Tag Archives: urban energy

GreenBiz

How SAP and cities are boosting innovation through open data | GreenBiz

Listening to a couple of coders gush over the virtues of gamification, location-based mobile services and open data standards, I might have mistaken the techies for sneaker-wearing pitchmen at a Silicon Valley hackathon.

But this was midtown Manhattan. Instead of B-school dropouts, the geeks in question were actually silver-haired civil servants in charge of the IT operations for Boston and Edmonton. Though centuries old, each of the cities is racing towards decidedly cutting-edge goals of opening up access to municipal data for their residents and businesses to use and commercialize.

“Successful cities of the future aren’t necessarily the most efficient. It’s about engagement and citizen empowerment,” said Bill Oates, chief information officer for the City of Boston. “Our innovation is on people, to help constituents connect with the city.”

The CIOs were brought together by SAP to mark the U.S. launch of the software giant’s Urban Matters program, which aims to help municipal governments “deliver better-run cities” by opening up data streams for citizens and business to tap into.

As this software space matures, big companies also are exploring opportunities to integrate city data feeds into current and future services.

GM is grooming its OnStar unit to become the software hub for transportation services such as RelayRides’ peer-to-peer car sharing service. The automaker recently issued protocols that will let third-party developers integrate the data beginning to flow from cities — such as road construction information, or parking data — into future OnStar services.

In the world of smart buildings, Johnson Controls is likewise eyeing the opportunities emerging by tapping into huge, public pools of data on the performance of buildings in Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, Washington D.C. and other cities.

Back in Boston, SAP technology is powering the city’s Boston About Results website and accompanyingCitizen Insights iPhone app. Citizen Insights collects, analyzes and shares performance measures across scores of city departments from tree planting requests to fire response times.

By digitizing and opening up their data flows, most cities are trying to evolve into “better versions of themselves” rather than presume to compete with Silicon Valley, said Bruce Katz, vice president and director of the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution.

Boston and Edmonton are pushing to lead a growing contest among cities aiming to boost their competitiveness by opening access to city data streams. Fighting to transform decades-old bureaucratic processes that tended to lock up key city information — such as property records or tax rolls — in hard-to-access formats, the goal is first to digitize as much information as possible.

As these programs grow more ambitious, cities face an outsized data challenge in scaling up these efforts. With centuries’ worth of property records or historical budget information, cities are typically sitting on mountains of data that are a challenge to digitize, standardize and make accessible.

Cities need “additional investment to deal with the analytics…of taking tens of thousands of data sets and looking inside them,” said Theresa Pardo of the Center for Technology in Government at the University of Albany (State University of New York, SUNY). “A lot of cities still have their records in paper form.”

Pardo’s center recently released a white paper, The Dynamics of Opening Government Data. The paper offers practical advice for government managers pursuing open data initiatives.

Edmonton started its open data efforts with a dozen public datasets in 2010. Today, “We have 257… San Francisco has 250,” said Chris Moore, the City of Edmonton’s CIO. Moore is pleased to be edging out one of the U.S.’s most wired metropolises.

Digitizing the information sequestered in city offices is just the beginning of the battle. Making those data streams publicly accessible and easily useable is essential for developers to build new services and businesses.

In Edmonton, for instance, the city transportation department recognized an appetite for access to information on road closures, resurfacings and the like. When the dataset went live earlier this year, it quickly became the city’s most popular feed. “After it was released, an Edmontonian created an app called YEG Constriction,” Moore told IT World Canada.

As Edmonton’s efforts unfold, Moore’s IT team hopes to stay at the front of city efforts by exploring gamification and the immersive 3D web as ways to boost public interaction with the data. For instance, the city is readying a Facebook game around traffic and safety, Moore said.

Behind all the enthusiasm for data transparency are bottom-line benefits that please city bean counters. The shift towards open data standards can deliver a big bang for the buck at a time when cities face rising demands for data services, yet have fewer resources with which to develop them.

In Edmonton, the city hosted Apps4Edmonton.ca, a contest to develop apps for city residents and businesses. “For around $50,000 we developed dozens of apps,” says Moore. Were the applications developed conventionally, he speculated, the cost of a single study of the business case would have exceeded that figure.

Code sharing between cities can further compound these savings. Boston’s New Urban Mechanics initiative encourages public collaboration to develop innovative civic services, explained Oates, the city’s CIO. Among the program’s most popular apps is Street Bump, an iPhone app that helps detect and report potholes. As a result of these efforts, nearly every pothole complaint in Boston is resolved in two days or less. A couple of years ago, less than half were completed that quickly.

Now, Boston is extending and sharing its New Urban Mechanics platform with dozensof other cities and towns, where apps can be adapted or further customized.

To be sure, cities aren’t going to threaten Silicon Valley’s software titans anytime soon. But the afamiliar, infectious air of competitive innovation is developing in municipal software circles. Earlier this month, Emily Badger at The Atlantic Cities rounded up the best open data releases of 2012. From listings of green roofs in Chicago to bikeshares in Boston, the apps are promising examples of how smart software can transform existing, static city data into dynamic, interactive tools that promise to make cities greener and more efficient.

While incremental, the boom in city data apps highlights how metropolises are best positioned to push ahead with effective innovation. “Cities are a lot more pragmatic than state or national governments,” said Brooking’s Katz.

Illustration of key opening file folder provided by Artgraphics via Shutterstock.

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Check out the original story here: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2013/01/03/how-sap-cities-boosting-innovation-data

GreenBiz

How to jump-start the vehicle-based smart grid | GreenBiz

The triple tragedy that struck Japan in March 2011 is already remaking global energy markets. In the wake of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster, public outrage over the meltdown delayed or derailed nuclear energy’s promised renaissance in many markets.

Yet if Japan’s tragedy hastened the demise of one energy technology, it may have jumpstarted another. In the year since, as Japan struggled to cope with crippling shortages of electric capacity, a handful of automakers have brought to market appliances that convert electric vehicle batteries into systems that can provide backup power to homes and help support the teetering grid.

In April, Mitsubishi Motors unveiled a portable adaptor, the MiEV power Box. For roughly $1,800, the appliance lets owners of MiEV electric cars plug in, and draw up to 1.5 kilowatts. A month later, Nissan followed suit with its Leaf to Home, a $7,000 device that, drawing power from a Leaf EV, can power a typical Japanese home for up to two days. Toyota too is demonstrating a similar system linked to its plug-in Prius hybrid in 10 homes and plans to launch a commercial version next year, if all goes well.

For the thousands of Americans suffering through power problems this summer—due to a punishing heat wave and storms in the mid-Atlantic—the appeal of these technologies is surely tantalizing. The case for EVs would sure seem more compelling if consumers knew the Chevy Volt or Nissan Leaf in their garage could also power their homes during an outage.

In fact, vehicle to grid, or V2G, has emerged as a sort of holy green grail. All manner of energy gurus — from Google.org to Rocky Mountain Institute-founder Amory Lovins to the DOE to Wired magazine — have recognized V2G as a grand solution to many of the problems that bedevil our grid and transportation fleet.

The promised benefits go well beyond household backup. As consumers buy more EVs, the combined stock of batteries offers utilities a low-cost path to grid-scale storage—why pay for grid batteries, if utilities can “borrow” EVs to perform the same trick? In turn, cheaper storage capacity paves the way for more solar panels and windmills by making it easier to store their notoriously variable output. And since utilities today pay for the sorts of storage services EVs might deliver, V2G systems could earn cash payments for EV owners, thereby lowering the cost of EVs and boosting their sales.

Yet despite Japan’s new systems, a comprehensive V2G solution remains years off. “[They are] a good first step, but they essentially turn the car into an expensive backup generator. There’s still a big leap to V2G,” says Ted Hesser, Energy Smart Technologies analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

In Japan, those new systems can support the grid indirectly, by feeding power back to the households and reducing their pull from the grid. But for now, they cannot link to the grid: by regulation, they’re strictly vehicle-to-home, or V2H, Ali Izadinajafabadi, a Tokyo-based analyst for Bloomberg New Energy Finance wrote in an email.

To make the leap from V2H to V2G will require navigating a thicket of barriers, including funding investment needs, upgrades to grid software, and creating cooperation between industry players who, so far, haven’t been eager to play.

The first of these barriers is a simple lack of standardization for two-way EV connections. It took big automakers years to agree on technical standards on how one-way charging plugs would be built. The effort didn’t account for two-way flow of power. Already dogged by high-costs and reliability concerns over EVs, carmakers are wary of imperiling warranty terms, or adding to the material and engineering costs to create two-way plugs that might not ever be used.

“It’s not that it can’t be done,” says Mark Duvall, Director of Transportation Research at EPRI, the utility industry’s policy research arm. “The automakers, utilities and the others involved have had a lot of other challenges to solve first.”

The Japan solution, Duvall explains, cleverly works around this barrier by offloading the technology necessary to manage the power flow out of the car into a standalone device. Both the Nissan and Mitsubishi systems tap into the EV batteries through high-power, 440-volt direct-current connections, which remain rare in the U.S.

Then there’s the closely related problem of the lack of a smart grid. For V2G networks to deliver grid-scale benefits, they will have to be connected into advanced systems able to communicate to vast numbers of EVs, in real time, to orchestrate hundreds of small power sources so that they behave as a single sizeable resource that can be tapped by grid mangers such as PJM. Those systems are taking shape, “But they’re not there yet,” says Bloomberg’s Hesser.

Another scale problem: there aren’t yet enough EVs on the market to make big V2G plays of interest to utilities. Sales have been steady, but slow. Pike Research recently postponed until 2018 the year in which it projects EVs will hit 1 million in the U.S. Until they reach a critical number, they’re too thinly dispersed, and too few in number to provide megawatt-scale storage and other power services that interest utilities, adds Hesser.

Lastly, however appealing they look on paper, the economics of V2G networks remain less than compelling for EV owners, especially if early systems run as high as Nissan’s $7,000 unit in Japan.

Last year, NRG Energy unveiled a pilot program called eV2g. Targeting commercial fleets, the company estimates that each vehicle would net $440 per year, Erica Gieswrites in Forbes.com.

A 2010 study by CMU looked at consumer (not fleet) V2G. The researchers used market information on the value of the sorts of near-, medium-, and long-term energy storage services V2G networks could provide and estimated the total annual value for an individual EV owner at not more than $250.

These guesses also underestimate the costs utilities face to market these programs as well. “You have to convince consumers to adopt this very new way of owning a vehicle,” says Hesser. As we’ve seen with EVs, “That takes a massive amount of marketing and education.”

What then will it take to get V2G off the ground here? Progress will continue, to be sure. Writing in the New York Times Wheels blog, green car guru Jim Motavalli reports that Nissan and Mitsubishi are both evaluating the option of adapting their V2H systems to the U.S. Meanwhile, pilot scale V2G efforts, run by the DOE, NRG and others are ongoing — but they involve only tens or hundreds of vehicles.

Such projects won’t get to commercial scale anytime soon. For V2G to link up millions of vehicles, and fulfill its green promise, Hesser believes the industry will have to push the technology, rather than wait for consumers to pull it. “For V2G to work, it means lining up the interests of vehicle owners, carmakers, smart grid players,” he says. “There’s just too many players for this to happen anytime soon on its own.”

He likens the challenge to the conundrum facing energy-efficient appliances. In that market, the value of energy savings were too low, or spread out, to motivate consumers. So the DOE stepped in to establish efficiency and technology standards that have delivered huge aggregate energy savings.

Specialized commercial fleets also show early V2G promise. An MIT study cited by CleanTechnica.com suggests that fleets may offer a sweeter spot for V2G deployments, at least early on. Trucks or buses, after all, require bigger battery packs. And because they park in the same area, they offer big battery capacity in a single location, making them easier to orchestrate. The study estimates earnings potential of up to $1,700 per truck.

Very high prices for energy could jump start V2G, too. Consider Nuvve — to date, the leading commercial scale V2G effort in the world. Started in 2011, the company is based in Denmark where, importantly, electricity rates are roughly four times higher than in the U.S. Plus, a third of electric power comes from variable renewable sources such as wind, so storage services are paid at a high rate.

Based on business plans mapped out by Zachary Shahan at CleanTechnica.com, EV owners in Nuvve’s network will be able to rake in up to $10,000 from V2G services over a vehicle’s lifetime.Finally, there’s the hard-to-price appeal of backup for blackouts. The U.S., luckily, hasn’t faced power problems as dire as Japan’s. But if blackouts multiply, necessity may spur V2G invention here too.

GreenBiz

How EnerNOC is Evolving Smart Grids and Building Energy Management | GreenBiz

How EnerNOC is Evolving Smart Grids and Building Energy Management

When I first met EnerNOC co-founder Tim Healy back in 2007, he was riding high on the results of a successful IPO. Catching up with Healy just a few weeks ago, I was struck by the dimming of the outlook for cleantech in the intervening years.

Five years ago, EnerNOC’s IPO was a bellwether in all-too-brief moment of exuberance for cleantech that marked that year. Listing in late May 2007 at a price of $26, EnerNOC’s IPO was a hit. The share price surged 20 percent in its first day of trading, and nearly doubled to $50 within six months.

At the time, EnerNOC offered something counterintuitive amidst all the breathless coverage of next-gen solar panels and complex batteries recipes. Rather than generate clean energy, EnerNOC was helping to solve energy shortages by reducing demand.

By taking control of commercial customers’ big equipment — think office building air conditioning systems — and turning them down briefly during periods of peak demand, EnerNOC could cut its customers’ bills by negotiating discounts with utilities. The plan helped utilities too, by giving them a way to cut the risk of costly blackouts.

These days, the atmospherics around cleantech are decidedly less exuberant, damped by partisan bashing, cheap natural gas and especially economic recession. EnerNOC’s stock has settled into a range just above $10 in recent months. Yet its business model has thrived and evolved, establishing demand response (or demand reduction, DR) as a fast-growing business and attracting a raft of competitors.

“We were among a small pack at the beginning competing for a land grab in the demand response market,” said Healy, the company’s CEO and chairman.

By most measures, EnerNOC scored well in that land grab. From a few dozen utility partners in 2007, the company now has contracts with hundreds and has expanded internationally, most recently to the United Kingdom and New Zealand. And its technology has evolved dramatically.

In the early days, said Healy, demand reduction amounted to relatively simple on-or-off decisions. During times of peak demand, equipment would simply be shut off.

“We call that DR with a machete,” he said.

These days it’s more like DR by microscope and tweezers. The combination of EnerNOC’s remote management software and advances in customers’ equipment — from freezers to digital lighting — make it possible to throttle down demand incrementally, following complex priorities. This ultra-fine control minimizes disruptions to operations, while delivering maximum dollar savings and maintaining grid stability.

This evolution toward automatic response technologies has accelerated DR’s business, and opened new opportunities. Where requests for reductions used to arrive a day or hours ahead of anticipated needs, these days contracts call for response times of minutes or seconds.

This is drawing EnerNOC and its peers into the role of automated grid management. The company’s recently-inked 150-megawatt DR project with the Alberta (Canada) Electric System Operator delivers not DR per se, but rapid response to grid variations to help maintain stability in the regional grid.

The fast-growing scale of wind and solar in recent few years has opened up a surprising variant for EnerNOC’s technology that works in reverse to demand reduction. In the Northwest, the Bonneville Power Administration has experienced periods when its dams and windmills spin out too much power, which can overload the grid. So the BPA has been searching for a way to increase demand on short notice.

EnerNOC is helping it to do so. In a pilot project, EnerNOC can push excess power to commercial facilities to heat up ceramic brick room heaters and/or boost the temperature of water heaters. The technology essentially stores excess electricity as heat, which can be drawn down later.

“We’re not just curtailing load. We’re ramping load up too,” said Healy. In addition to making more heat, making more cold also works. Cold storage facilities, for instance, can pull in surplus juice to chill their facilities to lower temperatures or make more ice, essentially storing excess load as cold.

Next Page: EnerNOC’s move into grid management, ‘persistent commissioning’ and more.

In addition to grid management, EnerNOC is also using demand reduction as a stepping stone to enter the broader field of energy management, to run the buildings and campuses of its clients. This gives EnerNOC a broader marketplace, for sure, but also brings it into head-on competition with bigger, deeper-pocketed incumbents such as Johnson Controls, IBM and Siemens.

It’s been a natural extension of EnerNOC’s expertise. As the company has grown, its software engineers have had to master an increasing diversity of software standards, control protocols, and other arcana — the code that runs offices, buildings, and the machines inside them. Expertise in these software layers has opened up a new frontier the EnerNOC: smart building systems.

“We want to drive towards a goal of ‘persistent commissioning,’ ” said Healy, where EnerNOC provides not just demand reduction services but real-time management of building systems.

The approach permits on-the-fly performance optimization, as well as the ability to detect faults. By mapping regular user patterns — escalators are always off from midnight ’til 6 a.m., for example — software can learn to take action if, for instance, an escalator motor energizes at 3 a.m.

“Managers have information systems for their finances, sales, manufacturing, practically every aspect of their operations,” said Healy, “Everything except energy. There needs to be better intelligence for the customer and utilities.”

Meanwhile, the DR market continues to mature.

“We’re seeing sectors coming to us that weren’t on our radar a few years ago,” said Healy. EnerNOC has recently begun to develop DR services for big farms, orchards and vineyards. They’re a natural fit. Big agriculture operations use lots of power to run remote irrigation pumps and other machines. These can be temporarily turned down with little harm to the crops. Installing intelligent sensors and controls on this network of pumps can deliver energy savings and other benefits too, such as reduced labor needs and fault detection.

Another potential growth segment is commercial sites that have until recently been too small to invest in DR: drug stores, convenience shops and gas stations. With all the fridges and display cases, these sites, in aggregate, face sizeable energy bills, yet are often too small to invest individually in smart energy management systems.

“If you could bring a packaged solution to these guys,” said Healy, “bundling up a series of outlets, you could see 10 percent or better savings at each site.”

I asked if the slow growth of power demand poses a drag on EnerNOC’s outlook. After all, during the recession, U.S. electricity consumption actually shrank and has grown only very slowly since. Healy told me overall electric demand growth is secondary to other trends.

First, there’s a coming wave of power plant retirements. With the EPA’s adoption of mercury rules on Dec. 21, utilities across the nation must shutter scores of their oldest, dirtiest plants, and will have to find alternatives. Secondly, the renewable energy standards now in place in most states drive demand for the sorts of grid stabilization services that EnerNOC is expanding into. Next, utilities continue to scale up spending on efficiency programs, an area where EnerNOC is positioned to help meet goals.

Plus, with overall growth flat, companies are working to shave costs: “One of the common refrains we’re hearing from customers is, ‘My top line isn’t growing, what can I do to cut costs to improve my bottom line?’ ”

And lastly, even if some factories have eliminated one of three shifts, for instance, they’re typically running daytime shifts at max, such that peak demand is still high.

“Even though overall usage is down or flat in some areas, we still continue to see peak records being set,” said Healy.

EnerNOC has some $1.3 billion in projects in its pipeline, Healy said. That’s roughly five times last year’s revenue of $280 million. The healthy pipeline has led many analysts to tag EnerNOC’s shares as undervalued. Thinking back to the IPO, Healy couldn’t agree more.

For more on EnerNOC, check out this podcast of Chrissy Coughlin’s conversation with Tim Healy here for GreenBiz.com.

The Fiscal Times

Offshore wind for Cleveland? Wind Energy Can Create Jobs, Reduce Carbon Footprint | The Fiscal Times

Cape Wind, the planned $2.7 billion wind farm off the coast of Cape Cod, Mass., in Nantucket Sound, got the green light in April from the Interior Dept., the most important approval so far in the project’s nine-year odyssey. Even so, there’s still plenty of reason to doubt it will ever be built.

Despite the environmental merits of replacing a dirty local power plant, and a steady parade of local, state and federal approvals, the project has been besieged by a series of legal challenges backed in part by well-heeled opponents with homes in the area, such as billionaire industrialist Bill Koch.

Cape Wind has also pitted green against green, renewable energy supporters against conservationists. Some have argued the project threatens the area’s shore views, birds and sea life, most famously Robert F. Kennedy Jr., senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, from whose family compound the turbines would be visible. In the wake of the April approval, opponents immediately vowed to file new suits.

Meanwhile, there’s little opposition to a proposal to put wind turbines in Lake Erie, near Cleveland. Developers there have been careful to focus on the potential to salvage the region’s beleaguered manufacturing sector. Ohio’s plan is smaller than Cape Wind — initially five turbines compared with 130 planned in Massachusetts — and slated to be a fraction of the cost, at about $100 million…

More here: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2010/09/25/Wind-Energy-Can-Create-Jobs-Reduce-Carbon-Footprint.aspx