In the film Blade Runner (at least the original that I’m familiar with), Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, had a job to do.

From Wikipedia:

The film depicts a dystopian Los Angeles in November 2019 in which genetically engineered organic robots called replicants—visually indistinguishable from adult humans—are manufactured by the all-powerful Tyrell Corporation as well as other mega manufacturers around the world. Their use on Earth is banned, and replicants are exclusively used for dangerous, menial or leisure work on Earth’s off-world colonies. Replicants who defy the ban and return to Earth are hunted down and “retired” by police special operatives known as “blade runners”. The plot focuses on a brutal and cunning group of recently escaped replicants hiding in Los Angeles and the burnt out expert blade runner, Rick Deckard, who reluctantly agrees to take on one more assignment to hunt them down.

As project managers, we’ve also got jobs to do.

Unless we don’t.

Well, thanks to green energy efforts – and in particular, green energy projects, there should be more opportunities for project managers.  Case in point (yes, another ‘blade’ reference) – a recent posting by the energy collective talks about a huge number of green energy jobs coming to Canada, in particular, to Ontario, thanks to huge efforts on solar and wind power projects.

The Ontario government discusses this in detail here in their Green Energy Act in which Ontario has set its intent (and call to arms?) to be the “North American green energy leader”.  Here are the Green Energy Act’s main points:

• Spark growth in clean and renewable sources of energy such as wind, solar, hydro, biomass and biogas in Ontario.
• Create the potential for savings and better managed household energy expenditures through a series of conservation measures.
• Create 50,000 jobs for Ontarians in its first three years.

They want to give Ontario the edge.

The key is the 50,000 jobs.  These are project-focused efforts.  So there will be a lot of work for project teams.  And so, there will be many jobs for project managers.

The reference to Blade Runner is mainly from this story in which Siemens will be building a turbine blade factory in southern Ontario.  The project managers overseeing the manufacture and distribution of the product from these factories are today’s blade runners.

The moral of this story?

It underlines our assertion that project managers should be learning about sustainability, building their green vocabulary, and practicing looking through their “green lenses”. You can do that by keeping up to date with our blog here at EarthPM and of course by buying and reading our book.  It will give you an advantage in the coming years that will (we couldn’t help this, sorry) cut like a knife.

Project managers who want to transition into practice areas such as energy should (must?) learn to be conversant in their new practice areas.  If for no other reason, they need this familiarity to be able to command the respect of their project team.

In this post we provide a means to learn about the efforts to extract bitumen from beneath the ground in Canada (and elsewhere).

Mainly, this posting is a resource pointing to rich sources of information in which you can get yourself smartened up on the subject, and understand the types of projects taking place.

The basis of the info came from a Public Radio story broadcast today on a show called Marketplace.  We suggest you start by going to this site and listening to the broadcast.  And, oh, by the way, that’s a great show to listen to as a project manager needs to keep up with the latest and most interesting business trends.  As we say in our book – project managers are indeed the “business end” of business ends.

• Here’s a 15-page photo slideshow with captions showing the process.
• Here’s a summary of a new project in Morocco – this also provided the story of how the bitumen will be extracted.
• Here is a well-illustrated and excellent resource, from the World Energy Council, showing  where the bitumen is located, the techniques used to extract it.
• Here’s a link which describes Petrobank’s new THAI(TM) technique of extracting bitumen using in-situ combustion.

We’d be interested in hearing from EarthPM readers to know if this type of posting is helpful to you.  Please comment directly to this post!  Thanks!

The press release below is jointly released from the New England Patriots (American Football team) and the deploying companies, but here’s a real example what we call a green-by-definition project….

FOXBOROUGH, Mass (August 2, 2010) – In a ceremony overlooking Gillette Stadium and The Hall at Patriot Place presented by Raytheon, Constellation Energy (NYSE: CEG), Evergreen Solar, Inc. (Nasdaq: ESLR) and Patriot Place announced the completion of a photovoltaic power system that will generate approximately 525 kilowatts of clean, renewable solar power at Patriot Place, The Kraft Group’s shopping, dining and entertainment destination adjacent to Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts.

U.S. Representative Barney Frank and Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Ian Bowles joined The Kraft Group Chairman & CEO Robert Kraft and officials from Patriot Place, Constellation Energy and Evergreen Solar for the announcement.

“When someone of [Robert Kraft's] stature as a business leader and promoter of economic development shows you that the environmental movement can be not just a chore, but a source of economic strength and growth, I hope others pay attention,” said Congressman Frank during the program.

“This is good business and the greening of our environment is important for our children and grandchildren,” said Kraft.

“Through Governor Patrick’s leadership, Massachusetts is on track for a 20-fold increase in solar power over a four-year period,” said Bowles. “This new 525-kilowatt array at Patriot Place is another chapter in the Commonwealth’s solar success story – which has added jobs and companies across the Massachusetts economy. I congratulate Patriot Place, Constellation Energy and Evergreen Solar for a project that will have a huge public profile throughout football season and beyond.”

Constellation Energy’s subsidiary, Constellation Energy’s Projects & Services Group, began installing the system in November 2009. It now supplies approximately 30 percent of Patriot Place’s power and spans seven building rooftops at the complex. Among them is The Hall at Patriot Place Presented by Raytheon, an award-winning sports and entertainment experience. Photovoltaic panels on the roof of The Hall will be visible to visitors from inside Gillette Stadium and from Patriot Place’s upper retail plaza, promoting commercial applications of solar power.

“We are pleased to announce the completion of this beautiful new solar facility at Patriot Place,” said Michael Smith, Constellation Energy Sr. Vice President of Green Initiatives. “We’re confident that this highly visible project will promote solar power and its viability in states like Massachusetts, and hope that it spurs similar solar projects throughout New England.”

The system’s 2,556 solar panels will generate more than 625,000 kilowatt hours of electricity annually. They were supplied by Massachusetts-based Evergreen Solar. “We’re thrilled that Patriot Place has chosen Evergreen Solar for this highly-visible solar installation,” said Scott Gish, Vice President of Sales & Marketing for Evergreen Solar. “As a company producing solar panels that deliver more electricity with less impact on the environment including the smallest carbon footprint, we feel we align perfectly with the environmental goals of Patriot Place while demonstrating the viability of solar power to the many patrons and fans traveling through this incredible complex.”

Constellation Energy’s Projects & Services Group estimates that the system will generate more than 12 million kilowatt hours of electricity over 20 years, and prevent the release of more than 8,800 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.  That is the equivalent of removing more than 1,600 passenger vehicles from the road for a year.  The system’s real time power output and performance can be monitored through a Web-based data acquisition system.

Under a 20-year power purchase agreement, Constellation Energy‘s Projects & Services Group will own the energy assets and sell the electricity it generates on site to Patriot Place.

“This project is a cornerstone of Patriot Place’s sustainability initiatives and we are proud that its visibility will help promote practical and cost-effective commercial applications of solar power,” said Jim Nolan, Sr. VP of Finance, Administration and Operations for Gillette Stadium/Patriot Place.

Patriot Place, which began opening in phases in 2008, was constructed utilizing sustainable design practices, including low-emitting construction materials and white roofs to facilitate heat island reduction. Patriot Place also employs an on-site wastewater re-use system that saves millions of gallons of water annually, and solar-powered trash receptacles throughout the complex reduce waste volume and energy consumption.

As we often do here on EarthPM, we are going to combine a couple of pertinent and important themes to hopefully strengthen some points that are key to each of them.

The two themes we relate here are:

• Electric Smart Grids for effective power transmission and reduced carbon footprint
• High-powered Grids of Smart PMs to gain a bigger collective and personal footprint

Smart-grids for power

PM Network magazine, the monthly instrument of PMI, this month (June) features a couple of really good articles on Smart Grid projects.  If you do nothing else as a result of this posting, plunk yourself down and read “Intelligent Design” and  “A Closer Look”, on pages 36 and 43, respectively.  Both articles speak to the number and increasing importance of these projects and the ways in which project managers are making a big difference in deploying these systems.

Some highlights:

• China will be spending, in 2010 alone, over US$ 7 billion in smart-grid technology.  Their first smart-grid project has already begun, in the city of Tianjin, under the auspices of State Grid corporation.
• In Ontario, Canada, every single home and small business will have a smart meter installed by the end of the year.  That’s a project worth CA$ 1 billion.
• In the US, 100 grants that total over US$ 3 billion were announced last October
• Similar projects and grants are planned for the European Union.

If any of this intrigues you, either technically, or as a project manager, have a look at this nifty interactive package put together by the US Department of Energy.

If you don’t think it’s smart to get smart about smart grids, how about this quote, taken directly from the above US DOE document:

“Time is of the essence: We literally cannot afford the grid as it stands.
The costs of new generation and delivery infrastructure are climbing sharply. According to The Brattle Group – a consulting group that specializes in economics, finance, and regulation – investments totaling approximately $1.5 trillion will be required over the next 20 years to pay for the infrastructure alone.”

So one can tell that opportunities will abound for those project managers who learn about this technology and get smart about it themselves.

Networking power (smart-grids) for PMs

I cannot begin this section without a shoutout to Bas de Bar, my favorite source for Social Networking intelligence and its power for project managers.  You literally do yourself a disservice by not staying in touch, at least periodically, with his site: Project Shrink.  But we would also encourage you to take action.  And you can do that.  Now.

If you are not on LinkedIn, get on.  Today.  Why are you putting that off?  With newly-tweaked groups and group discussions, there are numerous ways to find a special interest group for yourself, even within our fairly specific world of project management.  For example, one of the EarthPM founders started a group on LinkedIn strictly for people who blog on project management.  He expected maybe 10 or 12 people to join and to have a healthy discussion on that very specific topic.  That group, PM Bloggers, was started less than two  years ago.  It now is approaching 800 (yes, eight hundred) members.  Some of the groups we suggest below have hundreds of thousands of members.  Taken together, we’re talking about literally millions of years of PM experience.  Is that power, or what?

As for green project management, there are several groups that we encourage you to join today and to subscribe to the discussions.  You can also choose, as we have here at EarthPM, to join general groups that focus on green business or sustainability, because as above – the opportunites to be aware of are in general industry and it pays to be aware of what general industry is doing – that’s where the projects come from, after all.  Below is a list of LinkedIn groups we suggest you explore.  Of course, you have to join LinkedIn first – which is free and has had no ill side effects on anyone we know.  It’s not a virus.  It’s not yichhy.  It’s power, plain and simple – network power.  Just have a look at the jobs posted there.  In fact, we did that for you today – keeping our combined theme in mind – and ran a search for “grid project” and came up with 4 pages full of jobs, including this one for a project manager in California that looks pretty interesting.  That’s just a sample of the power of LinkedIn – and LinkedIn is only one of many social networking opportunities which bring power to project managers individually and collectively.  Elizabeth Harrin, author and creator of PM for Girls, has a survey that captures some of that data around this power at her blog, here.

List of LinkedIn Groups

• PM Bloggers
• EarthPM
• Project Manager Networking Group
• PMI Credentialed PMPs
• PMLink
• PMLink Green (a subgroup of PMLink)
• Sustainability Professionals
• GreenBiz
• Green

Hope this post has been helpful to you – it’s one that allows you to take action today to make yourself and your profession more powerful.

We’ve all heard the buzz about alternative energy; clean coal, wind power, tidal power, solar power, and nuclear power to name a few.  Traveling around Ireland last year, there was a noticeable increase in wind farms.  The talk around the county is to try to get most, if not all, of the power from the wind.  Everyone in Ireland and those who visit know that it is a windy country, surrounded by the North Sea, in an area of constantly changing weather patterns.  Power generation by wind is still in its infancy.  It may work in a small, unique area like Ireland, and generally on a smaller scale, we need to look to other alternatives for larger applications.

In today’s article in the Wall Street Journal On-line it states that, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), “Nuclear energy is one of the key low-carbon energy technologies that can contribute, alongside energy efficiency, renewable energies and carbon capture and storage, to the decarbonization of electricity supply by 2050, said IEA Executive Director Nobuo Tanaka. I could provide as much as 25% of world-wide energy requirements by 2050. ” That would mean that “nuclear generating capacity to more than triple over the next 40 years.”

Nuclear energy is a proven technology, unlike some of the alternatives.  Director General Luis Echavarri of the Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA) , a specialized agency within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an intergovernmental organization of industrialized countries, based in Paris, France, says  “Nuclear is already one of the main sources of low-carbon energy today. If we can address the challenges to its further expansion, nuclear has the potential to play a larger role in cutting CO2 emissions”.

To achieve these numbers, there will be a multitude of projects throughout the world requiring project managers.  Beside the project management jobs in the nuclear power plant construction industry, there will be PM jobs in support of nuclear power like plant design, accident prevention and development of safety features.  Just like the oil industry, there will be risks.  Who better to help manage risks than a project manager?

Because we are all interested in the “next best thing” in terms of what the future job market looks like, EarthPm will continue to identify those areas, whether the projects are green by definition, project impact, product impact, or green in general.  We’re not advocating one source of power generation over another, but we do believe that you must be aware of all the alternatives and where the potential future jobs may be.