottlenecks for reduced incidence of collisions and incidents, and improved utilization of mass transit assets. Measuring these efficiencies through metrics and key performance indicators will inevitably prove critical to the success of any user-fee based system. While it is difficult to point to one common set of metrics that will work in every environment, these are the types of measurable outputs around which objectives will need to be established. n Bryan Boettger is Vice-President and General Manager of Federal Signal’s Public Safety Systems business which includes public safety software systems, interoperable communications, license plate recognition systems for both public safety and intelligent transportation and lights/sirens for first responder vehicles. Boettger received an MBA from Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management and a Bachelor’s Degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University.
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INTELLIGENT TRANSPORT
SMART Caroline Visser of the International Road Federation details the benefits intelligent transportation systems can bring, both for travellers and the environment.
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hroughout the developed world good surface transportation networks have allowed for the mobility of people and goods, which has in turn led to improved national economic performance, industry productivity growth and international competitiveness. However, continuing to build ever more highway infrastructure does have numerous undesirable side effects such as environmental impacts, energy consumption, land use, congestion and not to mention the vast sums of money required to build this infrastructure. Growing concerns about the impact of these side effects have led countries like the US to move away from such infrastructure-intensive, capital-intensive transportation strategies, toward more integrated transport policies, which strengthen transport infrastructure through technology. Many are now looking to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and the benefits that they can bring. For the US, ITS provide a way of maximizing a road network that is on the brink of reaching capacity. “From a congestion and efficiency standpoint, I would say that managing a road network today without an ITS infrastructure is unimaginable,” suggests Caroline Visser, Road Finance and ITS Programme Manager for the International Road Federation. “For road operators, it’s a vital tool and there are so many different ITS applications now – from monitoring and data collection solutions to see what’s happening on the road, to options to guide traf-
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fic through dynamic signalling and travel information – that agencies can tailor the solution to meet their specific needs. I would say that road operators today are very much dependent on ITS for not only congestion management and demand management, but also road safety.” For Visser, research into the technologies themselves is no longer the main problem. She believes ITS technology is now at the stage where it can get the required results – provided the systems are implemented correctly. “It’s more about taking research results and making them deployable on a large scale,” she explains. “Today we’re at the stage that it’s more the implementation side that seems to be hampered.” To address this concern, Visser’s team has set up an IRF working group dedicated to transport policies and their relationship with ITS. “Our feeling was that the positive impacts of ITS are sometimes overlooked. ITS is somewhat lacking in visibility, and it’s not usually a very sexy topic with politicians. So what we have tried to do with this working group is raise the profile of ITS with the high-level decision-makers – ministers, transport secretaries and their immediate advisors, the high-level civil servants responsible for policy decisions – firstly to generate enough budget for ITS research, but also to explain its benefits. We want to demystify it. ITS has a technology label attached to it, which can frighten some people, but in actual fact it’s a really wide-ranging concept. There are so many applications and technologies that are encompassed in that single
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acronym. The technology is there, and it’s ever-evolving, so that shouldn’t be our main worry – raising awareness is now the key.” And this is the core role of the IRF as a federation: to bring together stakeholders from all sides of the road development spectrum, from government ministries to transport agencies, from planning departments to environmental parties. Its work encompasses the financing of roads, network optimization, environmental concerns and road safety – as well as ITS, of course. “Our mandate is to organize knowledge management activities and share best practice among our members,” says Visser. “We work closely together with the network of national ITS associations and are also open to representatives from international institutions like the World Bank and the United Nations, who are now embarking on a number of ITS initiatives from a standardization perspective. We have close contact with the European Commission. So it is the IRF that brings together all these different stakeholders to exchange best practices and share their knowledge.” ITS enable more effective use of the road network itself, but there is also another area in which ITS can play a key role: that of promoting a green and more sustainable use of the road network. “Road transport doesn’t have a very good image in this regard,” acknowledges Visser. “It contributes to 74 percent of all transport CO2 emissions. Nonetheless, many of our members are embarking, on a voluntary basis, on initiatives to reduce their own carbon footprint and to come up with innovations to make road construction, maintenance and operation greener. We have several initiatives within the IRF itself. We’re developing a greenhouse gas calculator, which is an instrument that monitors emissions during the lifecycle of a road, and a tool that will enable members to calculate their emissions. ITS is helping because we think that traffic management and congestion reduction – in which ITS plays
a big role – is a very important way to make roads and road transport more efficient and sustainable. Traffic management systems combined with emissions monitoring have a high potential in contributing to this. Also, to a certain extent, road-user charging has a part to play as it rationalizes the mobility demand. It will not be a miracle solution for addressing transport growth, but it might do something. For instance, it’s been proven in Stockholm, where they introduced user charging in the city a few years ago, that there have been substantial gains in reducing emissions.”
“The technology is there, and it’s ever-evolving” Encouraging a more sustainable approach to transportation is a key part of the IRF’s philosophy, particularly given rising traffic volumes, but despite the huge strides taken in recent years it remains a significant challenge. “We have not succeeded in decoupling economic growth from growth in transport demand, and we have to look at realistic options to handle this,” concludes Visser. “Rather than just extending roads to accommodate this growth, we need to look more to software and mobility management in order to get the required efficiency gains. From our point of view, this will have a great impact on policy decisions because it will be all about the efficiency of the transport networks in place. ITS and traffic management can contribute to that, but maybe it is only part of the solution.” n
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AIRPORT SECURITY
Security’s next wave Ron Louwerse tells Marie Shields about the futuristic technology that is helping Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport fight terrorism.
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n these times of heightened terror threats, one of the toughest jobs has got to be that of an airport’s director of security. How to thwart a potential attack while ensuring customers are not unduly inconvenienced? One answer is to invest in up-to-the-minute technology, something that is in evidence at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, where advanced body scanning machinery called the ‘Security Scan’ was introduced in 2007. The machines produce an image of the body contours using millimetre wave reflection technology, which alerts security staff to the presence of unauthorized items on the body.
Schiphol’s Director of Security Ron Louwerse explains the advantages of this technology: “The main benefit is that the machine scans all objects that people have on their body. A metal detector only scans metal, and then we have to do a random search to look for explosives. This machine looks for metal, explosives and non-ferrous items. The big advantage is that, with the scan, you deal with all possible threats people can carry with them.” He points out that it is also very fast. “The actual screening only takes three seconds. In the current system, the agent needs about nine to 10 seconds to look at an image if there’s something he has to go investigate further. This is a different agent from the one standing next to the machine. They communicate through a wireless system, and when something is not okay with the ankle or whatever, FACTS & FIGURES he only has to say, ‘It’s not okay with the ankle.’ (2008) The actual body frisking can be minimized to a specific location, in this case the ankle, which ANNUAL PASSENGER CAPACITY makes it much more passenger-friendly because it 60-65 MILLION doesn’t involve a search of the whole body.” Some passengers were understandably a little apAIRCRAFT PARKING STANDS 199 prehensive about the machines when they were first introduced: Louwerse says they were viewed like “some CAR PARKING SPACES new science fiction thing, like something from Star 36,299 Trek.” Now, however, they have become used to it and airport staff have found the system to be very passengerSHOPS friendly, with a normal throughput of about four pas121 sengers per minute, a speed Louwerse calls “acceptable”. CATERING OUTLETS Airline passengers have been taking the ma75 chines in their stride, but that hasn’t stopped privacyrelated questions being asked about them in the AIRCRAFT MOVEMENTS European Parliament. “They were worried about the 446,693 image being seen by other agents,” Louwerse explains. PASSENGER MOVEMENTS “That’s why, with the company who manufactures the (X1000) machine, we have tested new software in which there is no image for an agent to see. It’s a fully automated deSCHEDULED tection device: on a kind of outline next to the machine 43,540 it bleeps up on the ankle or on the knee or on the shoulder or whatever. There’s no communication with the NON-SCHEDULED two agents and there’s no agent who looks at it.” 3,851
TRANSIT-DIRECT
38
TOTAL
47,430 SCHEDULED DESTINATIONS
262
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Human error When airport security breaches do happen, they are often blamed on human error, which may be why Schiphol’s motto, as quoted by Louwerse, is “technology where possible and people where necessary”. “That’s the way we try to fulfill all security obligations,” he says. He cites 100 percent
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Mutual cooperation control of staff when they enter security-restricted areas, and the use of a central location to minimize the number of agents required to look at Xrays, as being vital to maintaining high levels of security. One of the big issues facing airport staff is how to keep passengers happy during increasingly lengthy security procedures. What are the challenges in maintaining security but also maintaining a good customer experience? Louwerse says that the most important element is passenger-friendliness: “When we train our people, we always emphasize the need for being friendly and polite and showing respect,” he says. No matter how advanced the technology gets, there will always be a human factor in making sure the customer experience is a good one. “It can be a difficult task, because you have to screen a lot of passengers on a daily basis. Not all passengers act friendly towards you, and it can be difficult sometimes to maintain your composure. The main challenge is to keep the whole process passenger friendly, but still it has to be a security process.” Although our awareness of terror threats remains relatively high, Louwerse admits that there is always a danger that complacency can creep in. In order to combat this, Schiphol uses ‘mystery’ passengers and other programs to ensure staff remain alert to possible breaches. “I think it’s a normal human reaction. When the threat is not immediate, it could slip in. If we see this happening, we act immediately,” he says. “We’re on a good level.” In addition to preventing threats introduced by passengers, there are other crucial areas where security needs to be maintained, including the airport’s perimeter. Schiphol has about 55 km of fencing, which Louwerse says is a large area to maintain. The airport uses modern radar and camera technology to prevent intrusion, and also works closely with the local police authority, which carries out surveillance around the whole area.
The International Air Transport Association’s Steve Lott explains the association’s role in international airport security. One of the International Air Transport Association’s main objectives is to ensure that international security requirements are mutually accepted between European member states. How do you go about doing this? Steve Lott. IATA proposes that states carry out a detailed comparison of their security measures, to assess whether their security levels are equivalent or not. This can be accompanied by audits at each other’s airports. Should they prove to be at equivalent levels, they should conclude Security Recognition Agreements that can then lead to one-stop security. Will it be possible to achieve a harmonized implementation of globally recognized security standards? SL. Harmonization is a fundamental objective in aviation security, but we recognize that states can be under different threat levels and may have to implement additional measures to cope with higher risk. Since global security is as strong as its weakest link, all states should at least adhere to the baseline security standard set by ICAO Annex 17. Beyond this, we encourage states that have different security regimes to at least recognize each other’s systems and cooperate closely. The response of a number of key states to the liquids and gels threats in August 2006 is an example of international cooperation and mutual recognition.
Acting out Airport security is often accused of being reactive in nature, and this does appear to be true. After 9/11, more control was introduced around cockpit doors and sharp objects were banned from cabins. Following the ‘shoe bomber’ incident, many airports started requiring certain types of shoes to be scanned. A threat from liquid explosives materializes and suddenly rules relating to liquids are tightened up. It’s easy to point fingers and say these measures have come too late, but how can we protect against things we haven’t even thought of yet? “You have to think the unthinkable,” Louwerse says. “That’s a paradox I can’t solve. It’s very difficult. You should be alert; you should look not only for compliance with regulations, but as a security agent or a security department, you should look for the actual threat. That’s just being aware at the spot, at the time, at the moment of what’s happening. Then we’ll be okay. “You could say a lot of this is theater. Which in a way is true, because 99.9999 percent of our passengers are not the ones we are looking for. But you still have
to check and control them. It looks like theater, but in the end, there’s a reason you’re doing it. It’s not really theater at all.” Louwerse agrees that part of the function of security checks is to make passengers feel as though something is being done. He says this works both ways: it makes some passengers feel secure, but then others complain because they feel they’re being treated like criminals. He notes the difficulty of finding a balance between those two feelings. Louwerse pins his hopes on new developments in technology to ease the stress that can often exist during current airport security procedures, moving toward a time when passengers won’t even notice they’re being screened. “We’re not there yet,” he says. But with its forward-looking approach, there’s no reason why Schiphol shouldn’t continue to lead the field of airport security into the future. n Ron Louwerse is Director of Security for Amsterdam Airport Schiphol.
On Christmas Day 2009 an al-Qaida affiliated Nigerian man attempted to bring down a passenger plane over Detroit as it completed it’s flight from Schiphol. We spoke with Ron Louwerse a few weeks before the shocking event and were understandably impressed with the extensive measures taken to protect travelers passing through the airport. However, as demonstrated by the lapse that allowed a man on a terror watch list to pass through security with explosives strapped to his body, even the most advanced protective setups have their vulnerabilities. We’ll be returning to this issue in future editions to ask if any measures can ever make us truly safe, or whether we simply have to accept a certain degree of risk whenever we travel.
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KevinThibault ED_4August 10/02/2010 15:19 Page 118
TRANSPORTATION
Destination: Florida As government investment flows into the state, Florida DOT’s Kevin Thibault explains that high-speed rail is only one part of the transportation picture.
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n January 28, 2010, Tampa had some unusually high-profile visitors. President Obama and Vice President Biden chose the Sunshine State as the venue to announce which high-speed rail projects would be benefiting from an initial $8 billion of government funding. As expected, Florida was one of the big winners, landing a cool $1.25 billion to spend on its Tampa to Orlando line. A few days ahead of the announcement, we caught up with Florida DOT’s Kevin Thibault. He was understandably excited at the potential investment flowing into the state but also keen to talk about the other priorities on his agenda. As you might expect, high-speed rail is right at the forefront of the DOT’s plans. Though it is dismissed by some critics as an expensive boondoggle, Thibault is adamant that there is both a palpable requirement and strong public support for HSR in the state. “There is a definite need,” he says. “For Orlando and Tampa, the only real way to connect those two right now is Interstate Four. Many times because of either excess demand or an incident it’s shut down. Then the travel between those two major urban areas is shut down and you have to use these surface streets which are hardly effective. Having the high-speed rail line in place will provide a definite improvement to that corridor.” In addition, Thibault details future plans for an Orlando-
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Miami link, a 300-mile corridor that should allow some very high speeds between the two major urban centers. But HSR only forms a small portion of the administration’s ARRA transportation plans. Any project that wished to secure cash had to be ‘shovel ready’ and be quickly implemented, to help speed economic recovery. “We were fortunate that we were able to take the portion of funding that we got and allocate it at the state’s discretion,” says Thibault. “We had a number of projects that we had developed that just couldn’t get the construction funding that were able to pull them off the shelf and get them under construction. So we were able to benefit from that and really get people to work. There was also the additional benefit that a lot of those projects were adding capacity. So at the end of the day when the project gets done, not only did we provide a stable employment picture for a number of people for several years, but we also provided capacity relief to those areas that we were able to do those projects.” A total of $1.3 billion of ARRA funds were allocated to highways in Florida, of which $400 million was given straight to local governments. This money has typically been used for simple jobs such as resurfacing and intersection improvements. “The $900 million that was at the state discretion was
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Big numbers
$1.25 BILLION amount Florida receives in first round of high-speed rail funding
$1.5
spread out,” Thibault continues. “We made sure that we ject that may last nine months. A lot of them are two to had projects that were pretty much in every geographic three year durations so the employment that’s being proportion of the state, from the panhandle, out to Pensacola, vided for those individuals is for that duration. It’s always all the way down to Miami. It had to be a project that was with the hope that at the end of that term, the economy ready to go. It had to have all its federal requirements met. will be turned around and so that those people getting off additional funding over So when you start going through those filters you then dethose projects will be able to continue to work with that next few years velop this pool of projects that can consume the funds.” company on the next one because the economy will have Though some critics express serious doubts over the improved.” efficacy of infrastructure investment as a tool of recovery, The projects themselves will also bring major gains for Thibault is in no doubt about the positive benefits it can the residents of Florida not directly involved in their conbring, the Florida DOT contending that for every dollar struction. Thibault is conscious of the need to avoid buildspent on transportation you can expect mixed economic ing ‘white elephants’ that have no purpose other than length of Tampa Orlando benefits of around five dollars. “There was an indepenkeeping people employed for a few years. “A long term high-speed line dent group that was hired to look at how much econombenefit of the projects that have been selected is that they ic benefit transportation investment brings,” he explains. provide congestion relief to the areas that are getting “They use an economic model that is used by our legislathem,” he says. “So Tampa will see congestion relief, ture to look at not only transportation but other economOrlando will see congestion relief, as will Miami. So when ic analyses, they used that model to come up with that the project gets done in three years, not only did I hopenumber. But it’s proven to be somewhat true that for fully provide the longer job opportunity, but then the peoline’s maximum speed every dollar you spend about five dollars in benefit comes ple who drive those facilities will be happy that they now back to that area. The benefit, as you can imagine, here is have six lanes of highway.” direct, indirect and induced.” Transportation planning decisions are also taken with In addition to providing an immediate bounce to the environmental considerations in mind. Key to protecting stricken economy, this new round of investment has to both the state’s natural bounty and ensuring its transport prove its worth over time. There would undoubtedly be systems are fit for purpose has been a strategy called scheduled completion date repercussions if resources were funneled to projects only Efficient Transportation Decision Making or ETDM. “We providing a short-term sticking plaster to a much more worked with both our federal and our other state agency persistent problem. “The projects that we’ve selected are partners in identifying the environmental issues associatlonger term projects,” Thibault confirms. “They’re not like a resurfacing proed with the projects earlier rather than later,” says Thibault. “When the pro-
BILLION
84 MILES
168 MPH 2014
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ject is then developed these agencies are not surprised that you’re widening this road, for example. They’ve already been involved in the early planning stages of what the proposed project is, what its needs are, what it’s trying to accomplish. Almost every step of the way they’re in lockstep with us in that development of the project so there are no surprises. That’s given us a leg up in that we’ve had, I don’t think any hiccups with any environmental permitting or anything with these projects in general. Not only the stimulus, but just in our projects in general in our program, because of that Efficient Transportation Decision Making project that we have in place already.” Florida’s government backed investment in high-speed rail also offers clear environmental benefits, provided it can create viable alternative to road travel as supporters claim. “I think there’s general recognition that you can only widen a certain highway so many lanes. At some point you’ve got to do something else,” Thibault continues. “Here in Florida, we’re recognizing now that we can’t rely on the personal vehicle to be our only means to move people, that we’ve got to look at these other modes to be able to do that. I think there is the environmental benefit because there is the recognition of less air pollution and so on, but there’s also the realization that you just can’t do it by the highway mode. Interstate 95 in Miami and Fort Lauderdale is as wide as it’s going to be.” One of the key factors in Florida’s selection as one of the America’s highspeed rail priority zones was the state’s existing commitment to rail. The fact that the state has already invested millions of dollars of its own money in rail transit put it in pole position once government started handing out funds. “We have a commuter rail facility that runs from West Palm Beach down through Fort Lauderdale and Miami called Tri-Rail which has been in existence for about 20 years,” explains Thibault. “It’s really grown in the last two years because of the demand as people recognize its value now. We’re looking to do the same in Orlando and Tampa and Jacksonville because there’s a
recognition that this rail, especially in the dedicated corridor, can get on time performance for people to get to work or to school.” Despite rising ridership figures and a growing acceptance of the value of public transit, the challenge of getting people out of their cars and onto trains remains very real. America is the land of the motor vehicle and changing such ingrained attitudes will be a vital if initiatives such as highspeed rail are to prove effective, both in Florida and throughout the United States. “It’s a cultural challenge,” Thibault confirms. “Americans like their vehicle more than, let’s say, the Europeans. It’s even more of a cultural challenge here in Florida where we have a higher percentage of single occupant vehicles than the national average. So it shows you that people just like to be in their own car.” Now that government investment in high-speed rail is confirmed, the state faces a battle to educate its population on the many benefits public transit has over the private vehicle. Technology is helping. Developments such as the iPod and public Wi-Fi make journeys both more pleasurable and more productive. With headphones in, travelers on public transit are insulated in much they way they would be were they in a car, while also having the opportunity to use their travel time more effectively. By contrast the car, such a potent symbol of freedom for Americans, begins to lose some of its luster when road congestion regularly makes it a prison for so many drivers. Thibault agrees; “People are tired of waiting in traffic and they’re looking for a more efficient way for them to get around,” he says. “It’s education and it’s experience. You can show them all you want about what they do in London and Paris and so on, but until they experience it themselves they’re never going to get it.” n Kevin Thibault is Assistant Secretary for Engineering and Operations for Florida DOT. In this position he is responsible for the Design, Construction, Maintenance and Motor Carrier Compliance areas of the Department. He is also the Governor’s Highway Safety Representative.
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GEOSPATIAL INTELLIGENCE
LINKING TECHNOLOGY TO LAND MANAGEMENT Stig Enemark, President of the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG), explains the importance of suitable infrastructure and sustainable land administration systems for the future wellbeing of land tenure, value, use and development. Sustainability is a key component of land policies and land-administration institutions. In your opinion, which technologies play a key role here and why? The management and administration of land is a crucial issue. Land administration systems (LAS) provide the infrastructure for implementation of land policies and land management strategies in support of sustainable development. The infrastructure includes institutional arrangements,
legal frameworks, processes, standards, land information, management and dissemination systems, and technologies required to support allocation, land markets, valuation, control of use and development of interests in land. The key technologies in support of land administration systems can be divided into GIS tools and modern measurement tools. Modern GIS tools support e-Government in terms of designing and implementing suitable spatial data in-
frastructures and implementing a suitable IT-architecture for organizing spatial information that can improve the communication between administrative systems and also establish more reliable data due to the use the original data instead of copies. In recent years the discussion has very much focussed on these issues of geo-information while the development of positioning technologies has perhaps not received the recognition that it deserves. In coming years, positioning infrastructure will become the fifth infrastructure after water, transport, energy and telecommunications. This positioning infrastructure will increasingly be seen as a critical component for achieving sustainable development in terms of the triple bottom line of economic, social and environmental sustainability. How is technology development changing the face of the spatial information world? How are new technologies revolutionizing traditional surveying disciplines? I focus here on positioning infrastructures. The primary components of the positioning infrastructure are the GNSS satellite constellations themselves, GPS being the best known to the public. GNSS could be considered as one of the only truly global infrastructures, in that the base level of quality and accessibility is constant across the globe. A stand-alone GNSS receiver has a typical accuracy of a few meters and under the wrong conditions, accuracy can be worse than 10 meters. Therefore, many GNSS users require improved accuracy or improved reliability with many requiring both. Improving accuracy and reliability requires so-called ‘augmentation systems’ using ground infrastructure such as Continuously Operating Reference Stations (CORS). Modern positioning infrastructure (including both GNSS and CORS) can be grouped into three main categories: geodetic datum in support of surveying and mapping
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“Information about land and land market processes that can be derived from effective LAS plays a critical role in all economies”
activities; stable geodetic reference frame for precise measurement and monitoring of global processes, such as those associated with climate change and disaster risk management; extension to the concept of a true infrastructure that underpins the explosion in industrial and mass market use of positioning technology such as interactive road maps and other real-time positioning, for example, agricultural farming purposes. What role is GNSS technology playing in particular? Land administration has evolved to become the core component of land management that includes the functions of land tenure systems, land valuation and taxation, land-use planning and land development. These functions are supported by comprehensive and updated land information organized through the concept of Spatial Data Infrastructure (SDI). This has changed and extended the role of geodetic datum accordingly, GNSS technology being the main tool. Recent trends have seen the emergence of more efficient and cost effective solutions for cadastral and other surveys. These can often be enabled only by GNSS/GPS and its ability to work directly in the geodetic datum. The growing use and propagation of CORS based on GNSS has enabled a revolution in the ability to measure and monitor global processes, for example, changes in sea level due to global warming; predicting greenhouse gas concentrations or ozone depletion; changes in the planet’s overall water storage; assisting disaster monitoring and management including earthquakes, tsunamis and floods. These issues represent the key challenges of the new millennium. The ideal way to transport the data required in modern real-time precise positioning is to link the positioning infrastructure to a modern telecommunications infrastructure (broadband internet and wireless mobile phone technologies based on internet protocols). This will tentatively revolutionize the space-based data.
What place does imagery have in the surveying profession? How is this developing? In many countries the role of national mapping agencies are changing into providing core datasets rather than map series. Traditional topographic maps are then replaced by databases available for various applications to be designed and marketed by private business. In the professional world, such as the surveying profession, images play a key role in terms of integrating data from various sources and for a range of purposes.
Recent milestones in GIS history The history of mapping dates back as far as pre 200AD. From the Eskimos of the Canadian Arctic to the Bedwin tribesmen of the Arabian desert, man has long possessed the skills necessary to produce rough but quite accurate sketches on pieces of skin or in the sand, indicating the positions and distances of the localities known to them. Here we detail some of the most recent milestones in the history of GIS.
1960 First meteorological satellite (TIROS-1) is launched.
1962 USSR’s first Cosmos satellite is launched. Britain’s first satellite Ariel is launched.
1964 The Harvard Lab for Computer Graphics and Spatial Analysis, Harvard University, US is established by Howard Fisher.
1968 Apollo 8 Space programme returns the first pictures of the Earth from deep space. The first Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) is developed and launched by NASA.
1969 NASA succeeds with a great start on the Moon and in orbit around the Earth. As the link up between Apollo and Soyuz, Skylab establishes a lasting presence in space. Stig Enemark
Modern technologies have changed the use of satellite images and photogrammetry. They have changed both the way of producing maps and even how images are used for monitoring land-use changes, environmental degradation and preventing natural disasters, for example. The use of modern photogrammetry in surveying work depends, of course, on the work that individual surveyors are doing. They offer advanced tools to those surveyors that are involved in planning or geo-business. More generally, the concept provided by Google Earth and similar web products has
1970 National Sample Survey (NSS) is regognized by bringining together all aspects of survey work into a single unified agency, known as the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO) under the Department of Statistics. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is established.
1972 The first Landsat satellite is launched (originally known as ERTS-1) by NASA that was dedicated to mapping natural and cultural resources on land and ocean surfaces. General Information System for Planning (GISP) is developed by the US Department of the Environment.
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1975 National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA) is established at Hyderabad for acquisition and distribution of data from various satellites. European Space Agency is formed.
1979 Indian National Cartographic Association(INCA) is established.
1981 JPL’s Shuttle Imaging Radar (SIR-A) launches the first synthetic imaging radar carried by NASA’s Space Shuttle Orbiter.
1985 The GPS (Global Positioning System) becomes operational. Development of GRASS (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System), a raster based GIS programme, starts at the US Army Construction Engineering Research Laboratories.
1988 The National Centre for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) is established in the USA.
1991 The first European Remote-Sensing Satellite (ERS-1) launched that carried radar altimeter. India launches second Remote Sensing satellite IRS 1B.
1992 The National Space Development Agency (NASDA), Japan launches JERS-1 satellite.
1993 The European Umbrella Organisation for Geographic Information (EUROGI) is established in Europe.
1994 IRS-P2 is launched by India.
1995 RADARSAT - SAR satellite is launched.
1996 ESRI India is formed. Japan’s Advanced Earth Observation Satellite is launched. IRS-P3 is launched by India. NASA and JPL begin America’s study of Mars by launching Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft.
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changed the perception of images to be something available at your fingertips. The full impact of this invention is still to be seen. In your opinion, what is the future direction for geospatial technology? What are your focus areas for 2010? The current situation is dominated by the financial crisis. Of course it affects the surveying discipline and geospatial industry throughout the world, but it also presents opportunities for the surveying profession in terms of arguing for the need and benefit of having sustainable cadastral infrastructures and land governance serving as a backbone for mortgage and systems for complex property commodities. Until the last couple of years, the developed world often took land administration for granted and paid little attention to it. However, the recent global economic collapse has sharply focused world attention on mortgage policies and processes and their related complex commodities, as well as on the need for adequate and timely land information. Simply put, information about land and land market processes that can be derived from effective LAS plays a critical role in all economies. Another opportunity is in the building of public infrastructures that are likely to be initiated as an incentive to boost the economy. This would be money well spent, giving the economy a boost and giving profits in the coming years. To summarise the FIG agenda for the next couple of years, the key challenges of the new millennium are climate change; food shortage; energy scarcity; urban growth; environmental degradation; and natural disasters. These issues are all related to land governance and are going to be the core area for surveyors; the land pro-
About FIG FIG is an international nongovernmental organization that gathers professionals from government, local authorities and the private sector to discuss technology and professional issues with researchers and academics. This multistakeholder approach brings people together whose joint knowledge can benefit the development of the geospatial industry. FIG is promoting the concept of a ‘spatial-enabled society’, where a government uses ‘place’ as the key means of organizing information related to activities ranging from health, transportation and the environment to immigration, taxation and defence, and when location and spatial information are available to citizens and businesses to support these activities.
fessionals. To effectively deal with this requires high-level geodesy to create the models that can predict future changes and modern surveying and mapping tools that can control implementation of new physical infrastructure and provide the basis for the building of national spatial data infrastructures. Sustainable land administration systems that can manage the core functions of land tenure, land value, land use and land development as well as facilitate a ‘spatialenabled society’ will be the key issue for the coming years. n
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development. Our latest sensor innovation is a panoramic mapping system, which enables simultaneous vertical and oblique mapping, produced to nationally recognized map accuracy standards. We are getting a lot of positive feedback on the system so far, with some noting its potential to revolutionize airborne mapping as we know it.
Mapping the future As technological innovations advance, so too does the importance of geospatial information systems in infrastructure projects, explains Louis Demargne. Geospatial services have become increasingly important to infrastructure projects, urban planning, and emergency response. What is the reason for this rapid growth? Louis Demargne. In recent years, there have been a number of important technology advances related to geospatial data acquisition and processing. These innovations have resulted in higher levels of data accuracy, more efficient map production, and increased data deliverable options. Airborne lidar mapping is one great example. Using laser technology to accurately map terrain elevation over large areas, lidar completes in days what would have taken an army of surveyors months to achieve on the ground. Additionally, increases in computing power and the introduction of web-based technology have broadened the accessibility of geospatial data through enterprise GIS systems. As the number of users accessing and manipulating a given dataset increases, so too does the overall value of that geospatial investment. There’s also a growing acceptance of geospatial technologies among the general public. Look at the varied ways people are using Google Earth and Bing Maps. From driving directions to real estate shopping, to community watch programs, people are using geospatial data to support personal decision making. Given this geo-savvy public, there will be little patience for government and businesses that fail to capitalize on high quality data for critical planning and management operations.
Fugro EarthData has a reputation for innovation. What are some of the recent technology advancements that you’ve been working on? LD. We focus our R&D efforts in a couple of different areas. First, we look for ways to increase the value of geospatial data through expanded end user applications. Our semi-automated image classification methodology is one recent example. Unlike traditional methods, which rely on manual photointerpretation, our approach exploits the spectral and contextual information contained in digital multispectral imagery to map different types of surfaces, such as soils, plant or tree species, and pervious/ impervious surfaces. Less influenced by human error or variances, this method provides more consistent and accurate mapping deliverables. We also look for ways to streamline data production for increased efficiency and faster project turnaround. As a society accustomed to on demand services, we are developing ways to host and disseminate these large volumes of geospatial data products for our clients through web-based GIS applications. Doing so will save our clients valuable time and resources by providing a central source for multiple users to access and analyze geospatial data through the internet. Finally, we work to fi ll technology gaps through new sensor
What makes panoramic mapping so appealing? LD. First, it’s highly efficient. With the panoramic camera, we are able to fly at up to twice the normal flying height of current imaging systems, which means we acquire larger areas more quickly. Second, we are acquiring not only the vertical imagery typically associated with aerial mapping projects, but any number of oblique angles from 0 to 50 degrees at a resolution of up to three inches. Third, it’s a photogrammetric solution, not a pixel-based solution, so even the oblique imagery is photogrammetrically accurate and suitable for topographic and planimetric mapping. And last, it is an ArcGIS-compatible solution, which allows for seamless integration within existing ESRIbased systems. Why should infrastructure managers be interested? LD. Panoramic mapping serves a number of applications related to infrastructure. These include urban planning, ensuring adequate housing, education, health, and transportation; asset management, mapping buildings and the features associated with those buildings, as well as other structures; property appraisal, detecting and measuring new structures on residential or commercial buildings and estimating property taxes; and disaster response and recovery, providing situational awareness for first responders and estimating damages for more efficient recovery.
Louis Demargne is Vice President of marketing at Fugro EarthData, overseeing strategic marketing, communications, and proposal activities. Technically trained, Demargne has over 15 years of geospatial experience, specializing in the introduction of new technologies and applications to the marketplace. He holds a master’s degree in remote sensing from the University of Paris VI, France.
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PUBLIC SAFETY
Public safety progress A new report from Frost & Sullivan highlights the potential role that wireless broadband technologies will play in the public safety applications sector.
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ublished in December of last year the report states that over the next few years, the public safety application segment is likely to emerge as a key domain for wireless broadband technology providers. In the light of numerous terrorist attacks and unanticipated natural disasters over the last decade, which have exposed the loopholes in emergency communications, governments worldwide have clearly understood the role of advanced communication technologies. Consequently, many governments have eased their regulatory environments by lowering the barriers to entry for foreign companies and releasing dedicated spectrum for public safety, says the report.
“IP-based communications is one of the most significant drivers of wireless broadband for public safety communications” “IP-based communications is one of the most significant drivers of wireless broadband for public safety communications, as it solves one of the fundamental challenges faced in this segment – interoperability,” notes Technical Insights Research Analyst Anirudh Srinivasan. “Besides its ability to connect disparate radio systems and frequency bands, the IP platform also enables future technologies to be incorporated as and when required, without getting stuck with a single vendor or protocol,” he added. The report discusses the role that WiMAX and LTE, which offer an IP based network, will play in the future of emergency communications for both fixed and mobile public safety providers. It is evident that the near future is more likely to witness an integrated infrastructure with P25 Phase2 or TEDS, alongside WiMAX or LTE, says the report. A multilayer network capable of supporting disparate technological standards by using multiple nodal radios capable of operating in several frequency bands, would offer the best environment for providing a versatile wireless broadband network. Developments over the next three to six years are expected to be crucial for wireless broadband technologies, states the report, with the analogue television spectrum likely to be cleared by most countries and auctioned off for mobile broadband operators. Moreover, the report predicts that LTE deployments are likely to have gained traction by 2011, beginning to offer stiff competition to WiMAX, and the economic recovery is anticipated to trigger a new growth wave.
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However, security issues are expected to pose a major roadblock to wider adoption in this segment despite the fact that wireless connectivity provides greater flexibility and near-ubiquitous coverage. “Wireless communications are still prone to interception and security breaches regardless of advances in encryption techniques and wireless security protocols,” added fellow Technical Insights Research Analyst Archit Subramanian. “The difficulty of ensuring security in commercial Wi-Fi networks is well known, but with mission-critical public safety communications this challenge is compounded manifold.” Counter-terrorism agents and law-enforcement officials cannot risk the prospect of having criminals and terrorists gaining access to critical information. The report highlights the need to integrate high standards of resilience and on-the-move mobility adds to the complexity of wireless broadband deployment. “The seriousness of an unreliable communication network for missioncritical public safety operations, is clearly evident; particularly, reliable connectivity cannot be compromised within critical indoor environments such as during fire and rescue operations,” says Srinivasan. “Vacating parts of the 700 MHz television spectrum for public safety communications in the United States is a step in the right direction, as frequencies in this band offer better penetration and consequently better connectivity and improved reliability.” Synergistic partnerships between the industry and governing bodies can help deal with such impediments dogging the market landscape, says the report. The onus is on companies to garner support from public safety agencies, governing bodies, such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and decision makers in the government, to understand and bridge the capability gap. n
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INDUSTRY INSIGHT
quirements in the midst of training sessions. Video conferencing is used by responders across the US to simultaneously train multiple stations or offices at once instead of rotating classes through a central training center. It allows for interactive training where the trainer can get immediate feedback on student’s level of comprehension, it enables students to ask questions, hear concerns from students at other sites, and can provide consistent training to the entire organization. Another key benefit is that responders can quickly act from their home station instead of having increased response times due to being away at a central training center. When describing why they deployed video conferencing in Statetech Magazine, Snohomish Assistance Fire Chief Gary Aleshire said: “The driving force behind this is the national response time standards,” referring to the National Fire Protection Association’s requirement of an eight-minute response time for 90 percent of calls. Field response coordination in the Emergency Operations Center is aided by the latest visualization tools, which provide GIS maps, weather, and structural diagrams. Video conferencing is another visualization tool increasingly used to allow the control center to see what is happening in the field and allow better coordination between responding agencies. In the field, cameras can be placed on a portable tower for a bird’s-eye view or mobile video solutions can be worn by responders to allow subject matter experts in the EOC to have remote eyes and ears in the field to investigate and take appropriate action. Unified communications and collaboration Coordination is essential when responding to natural or man-made technology are becoming increasingly disasters. “The compelling factor to invest in a video network for our important tools for improving emergency agency was tying our regions even closer together,” explains Ty Davismanagement, says Matt Jackson. son, training and exercise specialist for the Springfield-Greene County OEM. “Emergency response is a collaborative effort; video conferencing enables multiple people, wherever they are, to come together on the same ince 9/11 the United States has put a heavy emphasis on emerpage. That’s crucial in a disaster.” gency management at federal, state and local levels. Training As travel budgets continue to get slashed due to tax revenue shortstandards and requirements have increased, agencies are exfalls, agencies are struggling with how to fulfi l their mission while avoidpected to collaborate more closely using Emering costly travel. Sometimes there is no substitute for gency Operations Centers (EOC) as a central command “face-to-face” interaction. For example, the US Suand control hub, and continuity of government plans preme Court recently ruled that courts can no longer (COG) are now a central component of emergency opaccept lab report certificates or affidavits without the erations plans (EOP). examiner from the lab representing the report and Independent of the new requirements in emergency being available for cross-examination. Video conmanagement, unified communications and collaboration ferencing allows examiners to participate remotely technology have emerged as infrastructure priorities for and provides interactive, life-like testimony without government in general. When Gartner recently surveyed the cost of travel and increasing a lab’s already long government CIOs regarding their top technology prioribacklog. Michigan State Police (MSP) Forensic Scities for 2010, collaboration technologies and voice/data ence Division forensic analysts delivered remote tescommunications were in the top six. Although most timonies in two high-profi le drunk driving trials in agencies view collaboration between geographically Delta County, located a full day’s travel from Lansing. dispersed offices to ensure rapid response, quality deciBy testifying via videoconference, MSP estimates it sion-making, and reduced travel costs, public safety and saved 46 hours of analyst bench time, not to mention Matt Jackson, Director of Global emergency management may benefit most of all from the travel costs from these two trials alone. Government Markets, oversees solutions at Polycom for public safety, near life-like communications across distances. As emergency managers prepare for the next judicial and agency collaboration. Matt holds a BS degree in Computer With the persistent need for training across emercrisis, it’s important to consider how to ensure reScience from Virginia Tech, an gency response agencies, several key challenges occur sponders are well trained and can effectively collaboMBA. from NC State University, and a graduate certificate from the – minimizing the length of time to roll out training to rate with the EOC and other agencies – all without University of Virginia. all staff, keeping consistency, and meeting response rebreaking the budget.
Collaborative communications
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ASK THE EXPERT
and then uses the differences in those times to calculate an accurate location. U-TDOA is uniquely suited for E911 because it is able to consistently locate any mobile phone, anytime, anywhere there is wireless connectivity, with a high level of accuracy (typically within 50 meters) and reliability. When a U-TDOA system is in place to locate wireless E911 calls, it does not matter where the person is calling from – at home, on a city
Finding your place Dominic Li on the challenge of emergency communications in the mobile age.
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s mobile phones continue to grow as the dominant form of communication, the number of wireless calls to 911 has increased exponentially. A critical component of processing these wireless 911 calls is the ability to locate callers quickly and accurately. The debate continues as to which wireless location technology is best-suited for locating 911 callers. Th is debate is receiving global attention as nations around the world are looking to mimic the US Enhanced 911 (E911) system, and deploy their own emergency call location systems. In order to be effective for E911, wireless location technology must meet several performance requirements – high accuracy, high reliability, ability to work with any phone, and ability to work in any environment. First responders need reliable access to accurate location data at the fi rst request in order to find the person in need quickly. Furthermore, every wireless 911 call needs to be located regardless of the type or age of the mobile phone the caller is using or where that person is, including indoors, in cities, in vehicles – all places where many 911 calls originate. The Global Positioning System (GPS) is decidedly the most widely known location technology, fuelled by consumer demand for location-based services like navigation and
social networking. GPS relies on satellites to calculate the accurate location of a device or mobile phone. In ideal scenarios, GPS locates mobile phones with very high accuracy – typically within 50 meters. It requires an open line of sight from the mobile phone to the satellites, and performs at its best in outdoor rural and suburban areas. Conversely, GPS performs inadequately or fails to work in environments where the line of sight is obstructed, such as indoors, in cities with tall buildings, and even sometimes inside of a vehicle. Currently, more than 70 percent of mobile phone calls take place indoors. By nature, mobile phones can be virtually anywhere, in any type of environment. An E911 system that relies on GPS does not afford every caller the same opportunity to be located and rescued. Furthermore, callers whose phones are not equipped with a GPS chip will not be located at all. A more suitable location technology for E911 is Uplink Time Difference of Arrival (U-TDOA). U-TDOA is a network-based technology that requires no additional upgrades to mobile phones. It relies on a technique that measures the time it takes the signal from the mobile phone to reach multiple location measurement units (LMUs) within the cell towers,
“Currently, more than 70 percent of mobile phone calls take place indoors. By nature, mobile phones can be virtually anywhere, in any type of environment” street, or even lost in the woods. It also does not matter which type of phone the person is using, so regardless of the make or model of phone – GPS chip or not – if a person dials 911, emergency responders will be able to locate the victim quickly and accurately. U-TDOA systems have been in place for E911 in the United States for the better part of the past decade, delivering accurate location information quickly to first responders for more than five million 911 calls every month. The U-TDOA system in the United States has produced many successes and the reason is clear: U-TDOA meets all of the requirements for mission-critical situations: it works with any phone, works in any environment, and it works very accurately and reliably. In short, it is the location technology that is ideally suited for emergency grade situations such as E911.
As Vice President of Marketing and Portfolio Management, Dominic Li oversees the development and execution of TruePosition’s portfolio and marketing strategies, as well as the management of the corporate brand. Li brings more than a dozen years of experience in the telecommunications and technology fields. Prior to joining TruePosition, he managed the portfolio development, and marketing functions at Sprint Enterprise Mobility and was previously Vice President with British Telecom.
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INFRASTRUCTURE FUNDING
Emilia Istrate and Robert Puentes of the Brookings Institution examine the effectiveness of the current federal investment process and the extent to which a federal capital budget or a national infrastructure bank (NIB) would improve it.
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F
rom time to time, collapsed bridges, failed dams and ruptured water pipes remind us of the need for increased investment in the maintenance of US infrastructure. Overall, we know that infrastructure quality is generally declining, especially in metropolitan areas. And many are concerned that our extant infrastructure is woefully obsolete, geared more toward prior generations than for the challenges of the 21st century. Th is is especially true for surface transportation (roads, rail, transit), where two national commissions, major congressional committees, and numerous interested parties have maintained a steady drumbeat for greater federal engagement – mostly through increased spending. Today, with US unemployment at 10 percent, calls for increased funding – this time in order to create and retain jobs – have only gotten louder. However, while most of the attention has been on increasing funding for infrastructure projects, there are also renewed pleas for ways to improve the federal government’s investment process. In this context, two ideas that have come up over the years are the creation of a federal capital budget and a new federal entity for funding and fi nancing infrastructure projects of national or metropolitan significance. In short, the federal budgeting community agrees that federal government does not treat federal investment in infrastructure appropriately. While both the federal capital process and the federal grants to states have their own problems, there are three main problems plaguing the federal investment process as a whole. Firstly there is a bias against maintenance. While federal investment does allow maintenance funding, most of the investment is geared towards new capital assets. To the extent federal investment supports maintenance, state and local grantees use their transportation grants to cover major maintenance, such as major rehabilitation and repair of capital assets. However, without the funding of appropriate preventative maintenance, the useful service life of infrastructure assets is shortened unnecessarily. The second problem is the flawed selection process. In general government investment is justified if the targeted capital asset is associated with a market failure and produces a net welfare benefit to society. While the market failure is usually easily identifiable, the costs and benefits of government fi nancing for a project are harder to estimate. Many have called for investment in a capital asset to be justified based on economic analysis, such as a benefit-cost analysis (BCA). While there are legal requirements for BCA based approaches, there is no uniform implementation or estimation for a wide range of projects. The third problem is one of insufficient long-term planning. A major complaint is the ‘short sightedness’ of the federal investment process. The federal budget is released and updated annually, but there is little attention to long-term plans, and there are no mechanisms to hold policy makers accountable for the long-run effects of annual budgetary implementation. A clear and direct link between investment decisions and outcomes would help both federal agencies and grantees in managing the federal investment process. General recognition of these problems has given rise to calls for reforms to allow for better – and greater – federal investment in infrastructure. While not necessarily new or singular, two ideas have garnered considerable attention lately. One idea is to create a federal capital budget by separating capital expenditures from other expenses (referred to as ‘current’ or ‘consumption’ expenditures). While the private sector and most US states employ some version of a capital budget, the US federal budget currently functions on a consolidated basis where capital and consumption expenditures are comingled. Over the years a wide range of capital budgets have been proposed and debated. However, experiences over the past half a century illustrate that the issue of moving to a federal capital budget is not a partisan one as it has been proposed and rejected during both Republican and Democrat administrations. The main problem is that it never really gained intellectual support and the lessons from prior efforts show that the passage of any type of capital budget proposal requires support from both the White House and Congress.
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One key role of a federal capital budget is its potential to function as a management tool, helping the planning process for federal investment. It also usually comes with a capital improvement plan (CIP) which includes the construction and maintenance plans for capital assets for a five or six year period and is implemented over several phases.
“A properly designed NIB for the US is an attractive alternative for a new type of federal investment policy” However, there is no guarantee that a federal capital budget would improve the selection process of federal investment. The state and local experience suggests that the prioritization of projects is an intense political process. The federal agencies, Congress, states, businesses and advocacy groups will continue to push their priorities. If the poor condition of US infrastructure provides evidence for high prioritization of the maintenance of capital assets, it is not clear that a stakeholder driven prioritization process would result in this choice. Another idea that is being considered is the establishment of a national infrastructure bank. While not as far reaching a change as a federal capital budget, a national infrastructure bank (NIB) is a targeted mechanism for financing infrastructure. A development bank in essence, an NIB would have to balance the rate-of-return priorities of a bank with the policy goals of a federal agency. A new bill, the National Infrastructure Development Bank Act (NIBDA), was introduced in May 2009 and the 2010 budget proposal includes appropriations for a national infrastructure bank. These NIB proposals envisage an entity that improves the federal investment pro-
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cess in infrastructure assets of national importance and accelerates the investments in this type of infrastructure. The focus is on multi-jurisdictional or multi-modal projects with regional or national impact. Emphasis would be placed on projects that cut across stove-piped federal infrastructure programs. It is unclear whether the bank would be limited to certain sectors, such as transportation, or if it would allow for applications from a variety of infrastructure areas. For these types of infrastructure projects, an NIB could provide federal funding in terms of grants, loans and loan guarantees. Under the NIBDA and the 2010 budget proposal, the federal government would provide $25 billion over five years in terms of appropriations. In the case of NIBDA this would be 10 percent of all the subscribed capital. Under the House bill, an NIB would be able to leverage the paid in capital by issuing bonds. The proceeds from the bonds would be used to fi nance major infrastructure projects proposed by public entities (states, municipalities and agencies), public private partnerships and fi rms. As presented in the 2010 budget proposal or the current bill in the House, an NIB would be a federal special purpose entity. Its grants would score as any other federal grants, with no requirement of full funding. Its budget authority would include the subsidy cost of its loans. In the 2010 budget proposal, NIB funding is direct federal investment, similar to the funding for the Corps of Engineers. An NIB for the US is frequently compared to the European Investment Bank (EIB), as suggested by NIBDA 2009. The EIB has been functioning successfully for the last 50 years, playing a major role in connecting the European Union across national borders. Starting as a development bank focused on infrastructure, the EIB widened its operations, fi nancing projects on innovation, small and medium businesses and environment, in line with current European Union objectives. The EIB has over €164.8 billion in subscribed capital by all the 27 EU member countries. Only five percent of the amount is actually paid in. The amount of loans and guarantees it can provide is 2.5 times the subscribed capital. In 2008, the EIB contracted to fund €57.6 billion, mainly on transportation, energy and global loans. It posted a net profit of €1.6 billion for 2008. While not trying to maximize profit, the EIB functions as a bank, not as a grant-making mechanism. It raises funds from capital markets and lends them at higher rates, keeping its operations fi nancially sustainable. It offers debt instruments, such as loans and debt guarantees, and technical assistance. In order to maintain efficiency and serve projects of different sizes, the EIB deals directly only with loans exceeding €25 million. For projects below this threshold, it provides intermediary loans, which are credit lines granted to commercial bank to lend to Small and Medium Enterprises and local authorities. The EIB fi nances up to half of the cost of the project, which may be initiated by either public or private entities. A properly designed NIB for the US is an attractive alternative for a new type of federal investment policy. In theory, an independent entity, insulated from congressional influence, would be able to select infrastructure projects on a merit basis. The federal investment through this entity would be distributed through criteria-based competition. It would be able to focus on projects neglected in the current system such as multijurisdictional projects of regional or national significance.
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An NIB may introduce a federal investment process that requires and rewards performance, with clear accountability from both recipients and the federal government. Th is would in turn bring many advantages. At its heart, an NIB is about better selection of infrastructure projects. It would provide a mechanism to catalyze local and state government cooperation and could result in higher rates of return compared to localized infrastructure projects. It could also require that projects be delivered with the delivery mechanism offering best-value to the tax payer and end user. The mere establishment of an NIB would not correct the problem of deferred maintenance. However, through the selection process, the bank could address the current maintenance bias in the federal investment process. For example, the bank could impose maintenance requirements to recipients, including adequately funded maintenance reserve accounts and periodic inspections of asset integrity. Whilst the idea of both a federal capital budget and a national infrastructure bank have been around in policy circles for many years now, the need for better infrastructure has never been greater, especially if the US is to remain a strongly competitive economic player.
Today’s fiscally constrained environment demands a new approach to infrastructure policy, allowing us to upgrade our existing infrastructure, expand choices in moving people and goods (and ideas), ease the burden on household budgets, and help us to attain energy independence. Spending must produce real gains in productivity, inclusion and environmental sustainability – the foundation of short- and long-term prosperity. In this time of limited resources, improving the federal investment process should be prioritized over fi nding ways to merely increase the amount of infrastructure spending. Overall, creating a federal capital budget does have advantages, but it would provide little improvement for the federal decision-making process of infrastructure fi nancing. Whilst the more modest NIB is no silver bullet, if appropriately designed and with sufficient political autonomy, it could improve both the efficiency and effectiveness of future federal infrastructure projects of national significance. The fact that it is now drawing major political attention is indeed an important milestone and a unique opportunity to reform federal investment in infrastructure. „
US$2.2 billion
2008 Profit of European Investment Ba nk
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PROJECT FOCUS 138
ASCE’s top 5 engineering projects of 2009 The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) recently announced the five finalists for the group’s annual Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement (OCEA) award. Judged on innovation in construction and materials, public benefit, impact on the physical environment, and other judging criteria, the projects will be scored by the jury and announced in March.
Arrowhead Tunnels With the Californian water crisis still of major concern in the state and the threat of a possible earthquake, the District of Southern California Arrowhead Tunnels have been designed to boost water supply during times of dangerous shortages. Bored with massive TBMs (tunnel-boring machines), the tunnels extend for 9.6 miles and will be able to provide six months of emergency water for some 15 million residents. Costing $500 million, the project’s biggest test will be how it holds up during an earthquake, and as it runs east of the San Andreas fault, through 20 fault zones, the possibility of a quake is very likely.
Sound Transit Central Link Light Rail The largest and deepest soft-ground sequential excavation method (SEM) tunnels in North America, the construction of a passenger rail station in the Beacon Hill area, south of downtown Seattle, was literally a ground-breaking undertaking. The pair of mile-long tunnels, part of a 14-mile light-rail project, were nearly twice the depth and diameter of previous projects, running under a 352-foot-high hill. However, thanks to a 642-ton, 330-foot-long earth-pressure-balancing tunnel-boring machine, Beacon Hill now has a station 160 feet underground.
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Lakeshore Environmental Enhancement and Education Project Not as epic as the previous two nominees, but just as technical in its achievement. In order to counter an eroding shoreline along Lake Michigan, the Concordia University Wisconsin came up with an idea to construct a 130-foot-high, 2300-foot-long bluff to counter nature’s effect, whilst still providing public lake-front access. Using extensive 3D CAD and hydraulic computer modeling, water-tank testing and careful placement of 100,000 tons of rock, stone, and plants, a completely natural looking boundary was formed to break up the power of incoming waves (with strategically placed armour rocks) and the creation of a wetland area to absorb storm water.
Utah State Capitol Restoration Situated on an active fault line capable of leveling it during an earthquake, the Utah State Capitol Building is in a precarious situation. The state faced a choice; either replace the entire building, at a cost of up to $1 billion, or figure out a way to reinforce and baseisolate it, making the building essentially float on its foundations. Bear in mind that the building is a revered architectural masterpiece that’s more than a century old. Thus one of the largest and most delicate base-isolation projects was put into motion. Surgically installing 265 base isolators, while reinforcing the iconic dome and other structural elements, contractors completed the project at a cost of $212 million whilst not raising or lowering the 132-million-pound-building by more than 1/16th of an inch – which would have resulted in its collapse. The building is now one of the most earthquake-proof sites in the country.
Sutong Bridge The Sutong Bridge, which at 8206 meters (29,923 feet), is the world’s longest cablestayed bridge and the fi rst whose main span exceeds 1000 meters. However it was not just an engineering feat for China, but also a practical one. The bridge is now a substitute for the potentially dangerous four-hour ferry ride between Nantong and Shanghai allowing travelers to do the journey in a single hour by car. The bridge also broke another record during construction; at 20 meters, the Sutong has the deepest foundation of any cablestayed bridge.
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COMMENT 141
The sustainability bubble
Companies need to act now if they are to be ready for a carbon-constrained future. By Huw Thomas
T
he recent furore over Dubai World’s inability to pay back billions in loans serves as a cautionary tale for those that fail to consider the sustainability of their actions. In the boom years, Dubai was a shining beacon of development. Barely a week went by without the announcement of yet another improbably ambitious project. The tallest skyscraper in history? Why not? A cluster of private islands modelled on the countries of the world? What could possibly go wrong? To employ a tired cliché, it now appears that these undertakings were all built on sand. The bubble has burst and those gung ho pioneers who bet the farm on Dubai becoming some kind of Disneyland for millionaires now find themselves in the shadow of a teetering pile of debt. The emirate’s troubles are the most glaring example of financially unsustainable business practices and directly mirror the environmental sustainability challenges now facing the construction industry. Just as we cannot rely on an inexhaustible supply of easy credit, so we cannot expect the Earth’s resources to be limitless. Traditionally, sustainability issues have generally been viewed as little more than an imposition, a box to be ticked if a company is to meet its corporate social responsibility targets. Despite the failure of the recent UN
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Climate Conference to reach a legally binding agreement, greater regulation of carbon emissions and a stronger focus on the impact we all have on the environment is a certainty in the not too distant future. This change is coming and those that fail to respond will see themselves left behind. This means that design and construction companies need to stop thinking of sustainability as a chore and get serious about building it into their processes from the ground up. If the rewards of protecting the environment don’t seem significant enough on their own, look at the drive towards sustainability as a tool for improving how the business works. Making better use of resources and streamlining processes to generate less waste makes sense regardless of exactly why it’s being done. Being known as a low carbon company will also have advantages in the kind of clients it is possible to attract and the kinds of people who want to work for you. Green credentials are becoming increasingly valuable as a business differentiator. Ultimately, sustainability won’t just be about the survival of the planet, it will also be a key factor in the survival of companies and even whole industries. If Dubai’s plight has taught us anything, it is that taking the supply of an essential resource for granted can have grave consequences.
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IN REVIEW 142
Hot off the press Sustainable development has become a fundamental objective in all sectors of the industry. We take a quick look at what some of the current books on the subject have to offer.
Sustainable and Resilient Critical Infrastructure Systems: Simulation, Modeling, and Intelligent Engineering By Kasthurirangan Gopalakrishnan and Srinivas Peeta As our critical infrastructure becomes increasingly interdependent, the need to ensure that it remains resilient and sustainable, whilst at the same time being adaptive, has become a key focus area for the future. Th is book looks at recent advances in simulation, modeling, sensing, communications/information, and intelligent and sustainable technologies that have resulted in the development of sophisticated methodologies and instruments to design, characterize, optimize, and evaluate critical infrastructure systems, their resilience, their condition and the factors that cause their deterioration. US INFRASTRUCTURE SAYS: Particularly pertinent for those involved with infrastructure planning, design, fi nancing and maintenance.
An Introduction to Sustainable Transportation: Policy, Planning and Implementation By Preston Schiller, Eric C. Bruun and Jeffrey R. Kenworthy Reducing carbon emissions and halting climate change are two key priorities for the next few years. Transportation is one area that is under scrutiny for its contribution to increasing our carbon footprint. Written by three lecturers and experts in transportation policy and planning, this book explores sustainable transportation and development and suggests some innovative solutions regarding mobility management. It contains sections on policy-making and planning and compares and contrasts various modes of transport, from human-powered modes to motorized modes, including marine and air transport. The book also features many international examples and case studies, textboxes, graphics, recommended reading and end of chapter questions. US INFRASTRUCTURE SAYS: An informative, authoritative and worthwhile read for all those interested in sustainable transportation.
Sustainable Construction: Green Building Design and Delivery By Charles J. Kibert As industry attempts to review its construction practices and promote more sustainable buildings, this book provides a handy introduction to the design and performance of commercial and institutional green buildings. Author Charles Kibert uses the book as a way of encouraging the reader to realize the ecological and economic benefits of green building. He uses the US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) set of standards to help explain these benefits. US INFRASTRUCTURE SAYS: Ideal for anyone wanting to learn more about the theory, history, best practices and state of the industry with regards to green building.
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PHOTOFINISH 144
Fireworks explode during the grand opening of the Aria Resort & Casino at CityCenter in Las Vegas, Nevada on December 16, 2009. The 67-acre, $8.5 billion mixed-use urban development center is said to be the biggest privately ďŹ nanced construction project in United States history.
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