Monthly Archives: August 2017

Too simplistic? Quite possibly, nevertheless the conclusions from some new research out of Oxford arefood for thought (my emphasis added):

A new research paper from the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment provides the first evidence that automation played a major role in voters concerns in the 2016 US Presidential Election.

The paper, Political Machinery: Automation Anxiety and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election, authored by Dr Carl Benedikt Frey, Dr Thor Berger and Dr Chinchih Chen, all of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment, looked at whether groups in the labour market that have lost out to automation were more likely to opt for radical political change. Pitching automation against a host of alternative explanations including workers exposure to globalization, immigration and manufacturing decline the research shows that electoral districts with a greater exposure to automation were substantially more likely to support Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election.

The authors found that a 5 percentage points increase in the share of jobs in which workers have lost to automation in the past is associated with an increase in the share voting for Donald Trump in 2016 by roughly 10 percentage points.

Dr Frey, Oxford Martin Citi Fellow and Co-Director of the Oxford Martin Programme on Technology and Employment, said the data provided the first hard evidence of the impact of automation on political outcomes.

Our study suggests that automation has been the real cause of voters concern, he said. The prime victims of recent technological change want anything but the status quo. The populist rebellion in America, Europe, and elsewhere, has many causes, but workers losing out to technology is seemingly the main reason.

Its hardly the first time that I have asked this question, but what will be the political consequences as the process of technologically-driven job destruction moves further and further up the food chain, shattering the expectations of those who never thought they would be on the wrong side of creative destruction?

Speaking of which, theres this from The New Republic (again, my emphasis added):

The waning of the yuppies particular brand of ostentatious upward mobility, and the rise of its aesthetically scruffier hipster cousins, demonstrate the ongoing erosion of what Barbara and John Ehrenreich have called the professional-managerial class. The Ehrenreichs coined the term in 1977 to refer to the constellation of college-educated, white-collar, and creative workers (doctors, lawyers, journalists, artists, academics, and so forth) that hovered somewhere between the ruling class and the traditional working class. More than 30 years later, in their 2013 essay Death of a Yuppie Dream, the Ehrenreichs reported that the once-ascendant PMC was on its last legs, fractured by decades of technological advances, job outsourcing, and attacks on labor. Increasingly, its members have either peeled off to join a tier of exorbitantly compensated CEOs and supermanagers or suffered the collapse of their chosen professions, from the decline of newspaper journalism to the elimination of tenured academic jobs.

In this bleak new landscape, strivers havent disappearedthey have simply reoriented themselves around a new set of values that bolster their class position in less noticeable ways.

And they will probably continue to do, but whether they do so in a way that fits into Americas traditional free market(ish) model is an entirely different matter.

But its only 2017: Much of the article merely discusses changes in consumer choice:

This new elite is typified by the brownstone-dweller traipsing through Whole Foods with a yoga mat peeping from the top of her NPR tote.

But, it wont stop there, particularly as squeezed salaries and eroded job securitymake that trip to Whole Foods ever more daunting.

See the rest here:

Automation and the Voters - National Review

Automation is widely discussed in the financial services sector, but it isnt exactly considered sexy anymore. Emilia says it is still the technology that has changed the industry the most.

Automation is one of those subjects people love to talk about. It doesnt elicit confused faces or cautious questions, because people generally already know what it is. Yet, it still has the greatest potential to change the financial services industry, even more than it already has. Firms may have elements of automation deployed throughout their technology stack, but there is still so much room forevolution.

A report from FIS titled The Hunt for Growth, published in June, which surveyed 1,000 buy-side and sell-side firms, shows that there is strong demand for further trade automation, better data management and focus on digitization. The findings note that 59 percent of surveyed buy-side firms anticipate highly automated trade execution in the next three years, while 53 percent of sell-side firms are planning to meet that demand. This automation is not confined to transactions but the whole trade life-cycle, including middle- and back-officeprocessing.

John Avery, director, client and industry engagement, derivatives utility at FIS, says much of this demand is around regulatory compliance and the need to cut costs. The biggest challenges firms are facing are around regulation, the global political climate and of course cost-cutting which is still in place for many in the industry, Avery says. But we see that being committed to technology, those who are best prepared to meet those challenges with technology can continue to do well. He adds that demand for automation, to reduce manual input so employees can focus on more value-added tasks, reinforces thatmessage.

Its not just down to a desire to change, of course. Regulatory reform is encouraging many firms to look at market segments in different ways, and at using resources more intelligently as a result, on a firm-wide basis rather than just in response to specific issues. Part of this is through investment in technology to further cut costs. What is interesting is that there are some firms that want to take advantage of regulatory change, Avery says. They will either de-emphasize or enter certain markets, but as long as theyre invested in technology they are confident they can leverage these changes and even free capital to invest in stronginnovations.

The FIS report shows how important automation still is for financial services. How fast and widespread automation within a company will be, however, greatly depends on their innovation strategy, and while more than half of sell-side and buy-side firms believe in the importance of automation, there are still barriers that prevent them from implementing thesesystems.

In the same way, automation is the driving force behind so many of todays much-hyped technologies. What is artificial intelligence and machine learning, but a way to automate data processing and analysis? Isnt blockchain just a way of automating all the back and forth that counterparties have to do for certaintransactions?

Automation is so widely accepted in the financial services industry, but when phrased in certain ways, can inspire fear that robots will replace people. The same people who express that fear also complain that much of the grunt work in finance is manual. If that pressure is relieved and the skilled people in all areas of the financial services industry are freed up to focus on their core work, who knows where the industry willgo?

Inspiration

This ode to automation was inspired by podcast I heard a few weeks ago, focusing on the history of the humble spreadsheet. Microsoft Excel, todays most widely-used spreadsheet program, was conceived as a means to automate and replace the manually intensive task of writing down numbers on a sheet of paper. This also shows the ephemeral nature of automation. We went from celebrating the computerized spreadsheet to figuring out ways to phase it out completely, in a few shortyears.

The definition of automation is ever-changing, evolving alongside the technology and processes it augments. In the future, its likely that todays brave new frontier of automation might seem as quaint as Excel is starting to seem today. Perhaps then, there will be odes to AI appearing in the pages of this magazine by columnists who look at what were covering today with something akin tonostalgia.

More:

An Ode to Automation - http://www.waterstechnology.com

As coal-fired electric power plants close across the U.S., they take with them coal mining jobs, to be sure. And while those job losses have generated considerable political heat, a no-less important employment shift is under way within power plants themselves.

Gone are many of the mechanics, millwrights, and welders who once held high paying jobs to keep coal-fired power plants operating.

As maintenance-intensive coal-fired power plantschock full of rotating equipment and leak-prone pipes and valves, not to mention conveyer belts and coal ash handling equipmentare retired they are being replaced to a large extent by gas-fired units that make full use of sensors, predictive maintenance software, and automated control systems.

As a result, the extensive use of analytics and automation within natural gas-fired power plants means that staffing levels can be cut to a fraction of what they were a decade ago.

Recent announcements confirm the trend.

On August 1, Michigan-based DTE Energy revealed plans to spend almost $1 billion to build a 1,100-megawatt gas-fired power plant. When the station enters service in 2022, it will replace three existing coal-fired units that currently employ more than 500 people. Job openings at the new gas-fired plant? Thirty-five full-time employees, says a DTE spokesperson.

In late June, Louisiana regulators approved a plan by New Orleans-based Entergy Corp. to build a 994-MW gas-fired combined cycle power plant. The $872 million plant and associated transmission assets are slated to enter service in 2020. Job openings when it comes on line? No more than 31 people to manage, operate, and maintain the plant.

The lower headcount required at new gas-fired power plants like those in Michigan and Louisiana is the result of automation and advances in control system technology.

What changed is the evolution of technology, says W. Dale Claudel, vice president of power generation for Entergy.

Entergys plant in Lake Charles, La. will use two Mitsubishi 501G air-cooled gas turbines coupled with a Toshiba steam turbine. Claudel says that a single control room operator will be able to launch the plants entire startup procedure with the proverbial push of a button.

Once switched on, the plants automated systems are designed to synchronize generator functions, set ramp unit output, monitor firing temperatures, measure and adjust air emissions, all functions that previously required human oversight or intervention.

(Entergy Louisiana has a relatively small amount of coal-fired generation that will continue operating even after the Lake Charles unit is built.)

Whats more, in a conventional power plant outfitted with a boiler, multiple field operators would trek into the plant to visually inspect equipment and burners that were installed on multiple levels of the structure to ensure they were ready for firing. With the new plant, Claudel says that automation will monitor the combustion process, eliminating the need for many of the field operators required to walk the plant prior to startup.

A recent benchmarking effort by Black & Veatch used data from a commercial database of North American gas-fired power generating plants to offer insight into how gas-fired power plants are staffed.

Phillip L. Webster, P.E., associate vice president and project manager of Energy, Power Generation Services at B&V says that the firms research shows that a gas-fired combined-cycle power plant with a 565-MW generating capacity needs around 27 full-time personnel. A plant configured to yield nearly 300 MW more generating capacity requires only six additional people.

So even though the second gas-fired unit is more than 50 percent larger than the first in terms of generating capacity, the number of employees needed to run the plant is only around 25 percent more.

The roles just dont need to exist, he says.

One big reason is that new gas-fired power plants are equipped with sensors that provide constant data streams that are used to monitor turbine performance and feed predictive maintenance algorithms. Predictive maintenance means that maintenance outages can be scheduled well in advance of an equipment failure, and reduce almost to zero the need for in-house maintenance staff.

Software minimizes the effort of the operations and maintenance team, says Shin Gomi, a marketing vice president with Mitsubishi Hitachi Power Systems Americas. The operational reliability of an advanced gas turbine may approach 99 percent, he says, and operating efficiencies are edging toward 65 percent, nearly double the efficiency of most coal-fired units that are being replaced. Expenses for operations and maintenance, fuel, and employees all can be cut with gas-fired power plant technology.

With gas price volatility greatly reduced and gas supply greatly enhanced through hydraulic fracturing technology, long-lived gas-fired technology can be planned for by cost-sensitive utilities that historically have limited options available to them to enhance shareholder value.

The extent of automation and digital equipment in new gas-fired power plants also means that operators need to have different sets of skills. Gone are the specialized millwrights and boiler operators.

They are being replaced, Entergys Claudel says, by people who understand operations as processes and who are able program, troubleshoot, and tune the ultra-efficient turbines.

IEEE Spectrums energy, power, and green tech blog, featuring news and analysis about the future of energy, climate, and the smart grid.

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A Georgia Tech professor of robotics argues automation is still creating more jobs than it destroys 9Apr2013

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In a corner of Nebraska, a power plant continues a 60-year history of innovation as it aims to burn hydrogen for electric power generation 11Jul

Clean coal technology suffered a setback when efforts to start up the gasification portion of an IGCC plant in Mississippi were halted 30Jun

Methane Monitor increases speed and cuts costs of detecting greenhouse gas leaks from the air 29May

Methane rules and the Paris Accord expose friction within the GOP and the Trump administration over climate and energy policy 15May

Enviro Powers small steam turbine could cut homeowners electricity bills by 30 percent 18Apr

A mathematical rethink suggests that carbon dioxide will warm Earth more in the future than it does today. But better satellitessuch as those Trump wants to scrapare needed to reduce climate uncertainty 17Apr

The sweeping attack on climate action that President Trump demanded in his executive order is likely to prove but short-lived relief for coal miners who cheered him at the EPA 29Mar

NASAs new geosensing satellites may be on the chopping block. The timing could hardly be worse 9Mar

Injection wells that dispose of wastewater from oil and gas drilling operations can trigger earthquakes. Stanford releases a free tool to predict the risk 7Mar

Over budget and behind schedule, a clean coal facility may be a relic before it can become fully operational 28Feb

As coal industry jobs are lost, likely not to return, some in coal country have turned to coding 15Feb

Deregulation actions by congressional Republicans may undercut innovative sensor technology by quashing methane detection at oil and gas sites 13Feb

DOE report says renewable power generation jobs surpassed those in fossil fuels, and are growing faster 26Jan

Petra Nova, the world's biggest CCS project, started up last week, and other sites show that it's not just for coal anymore 16Jan

Analytics from Berkeley-based WattTime precisely match new loads on a grid to the power plant that will serve them, providing estimates of carbon intensity that are up to 45 percent more accurate than regional averages. Such tools can guide cleaner charging by electric vehicles, and yield a bigger carbon reduction bang from energy efficiency measures and renewable power projects. 26Dec2016

Some of the work of the U.S. Department of Energy's advanced research wing fits fine with Trump's priorities, but analysts worry the next generation of solar tech could suffer 5Dec2016

Aluminum-based device produces industrially useful compounds 20Jul2016

Excerpt from:

Automation Is Engineering the Jobs Out of Power Plants - IEEE Spectrum