Earth PM » electric

Sometimes, the obvious – isn’t so obvious

earthpm — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 15:17:32 +0000

Yes. That’s a real sign. And yes, it appears to be placed there by none other than Captain Obvious, champion of all that is, well – clear for all to see without further explanation.

But sometimes obvious answers stay mysteriously hidden. Any time you see an innovation and say – either out loud, or to yourself – “now why didn’t I think of that?”, you have experienced a Captain Obvious moment.

So as we browsed today’s papers, we came across this article. Here is the article’s first line:

With a name like General Electric, it stands to reason GE would want to embrace the electric car.

Um. Hello? Yes. It does indeed. On further reading, we realized that this is not only an example of Captain Obvious at work, it was an example of one of EarthPM’s assertions. Roughly stated, this assertion says that ‘the right thing to do helps you do things right’. In this case, GE’s use of electric cars in their own fleet is not only going to save them gasoline and money, it will drive up the demand for the very products that they want to innovate and sell.

This seems like a pretty easy decision, n’est pas?

The CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, said the company “would convert half of its corporate fleet to electric vehicles by 2015 in an effort to give the nascent technology a jump start and help develop a potentially big new market”. Give the technology a jump start. Nice pun. But it’s not punny – it’s about money. GE’s own estimates show that this expanding market will earn GE $500 million in revenue over the next three years. So it does seem obvious to (as PMI puts it) enhance the opportunity.

Here’s a little more of the article:

Electric cars are cheaper to fuel and operate than gasoline-powered cars, but they are about twice as expensive to buy, mainly because of the high cost of batteries. The battery that powers the $33,000 Nissan Leaf costs about $12,000, nearly the price of a gasoline-powered car the Leaf’s size.

Carmakers hope to be able to sharply reduce the cost of the batteries over time, but in order to do so they need to sell more electric cars.

That’s where GE comes in. GE is hoping that its planned purchase will help drive down costs by increasing production volumes and assuring carmakers that they will have at least one big buyer.

So GE becomes a customer of GM (and perhaps Nissan?). They increase the market for the cars, which drives the demand for the batteries, which GE develops and sells to GM and Nissan… get the picture?

Our question to project managers and others out there reading this: do you have any “Overhead Lines Above”? Do you have any Captain Obvious ideas like this? For example, if you work on a project that is directly or indirectly related to the electric power grid, are the vehicles in that project’s fleet electric? Wouldn’t it make sense, thinking in the long term, for those vehicles to be electric even if their initial cost is higher, since after all, the grid’s demands will be increased by electric cars?

Just asking the Captain Obvious questions…

And you should too.

Quick. Look UP! There are overhead lines above!

We close this posting with a quote from none other than Captain Obvious:

“Indeed, current events may become past events, but always remember that there will, now and always, be future events in the future.”

~ Captain Obvious on the future

A smart electric network – in more ways than one

earthpm — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 18:25:55 +0000

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

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.

Climbing cleanly from the competitive conundrum

Rich — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 14:22:03 +0000

“Clean tech is always in a boom-and-bust cycle,’’ said Matt Moscardi, manager of investor programs at Ceres, a green investment coalition based in Boston. “Without a price on carbon, or some other mechanism by which you measure pollutants and emissions, the playing field will not be level.’’ [Reference: Boston Globe article, 9-Mar10]

The ’tilted playing field’ or unfair advantage alluded to by Ceres is also referred to as clean energy’s “competitive conundrum”. Since clean energy costs are higher than those available from conventional sources, what is going to convince a typical consumer to pay that higher price? And, are those lower prices from conventional sources truly reflective of the true ‘price‘ of their service, including emissions? It’s not easy or convenient for consumers to think of it this way, but when they ‘save’ money on low energy costs, they’re paying for it later in tax dollars and cleanup efforts that result from the dirtier sources of power – not to mention the ‘intangible’ loss in ‘quality of life’ for this and future generations. I know… it sounds a little preachy, but it’s true.

From the referenced article:

Paul Maeder, cofounder of the venture capital firm Highland Capital Partners of Lexington, agreed, saying that when it comes to backing clean technology, he focuses on the long-term because venture capital investments often can take several years to pay off.

The best thing the government can do, he said, is institute something like a cap-and-trade system – which forces regulated companies to pay for the pollution they emit – to bring consistency to the world of clean tech.
What is clean tech, by the way?

Actually, we found a site full of interesting research on this subject from a source called CleanEdge. Visit this site for a full list of reports. We answer the question “what is clean tech?” after reading here, and share the key figure in this posting. The report goes on to discuss the same issues as the referenced Globe article with respect to an ‘unfair advantage’.

If this topic interests you and you’d like to read some expert analysis and opinion regarding leveling the playing field for clean energy – thus triggering a flurry of new projects – go to this link from the National Journal, entitled “What’s a Winning Stragegy for Renewables?”, in which 17 different experts give their readout on the situation.
There, you can vote and choose to agree with the experts that most reflect your view on the subject. Happy climbing, and let’s hope we see more of these clean tech projects get started!

Blowing away the records

Rich — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 01:11:36 +0000

According to the AWEA (American Wind Energy Association), the U.S. wind industry broke all previous records by installing nearly 10,000 megawatts (MW) of new generating capacity in 2009 (enough to serve over 2.4 million homes), but still lags in manufacturing, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) said today in its Q4 report. These new projects place wind power neck and neck with natural gas as the leading source of new electricity generation for the country. Together, the two sources account for about 80% of the new capacity added in the country last year.

But is this enough?

“The U.S. wind energy industry shattered all installation records in 2009, chalking up the Recovery Act as a historic success in creating jobs, avoiding carbon, and protecting consumers,” said AWEA CEO Denise Bode. “But U.S. wind turbine manufacturing – the canary in the mine — is down compared to last year’s levels, and needs long-term policy certainty and market pull in order to grow. We need to set hard targets, in the form of a national Renewable Electricity Standard (RES), in order to provide the necessary stability for manufacturers to expand their U.S. operations and to seize the historic opportunity we have today to build up a thriving renewable energy industry.”
Where is this wind power?

Amongst other places, deep in the heart of Texas.

See the table below, showing the top 5 states in terms of MW of power installed.

Texas, the nation’s wind-power leader, set a new record for wind generation today, March 5, 2010, when — at 6:37 a.m. — about 19 percent of the electricity on the state’s main grid was supplied by turbines.

But sometimes, the problem – strangely enough – is that the wind turbines are shut down because they are generating too much power, yielding an effect in which the value of the electricity they generate is actually lower than zero. Read this snippet from the New York Times eco blog, GreenInc:

“Texas’s progress in installing turbines is testing the bounds of just how much wind the electrical grid can handle. Some turbines are slowed or shut down on windy days because the state does not have sufficient transmission wires to move all the power from the remote, windy areas of West Texas to cities like Dallas and Houston that need it. Last night and this morning, for example, the prices for wind generation offered on the main Texas grid actually fell below zero, a sign of oversupply that usually prompts wind generators to shut their turbines down.

Texas is spending nearly $5 billion to fix the transmission problem. It plans to build a web of power lines that would be able to deliver the wind energy from congested West Texas, home to 89 percent of the wind capacity on the state’s main grid, to power-hungry cities. That process, however, looks likely to be delayed by a recent court decision.”

Whoa. Here at EarthPM that sparks (yes, a pun!) a lot of ideas for projects. Power transmission projects. Power storage projects. So we’d like to hear about some record number of project managers being hired…