GeoGarage blog

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

Mapping global wind power potential

Offshore wind to become a $1 trillion industry

From IEA

Offshore wind power will expand impressively over the next two decades, boosting efforts to decarbonise energy systems and reduce air pollution as it becomes a growing part of electricity supply.
Offshore Wind Outlook 2019 is the most comprehensive global study on the subject to date, combining the latest technology and market developments with a specially commissioned new geospatial analysis.

Offshore wind power will expand impressively over the next two decades, boosting efforts to decarbonise energy systems and reduce air pollution as it becomes a growing part of electricity supply, according to an International Energy Agency report published today.

Offshore Wind Outlook 2019 is the most comprehensive global study on the subject to date, combining the latest technology and market developments with a specially commissioned new geospatial analysis that maps out wind speed and quality along hundreds of thousands of kilometres of coastline around the world.
The report is an excerpt from the flagship World Energy Outlook 2019, which will be published in full on 13 November.

The IEA finds that global offshore wind capacity may increase 15-fold and attract around $1 trillion of cumulative investment by 2040.
This is driven by falling costs, supportive government policies and some remarkable technological progress, such as larger turbines and floating foundations.
That’s just the start – the IEA report finds that offshore wind technology has the potential to grow far more strongly with stepped-up support from policy makers.

CGI of Eolfi wind farm with Naval Energies floating platforms

Photo: Naval Energies

Europe has pioneered offshore wind technology, and the region is positioned to be the powerhouse of its future development.
Today, offshore wind capacity in the European Union stands at almost 20 gigawatts.
Under current policy settings, that is set to rise to nearly 130 gigawatts by 2040.
However, if the European Union reaches its carbon-neutrality aims, offshore wind capacity would jump to around 180 gigawatts by 2040 and become the region’s largest single source of electricity.

An even more ambitious vision – in which policies drive a big increase in demand for clean hydrogen produced by offshore wind – could push European offshore wind capacity dramatically higher.

China is also set to play a major role in offshore wind’s long-term growth, driven by efforts to reduce air pollution.
The technology is particularly attractive in China because offshore wind farms can be built near the major population centres spread around the east and south of the country.
By around 2025, China is likely to have the largest offshore wind fleet of any country, overtaking the United Kingdom.
China’s offshore wind capacity is set to rise from 4 gigawatts today to 110 gigawatts by 2040.
Policies designed to meet global sustainable energy goals could push that even higher to above 170 gigawatts.

The United States has good offshore wind resources in the northeast of the country and near demand centres along the densely populated east coast, offering a way to help diversify the country’s power mix.
Floating foundations would expand the possibilities for harnessing wind resources off the west coast.

“In the past decade, two major areas of technological innovation have been game-changers in the energy system by substantially driving down costs: the shale revolution and the rise of solar PV,” said Dr Fatih Birol, the IEA’s Executive Director.
“And offshore wind has the potential to join their ranks in terms of steep cost reduction.”

Offshore wind farm in Denmark (Horns Rev II) with the GeoGarage platform (DGA nautical chart)

Dr Birol launched this special report today in Copenhagen, Denmark – the birthplace of offshore wind – alongside the Danish Minister for Climate, Energy and Utilities, Dan Jørgensen.

The huge promise of offshore wind is underscored by the development of floating turbines that could be deployed further out at sea.
In theory, they could enable offshore wind to meet the entire electricity demand of several key electricity markets several times over, including Europe, the United States and Japan.

“Offshore wind currently provides just 0.3% of global power generation, but its potential is vast,” Dr Birol said.
“More and more of that potential is coming within reach, but much work remains to be done by governments and industry for it to become a mainstay of clean energy transitions.”

Governments and regulators can clear the path ahead for offshore wind’s development by providing the long-term vision that will encourage industry and investors to undertake the major investments required to develop offshore wind projects and link them to power grids on land.
That includes careful market design, ensuring low-cost financing and regulations that recognise that the development of onshore grid infrastructure is essential to the efficient integration of power production from offshore wind.

Industry needs to continue the rapid development of the technology so that wind turbines keep growing in size and power capacity, which in turn delivers the major performance and cost reductions that enables offshore wind to become more competitive with gas-fired power and onshore wind.

What’s more, huge business opportunities exist for oil and gas sector companies to draw on their offshore expertise.
An estimated 40% of the lifetime costs of an offshore wind project, including construction and maintenance, have significant synergies with the offshore oil and gas sector.
That translates into a market opportunity of USD 400 billion or more in Europe and China over the next two decades.

Links :

Monday, November 18, 2019

New Zealand (Linz) layer update in the GeoGarage platform

3 nautical raster charts updated

see GeoGarage news

A naturalist figured out climate change in 1799. The world forgot him.

Horses rear in a shallow pond filled with electric eels in this illustration from "The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt" written by Andrea Wulf and illustrated by Lillain Melcher

From CSMonitor by Anna Tarnow

Driven by a restless curiosity that resisted the confines of any one scientific discipline, Alexander von Humboldt offered the world a kaleidoscopic view of the wonders of nature.

Andrea Wulf and Lillian Melcher bring this “forgotten father of environmentalism” to life in a lush graphic novel.

Few people today remember Alexander von Humboldt, but the Prussian naturalist predicted climate change back in the early 19th century.
“He’s the forgotten father of environmentalism,” says historian Andrea Wulf.

During Humboldt’s travels through Venezuela in 1799, he noticed that farmers in the Aragua valley were deforesting the region to grow indigo.
As a result, the nearby lake was drying up.
Later, in a letter to President Thomas Jefferson dated June 1804, he wrote, “The wants and restless activity of large communities of men gradually despoil the face of the Earth.”

It was one of the first Western observations of human-caused climate change, according to Wulf.
Environmentalists and scientists like Charles Darwin, John Muir, and Henry David Thoreau were heavily influenced by his writings, which were widely read during his lifetime.
Wulf wanted to raise Humboldt’s profile for today’s readers.
So she wrote “The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt,” a lush and meticulously illustrated history of his South American expedition.

Courtesy of Penguin Random House
“The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt” written by Andrea Wulf and Lillian Melcher, Pantheon, 272 pp.

“I grew up in Germany, so we heard about [Humboldt] as an adventurer, or maybe a botanist,” Wulf says.
“But no one talked about him as the man who had predicted harmful, human-induced climate change.
So that became the thing that got me going.”
She’s also the author of “The Invention of Nature,” a 2015 New York Times bestselling nonfiction book that delves more deeply into Humboldt’s life and influence.

“The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt” stands apart with its rich visual presentation: It’s filled with Humboldt’s own drawings, maps, and writings, all sourced from the Berlin State Library’s digitized collection of his journals.
Those are juxtaposed with a dizzying array of reproductions, including pressed botanical samples, landscape paintings, and photos.
And it’s all stitched together by the artwork of Lillian Melcher, a recent Parsons School of Design graduate.

Early adopter: Alexander von Humboldt on the Orinoco River in Venezuela.

Portrait by Friedrich Georg Weitsch, 1806

(creditline: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie /

photographer: Karin März / montage: Raufeld Medien)

“[Humboldt] was one of the first people to make science popular and accessible, because he used infographics in all of his books,” says Melcher.
She believes strongly in following in his footsteps to increase scientific literacy.
“I think that combination of science and art is a better way to learn,” she says.

Wulf and Melcher collaborated to storyboard the book, but “Humboldt was our third collaborator,” Melcher says.

Each page represents weeks’ worth of research.
“Andrea and I are definitely the same kind of nerdy, where we just want accuracy.
We want to know all the little details,” Melcher says.

Map of Rio Orinoco designed by Humboldt

For example, the scanned pages of Humboldt’s diary that appear as background images on most pages of the book actually correspond to the events taking place in the story.
When Humboldt’s boat capsized in the Orinoco River, his journals were stained with river water.
Wulf and Melcher used reproductions of those diary pages to collage an image of the river, and Melcher drew Humboldt jumping into the pages to rescue his belongings.

“He’s jumping through that watermark to rescue his diary, but it’s [also] the real watermark,” says Wulf.
“It’s this double sense and I just love it.”

Humboldt’s interests were so wide-ranging that he found it hard to settle into a specific discipline.
(That’s perhaps one of the reasons he fell into obscurity: As scientific thought progressed, narrower focuses took precedent.)
The structure of “The Adventures of Alexander von Humboldt” is a true reflection of his restless curiosity – always varied, sometimes digressive, it’s a kaleidoscopic view into the diverse, fascinating, and occasionally brutal landscape of the South America that he encountered.

Intrinsic to Humboldt’s writings were his critiques of imperialism and slavery, as well as of environmental degradation.
With startling prescience, he pointed out the economic, environmental, and human costs of slavery and silver mining in “Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain” and “Political Essay on the Island of Cuba.”
Both are introduced in Wulf’s and Melcher’s book.

Importantly, he allowed his passion for nature to influence and color his work.
“If I look at [today’s] climate change debate in the political arena ...
what I’m really missing is that no one dares to talk about the wonders of nature,” says Wulf.
“[Humboldt] says we need to feel nature.
We need to use our imagination to understand nature.
...
And this aspect of his work, I think, is what makes it incredibly relevant today.”

There’s no doubt Humboldt was intrepid.
He fearlessly placed himself in harm’s way to gather knowledge, even if that meant climbing active volcanoes, crawling into mines, and prodding electric eels.
When a ship he was on sailed into a hurricane with 40-foot waves, he sat down to calculate the exact angle at which the boat would capsize.
Death would be better experienced methodically, he reasoned.
The ship stayed afloat.

Links :

Humboldt foundation : The Humboldt code / Humboldt's travels
Smithsonian : The Pioneering Maps of Alexander von Humboldt

Sunday, November 17, 2019

NOAA seeks public comment on ending production of traditional paper nautical charts

NOAA cartographers review a traditional printed nautical chart

From NOAA

NOAA is initiating a five-year process to end all traditional paper nautical chart production and is seeking the public’s feedback via a Federal Register Notice published on November 15, 2019.
Chart users, companies that provide products and services based on NOAA raster and electronic navigational chart (NOAA ENC®) products, and other stakeholders can help shape the manner and timing in which the product sunsetting process will proceed.
Comments may be submitted through NOAA’s online ASSIST feedback tool.

The creation of nautical maps is explained.

A long tradition in transition

For nearly 200 years, NOAA’s Office of Coast Survey has produced traditional paper nautical chart products.
Originally, this took the singular form of hard copy paper charts, today, there are several raster digital chart formats available to download or print through a NOAA certified agent.
Similar to the transition from road atlases to GPS navigation systems that we have witnessed in this digital era, we are also seeing the increased reliance on NOAA electronic navigational charts (ENC) as the primary navigational product and the decreased use of traditional raster chart products.
Since 2008, ENC sales have increased by 425%, while sales of paper charts have dropped by half.

The International Maritime Organization now mandates that all large commercial vessels on international voyages use ENCs.
In 2016, the U.S. Coast Guard started allowing regulated commercial vessels on domestic voyages to use ENCs in lieu of paper charts.
Recreational boaters are also increasingly using electronic chart displays.

NOAA is in the midst of a multi-year program to improve its ENC coverage by replacing over 1,200 irregularly shaped ENC cells, compiled in over 130 different scales, with a standard gridded layout of ENCs, compiled in just a dozen standard scales.
This will increase the number of ENC cells to about 9,000 and significantly improve the level of detail and consistency among ENCs.
More information about improvements being made is in Transforming the NOAA ENC®.

Electronic navigational chart displayed on an Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS) on NOAA Ship Thomas Jefferson.

Another option for paper nautical charts

Ultimately, production will be shut down for all raster chart products and services associated with traditional NOAA paper nautical charts, including:

Cancellation of these product and services will start in mid to late 2020 and be completed by January 2025.
More detailed information regarding this transition is explained in the document Sunsetting Traditional NOAA Paper Charts: End of Paper and Raster Nautical Chart Production and Introduction of NOAA Custom Charts.

Over the next five years, NOAA will work to ease the transition to ENC-based products while continuing to support safe navigation.
NOAA will focus on improving data consistency and providing larger scale coverage of NOAA ENC, as well as providing access to paper chart products based on ENC data, either through the NOAA Custom Chart prototype or third-party commercial data providers.

The online NOAA Custom Chart (NCC) application enables users to create their own charts from the latest NOAA ENC data.
Users may define the scale and paper size of custom-made nautical charts centered on a position of their choosing.
NCC then creates a geospatially referenced Portable Document Format (GeoPDF) image of a nautical chart.
Chart notes and other marginalia are placed on a separate PDF page.
Users may then download, view, and print the output.
NCC is an easy way to create a paper or digital backup for electronic chart systems or other Global Positioning System (GPS) enabled chart displays.

Traditional 1:100,000 scale NOAA paper nautical chart 16204.

16204 raster chart in the GeoGarage platform (NOAA layer)

A 1:80,000 scale NOAA Custom Chart of Port Clarence, Alaska.

Port Clarence ENC US4AK81M

A comparison of NOAA Chart 16204 and the corresponding NOAA Custom Chart is shown below.
Although it looks a bit different from a traditional NOAA chart, NCCs show the latest data as compiled in the NOAA ENCs.
The prototype is in the early phases of development and many improvements are needed to make NCC a viable replacement for traditional paper nautical charts.
We hope you will try out the NOAA Custom Chart prototype and tell us what you think through NOAA’s online ASSIST feedback tool.Electronic navigational chart displayed on an Electronic Chart Display and Information System (ECDIS) on NOAA Ship Thomas Jefferson.
Historical editions of nautical charts – suitable for framing – back to the mid-1800s, may also be downloaded for free from the Coast Survey Historical Map & Chart Collection website.

Links :