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.
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.
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.
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.
Tanzania will host the first wind farm in sub-Saharan Africa, and my heart swells with pride. I visited Tanzania last year, and while I tend to fall hopelessly in love with every foreign destination I visit, this trip really made me consider tearing up my return ticket.
Although my thoughts mostly ran to the stunning scenery and charismatic megafauna we saw on safari, Tanzania’s energy struggles were obvious: When we deplaned in Arusha (straight onto the tarmac; there are no air conditioned jetways at Arusha Airport), I was stuck by the heavy aroma of coffee tree trimmings being burned for domestic cooking. Tanzania gets most of its electricity from hydro installations, but very little of the country is connected to the grid. And without much diversity in its energy portfolio, the few Tanzanians who are on the grid are in the dark when droughts drain reservoirs.
The lodges we stayed in had electricity for just part of each day, usually powered by diesel generators. I worried that Tanzania’s ecotourism industry might soon be jeopardized by a pollution problem of its own making. Fortunately, solar seems to be catching on, if the many dusty solar contractors’ pickup trucks that I saw are any indication.
Solar seems the obvious choice for sub-Saharan Africa but it turns out there’s wind aplenty, too. When 3TIER unveiled the global 15 kilometer wind map in early March, some of our staffers were pleasantly surprised at the wind potential in the Horn of Africa, and it seems those wind speeds extend to the southwest in bands along the high escarpments of the Rift Valley.
Last year, the World Bank committed $111 million to improve Tanzania’s power system, which includes money for renewable and off-grid projects in rural areas. Looks like Tanzania won’t build the coal-fired plants that were called for in 2006, when droughts caused country-wide black outs.
