Tag Archives: infrastructure

the smart grid

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Stanford has a research project for the smart grid.

Bits & Watts is a major new Stanford/SLAC initiative focused on innovations for the 21st century electric grid—a new grid paradigm that is needed to incorporate large amounts of clean power and a growing number of distributed energy resources, while simultaneously enabling grid reliability, resilience, security, and affordability.

The initiative organizes its research into three thematic areas: grid core, grid edge, and grid data science. The initiative will advance technologies, policies, markets, regulations, and business models that work in concert between each thematic area.

The Bits & Watts Initiative seeks to:

  • Offer and implement new research ideas and de-risk them for the electricity ecosystem
  • Educate faculty, students, post-doctoral fellows, and staff about the holistic systems-focused approach to solving problems for the electricity ecosystem
  • Offer holistic educational experience for current industry executives and other leaders
  • Create open-source hardware and software solutions rapidly adopted by industry and policymakers
  • Maintain flexibility amid uncertainty to exploit emerging technologies
  • Be a trusted and unbiased convener
  • Create platforms and protocols for sharing data with due consideration of privacy, security and confidentiality

Edward Glaeser on infrastructure

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Edward Glaeser questions the idea of massive federal spending on infrastructure.

While infrastructure investment is often needed when cities or regions are already expanding, too often it goes to declining areas that don’t require it and winds up having little long-term economic benefit. As for fighting recessions, which require rapid response, it’s dauntingly hard in today’s regulatory environment to get infrastructure projects under way quickly and wisely. Centralized federal tax funding of these projects makes inefficiencies and waste even likelier, as Washington, driven by political calculations, gives the green light to bridges to nowhere, ill-considered high-speed rail projects, and other boondoggles. America needs an infrastructure renaissance, but we won’t get it by the federal government simply writing big checks. A far better model would be for infrastructure to be managed by independent but focused local public and private entities and funded primarily by user fees, not federal tax dollars.

I get the argument that investing without a plan leads to waste. We don’t really have any real planning at the federal level. I think it would help for the federal government to set a vision and direction for what the smart infrastructure of the future should look like, and not just transportation (public, private and human muscle-powered) but energy, water, communications, freight, manufacturing, housing and even green infrastructure. One of the problems with local authorities and companies doing the planning is that they focus on only one of these things at a time, so they miss out on potential synergies and opportunities for hybrid infrastructure. An example might be highway corridors that serve as rights of way for high speed rail, high-voltage lines, pipelines and movement corridors for wildlife. Another might be a system of parks that move water resources, improve water and air quality, absorb floodwaters, counteract climate change, provide habitat and improve peoples’ health.

He is right though that a lot of planning needs to be at the metropolitan area scale and incorporate hard-nosed cost-benefit analysis. This is already done to a certain extent by designated “metropolitan planning organizations”, but this only applies to transportation. It could be more comprehensive. I also see a middle ground between pure local funding and pure federal funding. Federal funds can be targeted only to projects that are in line with the national vision and the local comprehensive plan. They could be low- or no-interest loans rather than outright grants. They could be grants but require local matching funds and encourage private investment. They could be loans that are partially forgiven if the projects meet performance and cost-effectiveness criteria.

Having both federal and local plans ready to go, along with a federal infrastructure bank able to issue bonds, would also mean the country could really take advantage of periods of unemployment and low interest rates both to stimulate the economy in the short run and boost productivity and prosperity in the long run.

Swiss tunnel

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It is actually possible to build major new infrastructure. At least, the Swiss can do it.

The Gotthard rail link has taken 20 years to build, and cost more than $12bn (£8.2bn). It will, the Swiss say, revolutionise Europe’s freight transport.

Plans for a better rail tunnel have been around since the 1940s, but it was not until 1992 that Swiss voters backed their government’s plan to build a new high-speed rail link through the Alps…

For 17 years, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day, more than 2,000 people have worked on the tunnel. There have been accidents: nine tunnel miners have died.

Pretty amazing. What infrastructure projects will the U.S. public support starting today that will not be ready for a generation? Like I said, the Swiss can do it.

I think tunneling is a key technology for the future for everything from transportation to water management, and eventually space colonization. The technology has improved a lot since we dug the first subway systems with shovels in the late 1800s. Now we use massive tunnel boring machines like the one shown in this article. But it’s still hard and expensive enough with our current technology that it’s not often the first technology we go to.

Menino Survey of Mayors

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The Menino Survey of Mayors is a survey where mayors are surveyed. Basically they say they need help with infrastructure, and they complain that states are useless at best and anti-city at worst.

It would make sense to have some kind of infrastructure planning at the scale of the metropolitan area. If a metro area could agree on a planning body to represent it, and that planning body could come up with a truly comprehensive infrastructure plan, the federal government could bypass the state and pass funding directly along to that body for implementation. An infrastructure bank, part of the Federal Reserve or alongside it, could issue infrastructure bonds as part of the country’s monetary policy – invest when the private sector is underinvesting and the overall economy is lagging, and let the private sector play as large a role as it is willing to when the economy is strong. This shouldn’t be controversial – there is a near-consensus among economists that expanding infrastructure spending would be a win-win for jobs and economic growth.

This wouldn’t have to mean states would be completely obsolete. They could do the planning and implementation for the infrastructure that connects the metro areas together, and for agriculture policy and the infrastructure that brings agricultural goods to market. Their political power could be equal to a metro area in proportion to the people they represent, not the empty land they represent.

Changing the balance of power on paper between the federal government, states, and cities might require constitutional changes. But create the infrastructure bank and the funding mechanisms might change the practical balance pretty quickly.

cyberattacks and superflares

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Need some new things to worry about? Look no further!

  1. a catastrophic cyberattack on the U.S. electric infrastructure

In this New York Times bestselling investigation, Ted Koppel reveals that a major cyberattack on America’s power grid is not only possible but likely, that it would be devastating, and that the United States is shockingly unprepared.
 
Imagine a blackout lasting not days, but weeks or months. Tens of millions of people over several states are affected. For those without access to a generator, there is no running water, no sewage, no refrigeration or light. Food and medical supplies are dwindling. Devices we rely on have gone dark. Banks no longer function, looting is widespread, and law and order are being tested as never before.

It isn’t just a scenario. A well-designed attack on just one of the nation’s three electric power grids could cripple much of our infrastructure—and in the age of cyberwarfare, a laptop has become the only necessary weapon. Several nations hostile to the United States could launch such an assault at any time. In fact, as a former chief scientist of the NSA reveals, China and Russia have already penetrated the grid. And a cybersecurity advisor to President Obama believes that independent actors—from “hacktivists” to terrorists—have the capability as well. “It’s not a question of if,” says Centcom Commander General Lloyd Austin, “it’s a question of when.”

2. in case people are not enough to worry about, the Sun could turn on us.

Astrophysicists have discovered a stellar “superflare” on a star observed by NASA’s Kepler space telescope with wave patterns similar to those that have been observed in the Sun’s solar flares. (Superflares are flares that are thousands of times more powerful than those ever recorded on the Sun, and are frequently observed on some stars.)

The scientists found the evidence in the star KIC9655129 in the Milky Way. They suggest there are similarities between the superflare on KIC9655129 and the Sun’s solar flares, so the underlying physics of the flares might be the same…

Typical solar flares can have energies equivalent to a 100 million megaton bombs, but a superflare on our Sun could release energy equivalent to a billion megaton bombs.

infrastructure infrastructure infrastructure

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Hillary wants to spend $250 billion on infrastructure. Bernie wants to spend $1 trillion. Infrastructure investment is good. Economists all say so. Politicians who care at least a little about reality all say so. The American Society of Civil Engineers says so. I happen to be a civil engineer so it is definitely good for me.

The idea is that the infrastructure we have in the ground now wears out gradually, and we almost never do enough maintenance to keep it in its original condition. So there is a constant loss of value to the economy. You can also think of infrastructure as reducing friction, transaction costs, wasted time, effort, and energy in the economy. If people and goods can get where they need to go efficiently and cheaply, they can do more productive work and produce more value each day with less waste. The same idea applies to getting energy and water around. Finally, there is the economic idea that when economic growth is below capacity, as it is now, you could pay people to dig holes and fill them back in again, and there would be a net economic gain. So any infrastructure investment, even if it is not optimal, has even more benefit and it is a sort of free lunch, something for nothing, two birds with one stone. And interest rates are so low that it makes sense for the government to borrow money, or even print it, and realize this almost automatic, guaranteed, magical return on the investment. Politicians who oppose infrastructure investment on debt or deficit grounds just don’t understand or don’t care about reality, or else they are telling a cynically calculated story to people who don’t.

Optimal, planned infrastructure investment would be even better, of course. We really don’t do any planning at the national scale in the United States. Maybe we are still trying to differentiate ourselves from the Soviet planned economy, but seriously, it is time to get over that particular hangover.

I like Elon Musk’s Hyperloop because it is a big idea and it asks if we should be considering something bold, big, and different, not to mention more efficient and cost-effective than the same old ideas from the 1950s! But we need to remember infrastructure is not just about transportation, it is about energy, water resources, food, commerce, trade, information, environmental quality and ecosystems. Infrastructure has an ecological footprint which needs to be measured and considered in decisions. Let’s think big, take a holistic, long-term look at the whole system, and ask what kinds of investments would be best. What kind of integrated infrastructure system do we think would make sense in the future, and what steps would we take today to get there? One of the hard things about infrastructure, though, is that it is long-lived. The technology available actually changes much faster than the infrastructure wears out, so blindly repairing and perpetuating old infrastructure ends up retarding the pace of change. A good plan needs to take a long-term view, but it has to be flexible enough to adapt to changing technology, environmental, climate and socioeconomic conditions during the course of its implementation. This is the essence of good planning, but it is hard for many of today’s hyper-specialized, local- and short-term-thinking professionals to pull off.

smart, sustainable infrastructure

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This long report is called Infrastructure Crisis, Sustainable Solutions: Rethinking Our Infrastructure Investment Strategies. They try to take all the talk about sustainable and smart infrastructure and boil it down to some actionable recommendations and goals. It’s worth a skim. Just to give some highlights, here are four goals they recommend for 2040:

  • Convert 95% of all types of energy use to renewables; fully deploy efficiency to cut demand 60%

  • Wring out water waste by 60%; integrate across water-wastewater-stormwater silos

  • Upgrade 75% of neighborhoods to“Very Walkable”; connect cities with high speed transit

  • Ensure 90% of products are managed by producers after use, and most ‘waste’ material is recovered by local industry

They talk about green infrastructure elsewhere in the text. Actually, it is now called “natural infrastructure”. People are probably a little burned out on the green buzzword. Some other interesting buzzwords they use are “sustainable asset management” and “performance-based infrastructure”.