Water+Energy Presentation at CWEA Annual Conference 2013, Palm Springs

It was a very good turnout at the CWEA Annual Conference this morning. We talked about the next frontier in Water and Energy Nexus. The reception was very positive. Some people who could not attend my talk caught hold of me in the corridor/hall and wanted to connect and learn about with Proteus' Water+Energy work. I could not have asked for more!

The ideas we present here are new and refreshing. The concept of flexible load on the grid is not in the mainstream, but it will soon become a reality. Discussions are ongoing at the CEC level on how to prepare for the future grid when renewables will change the peak load profile. Water industry stands ready to meet the challenge, to act as a flexible load!

The plan forward is to get pilots going for flexible loads using treatment plants and pipeline networks in all three IOU territories by spring next year. Once the concept is proven, the work will commence on pricing and program development. As the water industry amounts to 20 - 45% of California's total energy use, that is a lot of load that can act as a flexible load on the grid. Welcome to the future!

Text Analytics for the Water Industry

Knowledge management in the Water Industry is archaic, that is if it at all exists. Since the turn of the century there has been dire doomsday predictions of mass retirement of water professionals with 20 to 30+ years of systems knowledge. With the economic slowdown and its effect on public retirement funds, most of those professionals held on to their jobs and now we are seeing the exodus happening. Many water managers are concerned. As their staff retires, they leave with the institutional knowledge and that is quite scary. After all there is no structured method of information capture.

Image courtesy of jscreationzs/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Most of our industry's Operational Intelligence lies unstructured in text-rich data. This data resides in emails, text messages, alerts, notes, chats, reports, and documents (word, excel, powerpoint, database,) etc.  Currently all this data, and hence information, sits virtually unanalyzed and unused. Much of this information  has the potential to deliver operational insights that can be used to make informed smarter decisions in the future.

Text analytics has made great progress in the last decade. Deep language processing capabilities such as summarization, multi-faceted search, and sentiment analysis is mainstream now. Technology is readily available to gather, store, filter, and mine textual information for hidden signals and patterns, trends, and anomalies. And most of this is open-source technology, just the kind of 'fit' public agencies look for.

At PROTEUS, we are working on Text Analytics. With new tools available to handle big data, we can now get access to this unprecedented amount of data and extract value. We no longer have to rely only on models (hydraulic or process) and SCADA information to understand and draw conclusions about our system operations, we can now tap into  a mountain of unstructured and unused complex data and derive insight that can boost our system performance like never before.

PROTEUS model of Operational Intelligence

We believe that once our water clients can crack the code on this cross-enterprise textual data, they will see a significant improvement in operations. Asking the right questions will make all the difference. The more specific and focused the questions can be, the better results can be achieved.

Water managers do not need to do another 'master plan' and set about searching for the data to feed the Analytics engine.  They already have the components to start generating these insights. They can start with existing documents, even with just the organization's email and folders on the server. While every organization is different, we can assure you that results can be seen within just a few months of getting started.

To learn more about how to get the water industry's text analytics initiative underway, on to Smart Operations Intelligence, please contact us at www.consult-proteus.com.

World Development and Change, the Pillars and Slabs

I am a civil engineer and much of my basic training was in structural engineering before I shifted to environmental engineering for my Masters. So I often tend to go back on analogies from my civil/ structural engineering training. Here is one of those analogies.

I believe that as we evolve as a civilization, our knowledge of the world around us gets more pronounced. Ancient humans were able to appreciate the world around us, their theories rested on empirical observations, and many things that they predicted based of these observations are pretty set on the mark. Science and Technology is relatively new and has found the 'reason' behind many a phenomenon over the last 3000 years. We are slated for even more fascinating times ahead.

This evolution of science and technology, I believe, has happened just like we build buildings. We lay a foundation, and then erect pillars, followed by a slab, then again pillars, followed by slabs, and so forth. For a structure to be stable, you cannot just go on building pillars, for without slabs, there will be no integrity and no use of the structure either. Slabs connect the pillars, transfer forces from one pillar to the other and ultimately to the foundation. Slabs are fundamental to the building as the pillars, they also enable people to make a home on them and live.

In the development of science and technology, the pillars are the discipline specific R&D that leads to great breakthroughs in those disciplines. For example, in the years leading to the Renaissance, there was development going on in physics, biology, engineering, astronomy, music, painting  and many such fields. When the Renaissance period came, a slab was built. The beauty of that period was that the foremost scientists and artists of the period started mingling with each other and sharing their ideas and approaches. That era afforded the opportunity and encouraged the cross pollination. As a result, there were many breakthroughs that can be directly attributed to the fact that the physicists sat along side the painters and discussed solutions together.

I think that we are at the threshold of another such era. We have made tremendous progress in individual fields, especially biology, IT, energy, etc. Now, it is time to share the discoveries across disciplines and cross pollinate again. The opening of the world due to the social networks make this even more easy to do. We need to build a slab that joins all the various disciplines and share the ideas and insights. This will yield a Renaissance of modern times. I sincerely believe this. And for this reason I work very diligently in the innovation space and consult with start-up companies. It does not matter if they are designing a new touchless mobile app for autistic kids to help them read books or if there is a group designing ground penetrating sensing devices to look for oil. It does not have to be linked to the Water industry, all I want is to learn about the edge ideas. This gets me thinking of novel applications in other fields, it opens up my mind to think differently and devise new ways to integrate technologies across disciplines. In that process I can identify for my start-up clients new markets, new possibilities, and have them be the defining and often disruptive technology in those markets. I enjoy this process a lot!

Watch this space, in the next few weeks I will be showcasing my fascinating discoveries at the WBT Showcase I am attending this week.