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ENERGY
ENERGY Houston's Role in Global Energy
Transition a Major Focus of Greater Houston Partnership Annual Meeting
By Subcontractors USA News Provider
Greater Houston Partnership 2020 Board Chair Bobby Tudor outlined how the organization will work to ensure Houston plays a key role in the global energy transition at the Partnership’s annual meeting on January 22.
Maintaining Houston’s place as the Energy Capital of the World requires that the region’s business and civic leaders address the dual challenge of meeting expanding global energy demand while lowering the world’s carbon footprint, said Tudor, Chairman of Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Co. LLC, an energy investment and advisory firm.
“The economic vitality and growth of our region’s economy is inextricably tied to the energy industry,” Tudor said, adding that the Partnership and its members “should use our convening power to rally our companies, political leaders and fellow citizens to position Houston as the city that will lead this energy transition.”
The Partnership will launch a new initiative aimed at accelerating Houston’s activity around energy transition, while existing committees will continue efforts to bring energy tech and renewable energy companies to Houston; explore the policy dimensions of carbon capture, use, and storage; and advocate for legislation that helps ensure the Texas Gulf Coast is positioned as a leader in that technology.
Houston business leaders have a responsibility to lead the transition to a cleaner, more efficient and more sustainable, lower carbon world, Tudor said. “We need to be the driver, not the passenger.”
Highlighting some of the changes and milestones reached in Houston over the last decade*, Partnership President and CEO Bob Harvey said that while the last 10 years were transformational for Houston, the next decade may be to be even more critical to the region’s long-term success. “I believe the decisions we make and the work we do together in the next few years will determine the trajectory of Houston for the next several decades and beyond,” Harvey said.
2019 Key Accomplishments 2019 Key Accomplishments
The Partnership’s 2019 Board Chair, Scott McClelland, said he was pleased with the organization’s successful efforts on major initiatives last year. Through its public policy committees, the Partnership influenced key bills during the 86th Texas Legislative Session, including House Bill 3 that brought $5 billion in new state funding into the public education system and Senate Bill 7 that resulted in $2 billion in state funding for statewide recovery and future flood mitigation.
“If there’s one big thing I learned over the last year, it’s that the key to making this city better for everyone is having a lot of Houstonians involved in the effort,” said McClelland, president of H-E-B. “There’s power in numbers. It’s a force multiplier.”
Harvey also pointed to Houston’s recent success in bolstering its innovation ecosystem—a move critical to the region’s ability to compete with other global cities. Last summer, Rice University broke ground on The Ion, a 270,000-square-foot innovation center that will anchor the broader 16-acre South Main Innovation District. Other startup incubators and accelerators have opened their doors throughout the city in recent months, including MassChallenge, The Cannon, Gener8tor, Plug and Play and more. The Partnership also played a role in fintech company Bill.com opening its first office outside of Silicon Valley here in Houston in September.
In January 2019, the Partnership launched a new strategic initiative, Houston Next, and a complementary $50 million capital campaign to support the effort. Designed to advance Houston’s position as a great global city, the plan focuses on three core areas: creating a strong, diverse 21st-century economy, ensuring a great quality of life and supporting opportunity for all. Houston Next aims to empower local business leaders to accelerate the region’s progress at the intersection of those three areas of impact and ensure Houston’s continued success. Harvey said the Partnership is well underway toward meeting its Houston Next objectives and reported that the campaign has raised $25 million, half of its goal.
See the Partnership’s full 2019 Annual See the Partnership’s full 2019 Annual Report for additional facts and figures. Report for additional facts and figures. *The last decade was one of the most transformative in Houston’s history. Consider: • T he region added more than 1.1 million residents over the last 10 years an increase of more than 18 percent. • Houston became the most diverse city in the nation, now led by its Hispanic population and the fastest growing Asian population in America. • T he Houston region added $64 billion to its GDP, a 17 percent increase in real terms. • Foreign trade expanded by nearly $24 billion, making Houston the most trade focused metropolitan area in the nation. • Houston added 615,000 net new jobs over the last decade.
ENERGY
What An EnergyEfficient World Looks Like
By Subcontractors USA News Provider
In 2017, the world used 562 quadrillion BTUs of energy in the form of oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear and renewables. But most of us don’t understand how this statistic is reflected in what we do each day.
That staggering number – 562,000,000,000,000,000 – represents the countless decisions made by the individuals, companies and communities that require energy. These decisions include the refrigerators we buy, the fuel we use in our tanks and even the large-scale energy consumption in power plants and factories.
And more amazing is that energy consumption would be so much larger if not for the advancement of energy efficiency. Fortunately, as the years roll on, our energy use gets more and more efficient.
Efficiency lets us do more with less, such as driving longer distances on better fuels and refrigerating food with less electricity. That also means fewer emissions from those same activities. Technology advances and new, lighter materials help reduce energy intensity – a measurement of the amount of energy used for an activity – and results in fewer emissions.
Without the efficiency improvements, as described in ExxonMobil’s “2019 Energy Outlook,” the world would need almost 60% more energy in 2040 than what is currently projected by the company and other experts such as the International Energy Agency.
But thanks to those efficiencies, the world will need just 20% more energy, even as the global middle class nearly doubles and seeks more goods and services that improve quality of life.
That’s good news for the economy and the environment.
Meanwhile, the United States will consume 1 quadrillion fewer total BTUs of energy in 2040 than in 2017, a feat made possible in part by efficiency gains during a time when the population is expected to grow by 15% and the economy jumps 65%.The lion’s share of the world’s energy demand growth in the coming decades is expected mainly in Asia, driven largely by population and economic growth in China and India. But because of new technologies and i ncreased efficiency, both countries will use significantly less energy than otherwise required to fuel their rapid economic expansions.
That’s a lot of energy savings – not to mention emission reductions – all thanks to new technologies and better energy choices.
IT & TECHNOLOGY Embrace the HUMAN ENTERPRISE
By Subcontractors USA News Provider
Why are so many digital transformation efforts stalling? Because leaders remain fixated on technology, at the expense of humanity.
The pressure to radically reshape organizations is only accelerating: industries keep converging, new competitors appearing, and societal and stakeholder expectations rising. Yet digital transformation efforts at many organizations are stalling. The reason? Transforming in a way that drives significant business value and has meaningful impact on the way organizations generate value for stakeholders requires applying a new, human-centered framework. It requires organizations escape the historical definition of “work” to become what we call a “Human Enterprise”.
The Human Enterprise reframes our relationship with technology to enable new ways of working and unlock new paths to value. It’s about making enterprises more human, applying a human dimension to both deploying technology at speed and innovation at scale. But it’s also about the enterprise of being human. Today’s emerging technologies provide a historically unique opportunity to free us from work we shouldn’t be doing and empower us to undertake work we should. It’s in this way that we are really engaged not in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, but the First Human Revolution — using the power of technologies such as artificial intelligence to proactively change the way we work and, in turn, the very nature of the organization.
There’s a reason technology-led advantage is increasingly short-lived. First, if everyone is transforming, no one is — transformation is today the new normal. Second, technology alone isn’t the solution — it’s a tool, and its effectiveness depends on how it empowers what we do. We’re at an inflection point where we can drive how technology shapes our world, rather than being driven by it. The Human Enterprise sits at the heart of this transformation. So how do you build one? By following six principles:
1. Human-first, not digital first
Always ask, “What are the human implications of this decision?” Empathy is the driving principle when designing solutions in a
Human Enterprise, ensuring technology: • is like well-designed furniture — ubiquitous, essential, unobtrusive, intuitive and supportive • n ot only automates mundane, repetitive tasks, but acts as a tool to unlock greater creativity and collaboration • e nables and empowers change and innovation, but isn’t the focal point of transformation efforts
2. Purpose and values-driven foundation Recognize value means more than financial metrics. A Human Enterprise defines its purpose and creates an ecosystem of long- term value, including the well-being of human stakeholders. That means it embraces technology as an instrument to realize its purpose.
3. Collaborative, “open architecture” culture
A Human Enterprise has an ‘open architecture’ culture, removing friction and encouraging experimentation to build the ecosystem required to address increasingly complex challenges.
Cultivate an ‘open architecture’ culture, encouraging experimentation and collaboration across an ecosystem of value to solve the increasingly complex problems it faces. A Human
Enterprise uses technology to: • enhance the organization’s culture and build trust, not replace it • s ave time, freeing employees to take advantage of opportunities for human engagement • enable communication and collaboration
4. Diversity and learning-driven innovation Diversity is not only the right thing to do for a Human Enterprise, but a business imperative: Boosting creativity and innovation, improving employee morale and retention, and aiding financial performance. Technology: • supports employee learning and development, instead of being another thing they need to learn • reduces human biases by, for example, adding a layer of machine-driven data analysis to inform decisions • b ecomes an equalizer to help spread and encourage ideas and knowledge, rather than something that leaves behind employees whose roles and skillsets are not suited to technological advances 5. Agile operating models and systems
Today’s structure-driven operating models promote standardization. A Human Enterprise is organized around issues, not processes, and values agility over hierarchy, focusing on relationships and fluid teams to encourage creative thinking. In this approach, technology: • a dapts to the needs and enhances the abilities of employees and customers, rather than holding them back • i s implemented with a technology at speed ethos, which resolves the constraints of legacy technology environments to deploy new functionality at the pace required by rapidly changing customer experience expectations
6. Technology as an enabler for humans At a fundamental level, a Human Enterprise becomes a platform using technology as a tool to support organizational agility. It removes the constraints of legacy technology, allowing new capabilities to be plugged in as needed, and amplifies the human element through improved communication, collaboration, and creative freedom. In short, it creates something vastly more than the sum of its parts.
Source: EY
IT & TECHNOLOGY AUTONOMOUS TECHNOLOGIES AUTONOMOUS TECHNOLOGIES can help alleviate the labor shortage
By Subcontractors USA News Provider
Robots, machinery and software promise to aid with the skilled labor shortage, or at the very least free up managers’ and other workers’ time so they can focus on more important tasks.
In the next three decades, as many as 2.7 million construction jobs could become automated, according to a report from the Midwest Economic Policy Institute. That could result in $30 billion in reduced labor costs in 2020 dollars, the report says.
Here are some tasks that automation is promising to aid.
Robots take on jobsite tasks
Most autonomous innovations are for simple, but time-consuming tasks on the jobsite, namely image capture and laser scanning that provide imagery of a project’s progress.
Boston Dynamics is continuing to market its autonomous tech to contractors. Its Spot the robot dog patrols jobsites autonomously, following along preplanned routes to take image captures.
A human may only get to this task a few times a week but the robo dog can walk the site any time. Also, the technology allows construction site managers and others to continue working on other assignments or tasks.
Hensel Phelps sicced Spot on a site for tests, trying out HoloBuilder’s SpotWalk app, which allows the robotic dog to perform reality capture of jobsites regularly.
Boston-based Windover Construction created a solution with software developer RCML to implement a solution on an existing robot. The two-tracked robot is able to move around jobsites to perform laser scans and make drawings of a site with precise accuracy — both jobs that would require a lot of time and effort if done by a person.
In terms of jobsite security, British robot developer Casta Spes Technologies has developed the Ziva robot — a two-wheeled robot that can patrol construction sites and use facial recognition technology to recognize people who should and shouldn’t be on jobsites. Though not yet marketed in the U.S., Casta Spes’ CEO Selby Cary told Construction Dive it will sell it in the Americas in the future.
Other tasks for robots
Automated machines filling jobs means not just supplementing the construction process, but performing physical tasks on site.
Built Robotics announced last month the unveiling of 100% autonomous software for construction excavators and bulldozers. Built outfits existing construction machinery with its software and trains managers to ensure they operate the equipment properly, using GPS guidance systems. With this technology, a manager can look over multiple excavators or bulldozers at once.
Other automation options are more niche, such as a robot designed to tie rebar, usually for work on bridges. The Tybot must be set up and placed on the jobsite, but is then able to tie rebar autonomously.
Source: Construction Dive
