Photo courtesy of yourpanama.com/images.html.

From a technopark located only meters from the Panama Canal, Kris McCahon and a rapidly growing team tend to 3TIER’s Latin American operations.

Latin America is a big place, so 3TIER’s business there, which is primarily wind-related, represents many stages of maturation. Most clients are working on new wind energy developments: They’re using our FullView wind resource assessments to identify promising wind farm sites. In Chile, where potential natural gas shortages have spurred interest in renewable energy sources, 3TIER enjoys a partnership with Seawind International, an engineering, construction, and operations firm that both contracts to external clients and develops projects on its own. Seawind and 3TIER collaborate to deliver value to clients all the way from prospecting through due diligence and operations.

At the other end of the spectrum are polities that are looking for ways to include renewables in their national energy strategies. They may be interested in a national wind map, such as the one the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation engaged us to develop for Bolivia. In that vein, other groups seek wind maps of smaller areas to learn  where they might site so-called distributed energy projects, or installations that directly power an inhabited area without requiring a long-distance grid of power transmission lines.

Kris has been with 3TIER for just over a year, but he’s been studying and working in Latin America since his junior year in college. Romance convinced him to settle in Panama, but he makes it clear that it’s no sacrifice. “Panama is nice!” Kris says, describing the temperate highlands, the generous benefits to retirees, the opportunity for permanent residence with an investment in reforestation. Panama now dominates the escapist fantasies with which I frequently torment my family. “Honey,” I said to the husband, “pack your woodworking tools. We’re buying a hectare of teaks.”

Many of our clients in Latin America are also familiar with Arturo Méndez, who directs 3TIER’s business development efforts from Baja California to Ushuaia.  If you are interested in joining Kris and Arturo in our Panama office, see our Careers page for information about additional opportunities. 

Sportin’ our colors at WINDPOWER 2008. Not a comet-worshiping cult. Not that there’s anything wrong with liking comets.

We got these custom All Stars from the Converse website. The Web has everything, right?

Sort of.

(more…)

In a story posted yesterday, Forbes.com makes use of 3TIER’s wind and solar maps to help illustrate the slide show “In Pictures: America’s Best Places For Alternative Energy.” Also see the accompanying article. 

Legendary oilman T. Boone Pickens may soon be known, instead, as a legendary renewable energy man. Today, Pickens – who recently placed the turbine order for what will be the world’s largest wind farm – announced the Pickens Plan, a national alternative energy strategy to reduce America’s reliance on foreign oil.

The Pickens Plan calls for capturing the full potential of wind energy across the US plains states, and new transmission lines to deliver the juice. By meeting 20 percent of our electricity demands with wind, Pickens says, we can shuffle the domestic natural gas currently used for power production to the transportation sector, thereby offsetting 38 percent of our oil consumption — and a big chunk of the $700 billion we spend each year buying imported oil. With the help of incentives, Pickens predicts this goal can be achieved in 10 years with an investment of $1.2 trillion.

And how is Mr. Pickens illustrating his plan, you ask? With wind maps from 3TIER, of course. See the video at the Pickens Plan home page, and images accompanying the plan’s details. 

Editor’s Note: While 3TIER has contributed wind maps to help illustrate the Pickens Plan, we are not his representatives and are not in a position to help readers communicate with him. We do welcome your comments, but suggest that you visit the Contact page at the Pickens Plan website to find out where to direct missives to Mr. Pickens.

In a little-used 3TIER conference room — the one where old desk chairs go to live out their twilight years — sit two stacks of cardboard boxes containing more boxes: slick, nearly featureless black boxes. One pile stores new CPUs awaiting introduction to the computing cluster.

The other pile stores hard drives shipped to us from the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Although 3TIER is located in the most wired building in the Pacific Northwest, we calculated that it’s more bandwidth-savvy to ship empty hard drives to Madison and receive full hard drives back. The data acquisition team unpacks them one by one and joins their contents to a massive collection: 12 terabytes of satellite pictures of the planet. These images are the beginnings of the REmapping the World global solar map.

(more…)

Bolivia, rich in natural gas and hydropower potential but with one of the lowest rural electrification rates in South America, will soon have its wind resources mapped at a resolution of 2 kilometers. 3TIER recently was engaged by the IFC (part of the World Bank Group) to develop the Bolivia map, which should be released later this year. The project complements our REmapping the World initiative by accelerating the delivery of reliable information about available wind resources. Like the 5-kilometer-resolution Mexico map we released yesterday, the Bolivia map will be viewable for free online via FirstLook.   

Today at WINDPOWER, 3TIER announced the online release of a 5-kilometer-resolution wind map of Mexico. If you’re in Houston, visit us at booth 1253 for a North American wind poster. Like the online map, the poster is free.

If you’re not in Houston, you can check out the 5 km Mexico wind map on our FirstLook site. This release is part of our REmapping the World project, which provides free, accurate information on renewable energy resources. The 15 km world wind map was released in March 2008; now we’re steadily producing maps of the globe at higher resolutions, country by country.

Stay tuned: We’ll be making more announcements from Houston this week.

Everyone’s busy preparing for the trip to Houston from June 1 to 4 for WINDPOWER, the annual party thrown by the American Wind Energy Association. If you’ll be there, come see us at booth 1253, and pick up a free world wind map poster with a special surprise on the other side.

And look for us in the following sessions:

Wind Forecasting 101
Sunday, June 1, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Pascal Storck will chair the seminar; Eric Grimit will help instruct.

Applications in Wind Energy Forecasting
Tuesday, June 3, 2008, 1 to 2:30 p.m.
Cameron Potter will moderate this panel discussion.

Future Topics for Utility Evaluation of Wind Generation
Tuesday, June 3, 2008, 1 to 2:30 p.m.
Eric Grimit will present “A Prototype Day-Ahead Forecast System for Rapid Wind Ramp Events.”

Understanding Project Operational Results
Wednesday, June 4, 3 to 4:30 p.m.
Cam Potter will present “Non-Deterministic Wind Speed to Power Output Conversion.”

Browse or search the entire WINDPOWER conference program for other things to do and see in Houston.

In the post “Assessment 101,” I mentioned that Scott Eichelberger and his ilk get a lot of grilling while staffing the 3TIER booth, and not just about the location of the restrooms, or which booths give away the best tchotchkes. People want to know how our method, numerical weather prediction (NWP), compares to other techniques. Many of our competitors are using a method called measure, correlate, predict, or MCP. Here’s the skinny on some key differences between the two.

(more…)

Canada’s Energy-TV recently aired a feature on our REmapping the World initiative, starring Ken Westrick and some truly beautiful footage, especially of offshore wind turbines. (I really do think they’re lovely, in a Bauhaus sort of way.) You can learn more about REmapping the World here.