Water, Water Everywhere

In October 2007, record rains caused flooding on the Congo river that killed more than 400 people and displaced many more. The Congo has overrun its banks — causing floods, landslides, destruction, and death — every couple of years for the past few decades, but history does not make a life-sparing prediction system.

To improve flood forecasting in places like the Congo where hydrological stations are scarce, Andy Wood (who recently joined 3TIER but retains an affiliate faculty position at the University of Washington) and colleagues evaluated three global precipitation datasets to see how well they predicted floods in nine of the world’s large river basins. The authors fed each dataset and other meteorological factors into the variable infiltration capacity hydrology model, producing a representation of the period from 1997 to 1999, which they then compared to the actual hydrologic values for that time span. While each of the three datasets had different strengths and weaknesses, the authors favored the ERA-40 precipitation dataset from the National Center for Atmospheric Research for its long span (from 1957 to 2002), its four-times-a-day data points, and its agreement with observational data from the test period.

N Voisin, AW Wood, and DP Lettenmaier, “Evaluation of Precipitation Products for Global Hydrological Prediction,” Journal of Hydrometeorology, June 2008 (vol. 9, no. 3, pp. 388-346).

And Not a Drop to Drink

Historically, planners have confidently relied upon fall rains and spring snow melts to quench the thirst of towns like Seattle. But climate change means the old assumptions no longer apply. 3TIER’s Matt Wiley and the University of Washington’s Richard Palmer modeled the Cedar and South Fork Tolt river basins (Seattle’s main sources of water) in three steps: 1. With general circulation models to portray future climate; 2. With hydrologic models of each basin; and 3. With simulations of municipal water use.

Because of decreased precipitation and earlier snow melts, the authors predict that the summer and fall stream flows slaking Seattle’s thirst will be reduced by an average of 6 percent per decade. The snow pack feeding Seattle’s water supply will be reduced by an average of 15 percent per decade at the same time that its peak shifts to earlier in the year. By 2040, the winter snow pack above Seattle will be reduced by 50 percent. Finally, the authors predict that the amount of fresh water stored in Seattle’s drinking water reservoirs at the end of an average summer will decline by 1.9 percent per decade. Ultimately, that means Seattle’s reservoirs will yield 6.1 million gallons of water per day less each decade.

So what’s the good news? The article by Wiley and Palmer presents methods that can be used to model water availability and resource implications throughout the western United States.

MW Wiley and RN Palmer, “Estimating the Impacts and Uncertainty of Climate Change on a Municipal Water Supply System,” Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management, May/June 2008 (vol. 134, no. 3, pp. 239-246). 

Move It 

If you ask people in the wind energy business to name the biggest challenge to further growth in the United States, they’d probably say, “It’s the transmission lines.”  Fortunately, there’s been some notable progress lately.

Utility regulators in Texas approved a $4.9 billion strategy for new transmission lines to shuttle the juice from west Texas wind farms to big urban centers like Dallas and Houston. The new lines, with a planned capacity of 18,500 megawatts, are slated for completion in 2013.

And Denver-based Anschutz Corp. will soon seek approval for a $3 billion transmission system to deliver Wyoming wind energy 900 miles to the desert Southwest. How much more would it cost to enable that system to deliver solar-generated electricity to Wyoming when it’s needed?

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Photo by bachmont, license by Creative Commons.

By Daniel Finan, 3TIER Marketing Intern

Arnulf Jaeger-Walden of the European commission’s Institute for Energy created big (solar) waves in the renewable energy industry when he announced on July 23 that solar panels placed in the Sahara would need to capture only .3 percent of the sun’s rays to meet all of Europe’s energy needs. Influential leaders such as United Kingdom Prime Minster Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and others in the newly formed Mediterranean Union have backed his ambitious plan.

The press was quick to point out the tremendous cost of such an undertaking by putting dollar amounts on what would be the world’s largest solar farm. The cost includes:

• an initial investment of $70.8 billion
• laying direct current transmission lines that would run from northern Africa to Europe at a cost of $1.98 billion per year until 2050 (a total of $80 billion over 40 years)

Taken together, this totals about $150 billion. That’s a lot of money, but let’s put it into perspective. 

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Another day, another blow to tax credits for renewable energy in the United States. Yesterday, Senate bill 3335 garnered just 51 votes – not the 60 necessary to move it forward to a debate. Republicans would prefer a bill that doesn’t grant tax credits only to increase taxes elsewhere, and some are withholding support for renewables to leverage Democrats’ support for more oil drilling in the US. Either way, the White House had already threatened to veto this variant of the proposal, the fourth one to be torpedoed this summer.

Meanwhile, North American Windpower reports that the governors of all 50 US states and the Virgin and Mariana Islands have written to congressional leaders in favor of a five-year extension of tax credits for renewables.

See coverage from the Associated Press, Reuters, and the Wall Street Journal’s Environmental Capital blog.

A meditation on comparative solar irradiation by Brian Davis, 3TIER Code Poet Laureate.

When you sit in “an office full of PhDs” all day long, you’re inspired to ask the really hard questions, to plumb the depths of human knowledge and probe the mysteries of the ancients.

And so, it came as no surprise last November (just prior to our release of FirstLook Solar) when Christian, our resident “Lord of the Maps,” casually asked, “I wonder how much beer Seattlites need to drink to make up for the difference between Seattle sunshine and Arizona sunshine?” The room was suddenly silent. The world stopped spinning on its axis momentarily as the gravity of his query sank in.

A truly great question had been asked, and it deserved a thorough answer.

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You may recall from the post Forecasting 101 that, while we expend a lot of effort predicting the weather, we’re ultimately informing wind farm operators and utilities about the power output they can expect from their turbines. That way, they can plan accordingly by selling all the power they generate, or by buying power from other sources to compensate for becalmed turbines.

How to Decipher a Power Curve

An important element in predicting energy output is the power curve — either provided by a wind turbine manufacturer or derived by observation — that describes the energy generated by a turbine at various wind speeds.

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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.

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As part of that environmental impact study, the BLM and the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy will accept public comments until July 15, 2008. If you’d like to contribute to this process, you can submit your thoughts on the Web, or by mail to:

Solar Energy PEIS Scoping

Argonne National Laboratory

9700 S. Cass Ave. – EVS/900

Argonne, IL 60439

For those of us who haven’t done this sort of thing before, here are some tips from the agencies on how to comment effectively.