Many people regret the passing of summer each year, but to me there's always a bright side - the return of the fall season when I can once again have fellowship with people I like to work with and talk to.
My friends in the geospatial world just never seem to be around in the summer. But when fall arrives I can look forward to seeing them again and finding what they're up to. Events such as the GITA Ontario Fall Forum are just right for that.
When you think about it, there are three ways for geospatial professionals - or any professionals - to learn from one another: on the job, at educational events or by communicating one-on-one. The Fall Forum provides two out of three of those opportunities, by creating one of the year's most important educational events and by bringing like-minded people together in an atmosphere devoted to collegial learning.
The 2009 Forum will take place November 4 at the Oakville Conference Centre. Do you want to contribute to the day's harvest of knowledge? GITA Ontario is now accepting abstracts for presentations. If your organization has developed or implemented a good new idea in geospatial technology, be sure to apply for the chance to describe it to an audience of geospatial specialists. Please send your abstracts to me at MMacLean@peterborough.ca.
Attendee registration for the Forum will be available soon at http://gita.org/chapters/ontario/exec.html.
GITA Ontario is also accepting vendor registrations. Make sure you book early for a great location for your booth! For more information please contact:
Teranet Inc.
Our goal is to provide educational resources and events that help geospatial professionals work together with greater mutual understanding. Looking beyond the Forum to 2010, GITA Ontario will provide even more resources and events that bring together this diverse community.
We are gratified that energetic and talented people continue to come forward to contribute to our association. We welcome two new members of the Executive Committee: Fiona Bruce of Galdos Systems Inc. and Randy Cracknell of RGAC and Associates.
GITA Ontario Chapter is helping to build a vibrant geospatial community across all sectors throughout the province. If you haven't done so already, join us! Become part of the growing Ontario Chapter. For details please see the GITA Web site, gita.org/membership/membership.asp.
Green Transformation Seen in Electric Utility Industry
The legislated introduction of distributed generation into Ontario's electrical distribution system will completely transform the electric utility industry in the province in the next few years, and transform the application of geospatial technologies along with it, an industry consultant says.
Geoff Cameron, executive vice-president, intelligent networks with Angus GeoSolutions Inc. (AGSI), described for a GITA Ontario audience how the "smart grid" will introduce unprecedented technological challenges to electric utilities. It will force them to rebuild the entire technological foundation for the distribution network in Ontario to accommodate distributed generation and smart switching, at staggering cost.
All of this will be the result of the passage of the Green Energy Act and the need to find sustainable energy sources for the future, Cameron said at the Summer Program Event on July 7, presented at the Hornby Glen Golf Course by GITA Ontario in conjunction with URISA Ontario Chapter.
"In the geospatial world, on the utilities side, everything you can think of is going to change," Cameron said.
The Green Energy Act, which received royal assent May 14, calls among other things for the distributed generation of renewable energy. That is, the legislation enables the establishment of a distribution system in which local producers of energy, such as owners of wind farms or solar panels - even owners of electric vehicles with full batteries -- could feed their available energy into the provincial grid and be paid for it.
Specifically this would be achieved by:
* Creating a feed-in tariff that guarantees specific rates for energy generated from renewable sources;
* Establishing the right to connect to the electricity grid for renewable energy projects that meet technical, economic and other regulatory requirements;
* Establishing a one-stop streamlined approvals process, providing service guarantees for renewable energy projects that meet regulatory requirements;
* Implementing a "smart" power grid to support the development of new renewable energy projects, and prepare Ontario for new technologies like electric cars.
Cameron said that a smart grid has not yet been built anywhere in the world. The Ontario government is working with several utilities in developing pilot projects for various new enabling technologies and so is the Obama administration in the US, which is considering legislation similar to the Green Energy Act.
Cameron and AGSI are consultants to several utilities working on pilot projects. Cameron said in an interview that no one knows what technologies will ultimately support the smart grid and what the cost will be to implement them, but it will be on a scale not seen before.
"My guesstimate is that in North America, if the US passes a similar act, there will be trillions of dollars of investment needed in the electric utility industry in the next 20 to 30 years. Not billions - trillions!"
A smart grid would enable the two-way flow of electrical power and the data it generates, including from smart meters. Bi-directional data would be used to monitor and maintain the grid in real time through the use of smart sensors, smart communications devices and self-healing network technologies.
"To make smart grid work we have to be able to make snap decisions," Cameron told his audience. "In the case of self-healing networks we are talking milliseconds or thousandths of milliseconds for these devices and switches to operate correctly on the network without things blowing up.
"The devices have to be able to talk to our GIS systems and other corporate systems in real time. It is the back-office technology requirements that are scaring utilities and CEOs around the industry."
Data Management
The smart grid will create extremely difficult challenges in data management and storage. Cameron cited a pilot project in Boulder, Colorado, in which a utility has outfitted 30,000 homes with smart meters and installed 4,500 smart devices on the network to monitor the usage data.
The project has already cost $100 million, even without attempting to integrate the back-office technologies, and is in danger of having to shut down, Cameron said.
"They are getting 1 million points of data back a second and trying to figure out what to do with it."
In Ontario, Hydro One plans to begin a pilot project by early 2010 in the Bruce Peninsula to build a high-bandwidth, wireless communications network for use in monitoring, outage management and restoration of the electrical distribution grid. The network is ultimately envisioned to be available free for use by all electric utilities in the province. But the cost to build it has been estimated at up to $1 billion.
Cameron said the province's smart grid is envisioned as a flow of information across many different technologies coming to a central hub for analysis and storage. This will transform GIS and other systems because of the need to pull data from multiple sources, including smart devices, into one application for analysis in real time. This will create a demand for technological interoperability, to the point where many stand-alone systems in use today will become obsolete.
"From a geospatial perspective, we have to open up the technologies, create standards and think about data management as opposed to tools," Cameron declared.
"GIS developers have been great at showing off fancy tools and terrible at linking technologies that integrate in real time with other systems. And nowhere is that more true than in the electric utility industry.
"We have stand-alone data collection and engineering analysis tools, we have stand-alone management systems and stand-alone customer information systems," Cameron explained. "All of these have to come together. That's why nothing is sacred.
"Today we are still stuck with a lot of geospatial platforms that are commonly in use but have their roots in technologies built 25 years ago. They will have to change."
'Go Green' Seminar Hears of New GIS Tools
GITA Ontario delegates at a unique summer event learned how geospatial applications are helping public-sector organizations to keep their assets sustainable and their data-management processes efficient.
The Geospatial Go Green Seminar on July 7 in the village of Hornby, in Halton Hills just north of Milton, was the first summer educational event jointly presented by the Ontario chapters of GITA and URISA.
The educational session took place in the morning preceding a round of golf at the Hornby Glen Golf Club. Four corporate sponsors contributed to the educational presentations: Angus GeoSolutions Inc. (AGSI), ESRI Canada, iPLANcorp and Teranet.
The presentation by AGSI vice-president Geoff Cameron was a revealing examination of how the Green Energy Act will lead to the transformation of electric utilities in Ontario and the GIS technologies that serve them (see separate article).
For municipalities, sustainability programs to protect man-made assets as well as natural ones have high priority. But effective sustainability programs depend on the availability of reliable data about assets - and data, even if it is complete and up to date, is often defined and treated differently by different departments.
The City of Woodstock has found a new way to deal with these problems by using GIS technology as the basis for a central asset-management system. As explained by Barry Kelly, public works account manager with ESRI Canada, the solution is built on a new product called the Asset Value Toolkit (AVT) for ArcGIS. It is a collection of GIS-based tools to collect, manage, amortize and report financial asset information.
The AVT's built-in accounting rules enable managers in Woodstock to examine attribute information such as acquisition cost, expected life and salvage values, and then calculate the depreciation of individual assets. The Engineering and Finance departments can now draw accurate data from the same central source by exporting the AVT toolbar results to simple Excel files.
Woodstock's solution will help to improve its infrastructure maintenance and renewal programs, reduce its infrastructure gap and promote better long-term planning by bringing departments closer together, Kelly said.
Data Delivery Service
Richard Norris, account executive with Teranet, described the company's electronic data delivery service called GeoServer. He summarized its data features and models and explained how Teranet delivers parcel data to clients via the Internet, with no need to produce or dispose of DVDs.
Norris said Teranet clients normally receive updated parcel data for Ontario once a month. If they still receive it on a DVD they have to spend considerable time to upload it, update the mapping and title data and integrate the new data into their systems. All these steps are eliminated with the automated GeoServer delivery.
The majority of features available in the POLARIS data model are available with GeoServer along with attribute information. Data is updated remotely and transactionally from Teranet's GeoWarehouse. Clients can customize the data that is delivered and can easily identify what has been changed.
Norris introduced Thomas Hall, a project leader/systems analyst with the City of Vaughan, who described how using GeoServer helps the municipality to update its data effectively for the Planning, Engineering and Finance departments.
Hall said Vaughan benefits from having a reliable schedule for automated, timely updates of parcel data and from having a convenient source for comparing current and historical data.
Data Delivery Service
The presentation from iPLANcorp described a software product designed to make GIS data available to workers in the field to save time and improve decision-making.
Survey Document Manager is a document-management application that works across all departments in a municipal organization or utility or conservation authority to permit rapid searches of datasets and to position drawings spatially in seconds to improve decision-making.
"It's a browser-based, zero-footprint technology," said Paul Nicholls, account manager for iPLANcorp.
Instead of carrying rolls of plans or drawings, field employees can travel with a tablet or notebook computer enabled with Internet connectivity and Survey Document Manager. The application can search databases and quickly locate all geo-related documents relevant to the task in the field and display them with a mouse click.
The documents can be positioned in a geospatial environment, such as a subdivision or individual parcel, and overlaid one on top of another. Documents such as surveys, site plans and grade plans, can be overlaid so the viewer can find any discrepancies among them, or investigate the accuracy of as-built structures.
Nicholls said the application reduces document management time and protects the quality of paper drawings that no longer have to be taken to the field.