CERA Week is a usually superb bellwether of energy sector moods, and this year was no exception.
Overall I found the tone last week to be pragmatic, occasionally even downbeat.
Amin Nasser of Saudi Aramco captured the general mood in his comments (https://lnkd.in/gMSQViKF), noting that consumers “want energy that helps protect the planet and their pocket books, with minimal disruption to supplies and their daily lives”.
His full comments are worth reading, and don’t mince words on critical points I agree with such as:
😡 Tribalism and hyperbole are deeply counterproductive to addressing our collective climate challenge
📈 Consumers in lower and middle income countries (who use far less resources than those in the wealthier world today) will increasingly drive the climate agenda
🏔 The hashtag#energytransition is not on track
The final point is a serious concern, because out in the real world the clock is ticking.
Just prior to CERA I had an update from the Berkeley Earth team, and though I was aware of recent increases in ocean temperature, it was still shocking to see record daily temperatures now observed for over a year.
But unfortunately the conversations and presentations at CERA highlighted how difficult it will be to pull off the badly needed shift away from fossil fuels, especially natural gas.
For example, although ⚡ electrification is a primary pathway to decarbonize a range of consumer and industrial demand, there is simply not enough power, transmission capacity, and even just grid hardware to go around. Particularly as the power demands of data centers grow and tech companies fill up grid connection queues, planners and policymakers will need to take extra care to ensure decarbonization projects aren’t pushed back in the line.
So in the end I left Houston exhausted and concerned, but still optimistic.
To quote Nasser one final time “the world has been trying to transition in fog, without a compass”.
This compass is precisely what we are building at Othersphere, helping those scaling sustainable infrastructure to build better projects, faster. The energy transition is a global challenge that will be solved at the local level—step-by-step, project-by-project.
CERA was full of smart people working together to make this happen.
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Equipment sizing and operating strategy LCOH optimizations for hydrogen electrolysis plants are cumbersome and time-consuming. It can take days to weeks to get the data, with each optimization run often taking hours. This limits analytical efforts to a handful of potential sites, leaving many opportunities unexplored.
The result — sub-optimal capital allocation and higher risks, with countless missed opportunities.The difference between initial cost calculations versus hourly optimizations can be dramatic, and highlights location as a critical element of project success.
Othersphere has revolutionized this process by combining the power of our underlying spatial economics platform with neural networks for dimensionality reduction and surrogate modeling.
Our global search engine now recommends pre-optimized projects in seconds, having already run an hourly optimization considering:
1) Hourly day-ahead wholesale power market pricing
2) Grid upgrade CAPEX (developed with a global leader in grid transmission engineering and equipment)
3) Grid fees associated with transmission connections
4) Variable stack efficiency by load, incorporating operational ranges
5) System economies of scale, as well as commercial and technical nuances between PEM and alkaline plants
6) Hourly carbon intensity data
7) Demand profiles and cost of storage
8) Co-located renewables CAPEX
9) High-spatial resolution hourly solar and wind capacity factor data
All of this is delivered through the Othersphere Explorer tool, which provides a novel, bottom-up view of potential hydrogen projects, evaluating key factors such as production costs, emissions, available offtakers, and fit with local surroundings.
Introducing the world’s first global optimizer for hydrogen projects
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Topography is one of the many variables within the Othersphere Explorer tool used to reveal and diligence optimal siting of sustainable infrastructure projects. To inform this analysis we use licensed data, open data, and novel datasets we have created or augmented. Our topography data is an example of the latter, where we built upon the exceptional work within the Multi-Error-Removed Improved-Terrain Digital Elevation Model (MERIT DEM).
🔍 Augmented for massive-scale analysis
To make this sophisticated dataset even more accessible, we have introduced tiling to the MERIT DEM. Each tile offers detailed elevation and ruggedness data, enhancing usability for systematic geographical analyses.
🚀 Tackling climate must be a group effort
We are excited to release this tiled dataset derived from MERIT DEM, adhering to licensing requirements and aiming to benefit the broader community working on topographical challenges. This data is provided as a parquet file (~4.5GB) and is access through Google Cloud Storage. Please click here to learn more about setting up a Google account to access the data and here to learn more about gsutil for downloading files. Alternatively, please contact explore@othersphere.io can we can work with you to determine other file delivery options.
Multi-Error-Removed Improved-Terrain Digital Elevation Model (MERIT DEM) is a sophisticated dataset that addresses terrain issues common in other mapping efforts.
Please reach out if you would like to learn more about Othersphere, our products, and opportunities to partner in accelerating global industrial decarbonization.
