The irony for this blog post is quite amazing.  Astounding, actually.

I’m writing this blog post from a friend’s house, because a freak snowstorm in the northeastern US caused thousands of trees and major branches to fall on electrical transmission wires (due to excess weight from wet snow).

I had no backup power.  No generator.  No batteries.  No resource leveling.

By candlelight that night, I read a story which was about the “uneven” supply of power from renewable sources, such as wind, tide, and solar.

The article – from the Boston Globe – laments the failure of renewable energy to provide regular, “leveled” amounts of energy.  And yet, as I write this, the following day, it’s intensely sunny out.  Solar power would be very productive and reliable today.  The electricity provided by non-renewable sources, though, is unavailable, eliminated by the effect of  hundreds of downed tree limbs have taken out the “reliable” standard electrical power supply.

There’s a connection to Project Management here, and it’s multi-faceted.

Here are two of those facets: Opportunity, and a connection to Resource Leveling.

1. Opportunity knocks.

The article discusses several very interesting projects and developments around the effort to store energy from uneven sources (tide, solar, wind) so as to provide a steady-state supply.  So there are opportunities galore for project management.

Says the article: “The challenge for people developing renewable power projects is that you get a low price if you can only provide sporadic power,’’ explains Rob Day, an investor at Black Coral Capital in Boston who focuses on the energy industry. “If you can deliver a consistent load of power, you can get perhaps double the price, so developers might be willing to invest in additional equipment.’’

In New Hampshire, a start-up called SustainX is designing and testing compressed air storage systems. Founder Dax Kepshire says the technology could store power from any sort of generating facility. Electricity from the facility powers an electric motor that pulls air into a maze of pipes and compresses it to about 3,000 pounds per square inch. (A typical car tire is inflated to about 30 pounds per square inch.) “When you reverse the process, uncompressing the air drives the same electric motor, which functions as a generator,’’ Kepshire says.  Is there opportunity here?  Well, SustainX has raised $24 million in private financing, along with a $5.4 million grant from the Department of Energy.  That’s going to provide some work for project managers, for sure.

General Compression, a company from Newton, MA, has raised $75 million in funding. The company  plans to use “underground geologic formations’’ to store the compressed air.  They are – one could say – “caving in” to pressure.  Sorry.

Other companies in the Boston area, A123 Systems, Boston-Power, and 24M Technologies – are working on large-scale energy storage systems. “We’re still in the R&D phase,’’ says Throop Wilder, chief executive of Cambridge-based 24M, which received $10 million in venture capital funding last year. Like executives at SustainX, Wilder wonders whether his company will find interested buyers in Asia and Europe before the United States.“Even though the US doesn’t believe in climate change, the rest of the world does,’’ he says.

2. Resource Leveling

When you think of what’s going on here, whether it’s compressed air, batteries, or whatever, it should sound familiar.  Why? What these companies are doing is something with which we project managers are already quite familiar.  It’s resource leveling resource leveling.   What’s resource leveling?   From an IBM source, we have this nice explanation:

 Resource leveling is the project management function of resolving project resource over-allocation. By definition over-allocation means that a resource has been assigned more work than can be accomplished in the available time as dictated by the resource’s calendar definition.

In most scenarios, over-allocations can be remedied manually by extending tasks or moving them to accommodate the resource’s availability.

In other instances, however, schedules can be impacted not only by the resources’ assignments in the current project, but by planned and proposed assignments in other projects as managers compete for the most critical resources in an attempt to align them with the most critical initiatives.

As well, project constraint dates, estimate to complete forecasts that do not align with the constraints and dependencies can all play a role in whether a manager chooses to level or manually adjust the project schedule.

So in PM, we have a need for a resource (power) and not enough power to meet that need – at times – and too much power (for example when it’s very windy) when we don’t need it.
You want more?  More, more more?  We have resources – right on the level.

• You can read more about the energy technologies here.
• And you can read more about Resource Leveling in this nifty article from Penn State University here.

Keep tuned to EarthPM for more stories like this that are right at the intersection of sustainability and project management.