Polar bears are normally seen along the Arctic coasts or on ocean ice, like here along the Hudson Bay. But recently, things have changed.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MATTHIAS BREITER, MINDEN PICTURES/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

Polar Bears Appear Where They Never Were Before

The big predators have been rummaging through science camps at the top of Greenland's ice sheet far inland, where they were never expected. Is climate change driving them?

BY CHERYL KATZ

PUBLISHED JULY 20, 2018

Ryan Kunz was sleeping in his tent on the ice when the polar bear wandered into camp. At 10,500 feet high, in the middle of the Greenland Ice Sheet more than 200 miles from the nearest coast, the remote U.S. scientific research station was about the last place anyone expected one of these sea ice-dwelling animals to be.

Yet here it was, lumbering around the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Summit Station, the highest-altitude, northernmost science operation in the Arctic, where key meteorology and other research is conducted. Kunz, a carpenter from Florida, was one of the half-dozen or so workers sleeping in “Tent City”—a collection of orange domes atop snow glinting in the June 24-hour sunlight. It was 5:13 a.m.

“I woke up and people were screaming at us that there was a bear,” Kunz recalls. “It didn’t make sense to me there was a bear there.”

Never before had a polar bear been seen this far up the ice sheet, and people had generally assumed it wasn’t possible. Thinking it was perhaps some sort of drill, he and the other Tent City residents began walking casually toward the Big House, a hard-sided building up on stilts.

“We come around the corner and there is a polar bear maybe 30 to 50 feet away, and it was coming at us,” says Kunz. “That definitely picked up our speed!”

The standoff lasted 36 hours. Most of the 31 staff onsite hunkered indoors, while a few drove loud machinery around the site to repel the bear. Some tried launching food far off onto the ice in an effort to lure it away. Mahi mahi was the bear’s favorite, according to the general consensus of people who watched as it roamed the station: investigating the outhouse, poking its nose into tents, and trying to get into the garbage throughout that day, night and into the next day.

The female bear’s incredible journey to the top of the Northern Hemisphere’s largest ice sheet last month [June 13-14] may have set a record for a polar bear climb, says polar bear expert Andrew Derocher. While the bears, whose normal habitat is sea ice, do sometimes travel inland and cross glaciers, “I can’t imagine anywhere else that a bear could get that high off the ground,” says Derocher, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Alberta, Canada, and scientific advisor to Polar Bears International. “It’s such a weird thing, I mean here’s an animal that spends its whole life at sea level.”

But climate change is decimating polar bears’ sea ice habitat across the Arctic, leading to an International Union for Conservation of Nature Red Listclassification as “vulnerable.” With bears forced to venture afield for food at the same time that humans increasingly venture north for resources and recreation, Derocher and others say such encounters are likely to increase.

A Trio of Dangerous Incidents

Indeed, this was the third time in the past three years that a polar bear has made its way to a science station deep in the Greenland Ice Sheet interior. Twice before, one had been seen at a Danish ice coring site 8,800 feet up, including one just a few weeks earlier.

Fortunately, no people were hurt in any of those incidents. But, while seals are the bears’ normal diet, they have been known to prey on humans. Earlier this month, one fatally mauled a man who was on an outing with his children in western Hudson Bay, Canada. Two years ago, scientists on a remote Russian Arctic island were trapped in their cabin for days by a pack of polar bears that ate one of their dogs.

This polar bear rummaged through the Summit Station at the top of Greenland this summer, where the animals had never been seen before.

PHOTOGRAPH BY PAT SMITH

A study released last year analyzed reported polar bear attacks on humans across the Arctic between 1870 and 2014, and tallied 73 confirmed attacks, with 20 deaths. The study concluded that, while attacks on humans were historically rare, the greatest number took place in 2010-2014—years with exceedingly low summer sea ice, which is rapidly declining due to climate change. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, Arctic sea ice extent this June was the fourth lowest since satellite observations began in 1981.

Polar bears are coming into communities more often these days, says Kristin Laidre, a marine biologist at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center, and an authority on polar bear populations in Greenland. “It’s happening all over the Arctic, and it’s something that’s only going to be an increasing problem as we continue to lose sea ice,” she says.

While it’s too soon to tell whether the three recent polar bear visits high in the ice sheet’s interior mean such epic treks will become more common, Laidre says, “I think as we move forward towards this ice-free Arctic, bears are going to end up places they wouldn’t prefer to be.” (The “starving polar bear” photographers explain what they would have done differently.)

“It Looked So Cute”

As for the polar bear’s visit to Summit Station, it ended happily for everyone but the bear. A sharpshooter flown in from Iceland killed it, after warning shots failed to drive it away.

For now, Tent City will stand empty, with everyone crowding into the facility’s two indoor dormitories. A “bear spotter” from New Zealand has been bought in to patrol at night. Safety practices at other NSF research sites in known bear country, such as Alaska, will now be instituted up on the ice sheet, says Jennifer Mercer, program manager for Arctic research and support.

“It is common for researchers to carry weapons as well as bear deterrents, such as bear spray, air horns, and things like that,” says Mercer. “The difference at Summit Station is that it is extremely far inland. We’ve never had a bear enter the station before.”

Kunz said he was only scared after the fact, when he read about polar bears’ predatory behavior.

“It looked so cute. It was like the cutest thing in the world,” he says. “But it definitely needed some food. It was a young female, a long way from where it needed to be.”

Blockchain explained

05/01/2018

         

Jo-Jo Hubbard, co-founder of blockchain company Electron, tells Kelvin Ross that she has a vision of how data will forever transform the energy sector

Joanna Hubbard’s enthusiasm for the blockchain platform she is helping to pioneer is evident within minutes of meeting her. Instead of delivering a thinly disguised sales pitch for a bit of technology, she makes a lucid and engaging argument for a solution that she passionately believes is the key to helping deliver a successful decentralized energy market.

As the co-founder and chief operating officer of UK company Electron, Joanna – or Jo-Jo as she likes to be known – has for two and a half years been delivering the message that blockchain is the missing piece in the 21st century decentralized energy jigsaw.

And it’s a message that has gained considerable traction: since its early days Electron has had the backing of the UK government, Siemens and Japanese energy giant TEPCO, and this year it formed a blockchain consortium comprising Baringa, EDF Energy, Flexitricity, Kiwi Power, Northern Powergrid, Open Energi, Shell, Statkraft and UK Power Networks. Last year Electron was named by the World Economic Forum as one of the top 30 most promising technology pioneers.

Hubbard’s journey into blockchain started when she was working for consulting firm McKinsey in its Digital Strategy Transformation team. She read that ‘blockchain 1.0’ is the transfer of payments with bitcoin, cryptocurrency etc, and ‘blockchain 2.0’ would be the settlement of contractual relationships.

“And I had this moment of ‘Wow, that’s what you need for a decentralizing energy industry’,” she says.

She and her co-founder Paul Ellis worked on the concept, with the help of ex-npower chief Paul Massara as a “mentor and sounding board”, and Electron was born. Massara 
has since become the company’s chief executive.

Before we get into what blockchain is and does in the digital energy landscape, I ask Hubbard for her definition of what exactly ‘digitalization’ means in an energy sector context.

“Digitalization means a lot of different things to a lot of different people,” she says. “In the 4D energy sector [digitalization, decarbonization, decentralization and democratization], the digitalization of energy refers to the collection of data.

“But for me, and for Electron and our focus, we’re looking at two key components: physically representing digital assets in the system and we’re looking at digitally representing the flows of those assets: the trading and the operational data.”

She says that as we move from a traditionally centralized energy system to one that is increasingly decentralized, “suddenly that data becomes incredibly important: that ability to represent the system in a digital fashion. Because all of the new business models coming up around optimization, flexibility, energy services, tariffs… they all rely on having access to that fundamental data and optimization.”

So what is blockchain? And why is it so often misunderstood – or not even understood at all?

“The reason that a lot of people don’t understand blockchain comes from the fact that people aren’t usually explaining blockchain in the abstract – they are explaining a particular blockchain. So they are making claims like, ‘blockchain is transparent, blockchain is opaque, blockchain is secure, blockchain is not secure, blockchain is fast, blockchain is slow’. And they all might be true for ‘a blockchain’, but they aren’t really true of blockchain in the abstract.

“Blockchain in the abstract is a technology. Essentially, it’s a protocol, a set of rules, which is enforced across participants in a network.

“And when all those participants adhere to those rules, they are able to essentially update the status of the network and maintain that network together.

“So in the energy space, blockchain is very exciting in terms of being this coordination mechanism.”

She says in an increasingly decentralized energy world, “we need a new coordination mechanism that is capable of enforcing a set of rules across all those different assets. And that gives them the ability to access a market in a rules-based, auditable fashion. And that’s why I think the energy industry is getting very excited about this technology.”

She stresses that blockchain in itself is not a business model: “It’s a technology that enables much more granular business models and much more asset participation in the energy industry.

“What’s almost been misleading about recent waves of press coverage is that blockchain does not necessarily enable new business models.

“Business models like peer-to-peer or vehicle-to-grid are possible with a central intermediary. Blockchain allows them to do it without the central intermediary – which can improve the cost efficiency function and also the trust function.”

Hubbard highlights decentralized energy as one aspect of the energy industry that is “particularly ripe for coordination. Coordination across potentially competing, potentially non-competitive parties. And that’s Electron’s core focus – the flexibility markets.

“There’s a really exciting component of the flexibility trade that doesn’t really exist on any exchange product today.

“A single turn-up or turn-down action from an end user has multiple non-rival value components for different players in the energy market. So, if I’m a battery and I take a turn-down action, the net effect of the system balancing has a value to the system’s operator, and they might pay for it. The location of that action will have a net positive or negative effect for the distribution operator who’s trying to manage flows and constraints and asset lives, so he’s capable of putting a price to that. And it also has a value to a supplier because they are trying to balance their trading position.

“And you might have people in that area who want to reward that person for producing local or green energy.”

So she says that while today only bilateral trade is possible, “as soon as you bring in a blockchain-trading layer, you can coordinate all the different trading elements. You can make sure that one asset receives the full value stack.”

Electron has built two blockchain platforms: an asset registration platform and a trading platform.

“Our application is an enterprise application that is solving a problem that a lot of asset owners or flexibility providers or aggregators want solved, and that participants on the other side who are buying this flexibility haven’t been allowed to solve themselves.”

Hubbard says the reason Electron has enjoyed such swift success “is because we have done it with the industry”.

“Coordination is key to realizing the full value of digitalization. There are three core platforms that need to be coordinated and shared. It’s the asset register: what is it; where is it; there’s the trading platform and the rules around how you are allowed to interact; and then there’s the data repository.

“Everything else – all the other competitive business models – can be built on top of of that structure, but that infrastructure needs to exist first.”

However, the key element Hubbard stresses for the energy industry, is that “you can start doing it in little pieces. You can build it up piecemeal as the market requires it.

“With blockchain you can build a living, breathing data set and you can decentralize the responsibility for keeping that up to date – maintaining it and correcting it – and you have this perfect auditable record of who has changed what data, and how, and when.

“You fulfil the governance functions that you need for something like national infrastructure.”

Hubbard says the key to developing the blockchain platform is “about building something that’s future-proof”.

“We know we need to build an infrastructure that enables greater asset participation in the system. Because that creates more competition it increases the efficiency of the system, and it also increases the resiliency of the system.”

Electron is focused on the UK energy market but the company is attracting global interest because of the adaptability of the technology.

“Almost every country with a developed renewable energy market is looking at these issues,” says Hubbard.

How blockchain powers energy digital transformation

08/13/2018

By Sidharth Mishra, Managing Partner, Downstream Oil & Gas, Wipro 

         

The rise of data-driven enterprises and changes in consumer habits mean that the way business is done in energy markets is changing.

Emerging technologies are driving digital transformation and causing industry disruption on a large scale, bringing major benefits to the energy sector. Boasting trustworthiness and transparency, blockchain is one such technology.

This potentially revolutionary innovation can help businesses to manage the growing complexities of the industry while also eliminating inefficiencies.  

Blockchain, also known as a shared ledger, is a database that keeps a digital paper trail of all transactions. The ledger is not located in one place. Instead, it is stored on a chain of hundreds or even thousands of computers around the world. When a change is made to one record (block) in the ledger, this is reflected throughout the entire chain, along with a timestamp of the change.

This makes it impossible to alter one block retrospectively without altering all subsequent blocks – which would require consensus from the whole chain. This is why blockchain is attractive for any transactions which need to be completed in a secure way, and where transactions cannot be changed or re-allocated. Blockchain is best known as the backbone of cryptocurrency Bitcoin as payments between sender and receiver are secure. But its capabilities extend far beyond cryptocurrencies.

There are three key ways that digital technologies like blockchain can improve business. The first is the development of new business models, which is perhaps the strongest value-adding benefit. The second is disrupting existing processes. Outdated business practices can stunt growth, while reimagining and redefining them can have a transformative effect. The third major strength of blockchain is disintermediation. The technology can help to disintermediate existing value chains and offer ways of redefining them. This can give businesses direct access to information that otherwise would require a mediator.

Development of new business models

In terms of new business models and innovative digital platforms enabled by blockchain, we have already witnessed the convergence of different industries within the marketplace. For example, oil companies have become actively interested in owning capacities for power generating and for the ‘last mile’ delivery of marketing services to both B2B and B2C channels. By doing so, they are attempting to play a role across the end-to-end hydrocarbon supply chain. It is beneficial for both them and their customers to provide services that improve business. Blockchain can become one of the key mechanisms for B2C channels to manage authentication, management, syndication and sharing of the datasets in a secure and trustworthy manner across various parties within the ecosystem.

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Another example is the peer-to-peer trading of energies, where the consumer is someone who both consumes and produces. This means that they can be incentivized to generate renewable electricity and trade any surplus they might have as a result. If given the opportunity to create energy which offers individual value from which they themselves can benefit, today’s consumer will be willing to pay the premium price to join the service. However, they might not have the insight to do this efficiently. A scalable business model could develop around people who want to offer and transact within a marketplace. 

Here, blockchain offers a trustworthy depository where consumers are able to place that marketplace dataset, including information on how much energy they produce, how much they are offering for sale, and to whom. All of that information remains unaltered in a blockchain-based depository which is secure to use for all parties within the network.

Another example of a new business model revolves around electric vehicles. There is a rapidly developing network of vehicle charging stations, with many large companies taking positions within this sphere. Blockchain could be central to such a service, enabling authorization, authentication and maintenance of that charging station dataset. Blockchain can become a foundational digital platform, capable of orchestrating the sharing of power across different channels, helping to create and scale new business models. In Europe, Wipro has worked with a client to create a marketplace for electric vehicle and hybrid charging points, developed on a blockchain-based solution.

Disrupting existing processes

The second key benefit of blockchain centres on reimagining, redefining and retooling existing business processes. There are numerous examples where blockchain can potentially disrupt the way that things are currently done, to make them more efficient and secure and less expensive to run and maintain. 

This could benefit everything from procurement supply chain-related work processes to customer-facing or customer value-creating processes. Blockchain can give the data pipe the necessary level of security, resilience and performance so that it can be securely used by a hub of different participants within that process.

Cutting out the intermediaries

The third key advantage of blockchain within the energy market is disintermediation. In the energy industry – including power, oil, gas and renewables – each individual sector has a unique opportunity to take advantage of the technology. The electricity market has gone through a transition of regulation to deregulation.

This means that there has been a history of market participants who have a series of business interests where one feeds off the other. At every node of the ecosystem, there is always some value creation - but there are inefficiencies. The same applies to oil and gas, with movement and creation of hydrocarbon and molecules across the supply chain, involving parties in between.

Agents, brokers and providers support the existing supply chain, but they also accrue costs to the business over time. Blockchain has the potential of uniting all these roles and making everything much more efficient by cutting out the middle man - removing some of these intermediates from the process.

MORE IN-DEPTH BLOCKCHAIN: Blockchain explained

A classic example of this disintermediation is in trading cycles where there is a lot of manual handling between several parties. Blockchain can completely disrupt that whole process, creating a digital mechanism for businesses to carry out post-trade settlement, trade processing and even to manage trade finance.

There is currently a range of industry initiatives that are trying to achieve this. The same applies to small-scale energy businesses where the challenge is to create a digital marketplace, rather than a physical one where people are interacting using more traditional methods that involve a significant degree of inefficiency. Blockchain can have a huge positive impact on traditional supply chains that are currently reliant on ageing and inefficient processes.

Igniting the blockchain revolution

Many businesses are experimenting with various new technologies, trying to determine which ones suit their businesses best, including blockchain. We can see various scalable production-grade deployments in the industry, most of which are in the more physical supply chain, mainly concentrating on container businesses and in some cases around remittances. These early use cases give an early indication of the vast potential of blockchain, which is now becoming a focus for more organisations looking at how they can strategically use new technologies to accelerate their businesses.

Therefore, interested parties are now coming together to create common definitions, data standards and solutions backed by blockchain, and participate in industry consortiums by putting in equity and investments.

Wipro recently became an affiliate of the Energy Web Foundation (EWF), a global nonprofit organisation focused on accelerating the adoption of blockchain technology in the energy sector. In collaboration with more than 50 affiliates from around the globe, EWF is building and scaling the Energy Web Chain, the first public, open-space blockchain platform tailor-made for the energy sector.

As we are still in the early stages of the blockchain revolution: the technology is at times misunderstood and viewed as an answer looking for a problem – similar to an aspirin looking for headaches.

This is why Wipro is investing in deployable business use cases for this promising technology, and in relevant solution accelerators. These are ready-to-use “software building blocks” for common business requirements which accelerate the development of customised software. This will drive adoption of blockchain, enabling organizations to focus on identifying the strategic value of blockchain to their business.

Wipro is an active contributor in various technology development and strategy forums. We have made selective investments in industry consortiums to promote standardization and development of secure and scalable platforms for digital market place, straight through processing, remittances etc. Our blockchain lab as a service is underpinned with industry solution frameworks and technology assets, so as to enable organizations to rapidly experiment and innovate on their digital transformation and acceleration efforts.

Blockchain offers huge possibilities for the energy industry and is set to play a key role in its digital transformation. We believe that 2018 will see the growth of blockchain as a viable platform, coupled with industry-wide efforts to create common standards that will enable more business to unlock the potential of the new technology. 

Blockchain: From disruption to new business models

05/16/2018

By Thomas Steinberger, Robert Schwarz and Sergiu Maznic, Pöyry Management Consultancy 

         

Blockchain has the potential to change the business world as we know it today. Entire value chains can be shortened by it – including in the energy industry.

In the field of renewables, this shift can lead to new business models, from peer-to-peer trading to flexibility schemes or investment incentives to name just a few. Although startups and even classical utilities are increasing their efforts in developing blockchain-based applications and processes, nevertheless the number of scalable case studies is marginal right now and developers have difficulties realising their promising ideas.

So how does the blockchain vision translate into the world of energy, utilities and renewables?

As a digital transaction system that allows for secure data storage and execution of smart contracts in peer-to-peer networks, blockchain can eliminate the need for intermediaries in transactions. Instead, they are performed peer-to-peer in near real time, as integrity and security are guaranteed by the blockchain.

From an IT perspective, blockchains solve the double spending problem – a phenomenon of the current state of the internet where a copy of each set of data is sent from server to server when information is transferred. For any transaction system this issue needs to be eliminated, which so far has been the job of trusted institutions.

By taking over this task blockchains make any intermediary superfluous and are therefore referred to as the Internet of Value – an evolution of the current Internet of Information. A next step might be the application of blockchains in the energy sector as the Internet of Energy, which leads us to the ever-growing startup scene around the technology.

Blockchain technology gained relevance for the energy sector at the beginning of 2016 with an experiment in Brooklyn, New York, when owners of PV systems sold their power in the neighbourhood using the Ethereum blockchain without a utility.

A recent survey indicates that today, around two years after the launch of a major blockchain microgrid research project, there are 122 organizations involved in blockchain technology and 40 deployed projects. Between Q2 2017 and Q1 2018, over $300 million was invested in the blockchain in the energy industry.

While it is still much too soon to speak of a triumph as blockchains must continue to evolve, the technology has the potential to radically change the energy industry. It provides the opportunity for new or more efficient business models and thus the opportunity for entirely new companies entering the market.

Starting points

The years 2015 and 2016 were starting points for blockchain in the energy sector. The last month was marked with relevant infrastructure layers like the Tobalaba test network of the Energy Web Foundation or IOTA - a blockless distributed ledger, so in the coming years we will see numerous rollouts of new, relevant application layer and business models.

There are at present many new players who are currently developing entirely new areas of value creation, with a variety of startups and established utilities working hard to test blockchain technology. These possible platforms and distributed database systems are striving for acceptance in order to become the leading player in the decentralized world.

Following the example of over 70 banks and financial institutions and their R3 consortium, utilities could also attempt to enable a decentralized power grid and compensate for lost revenues by providing the business platform as a service via such community chains — a kind of consortium. Since the consortium’s participants are known and thus have a particular level of trust to each other, the integrated governance of these kind of blockchains is much easier than for free accessible public blockchains. This, in turn, also leads to the advantage of a less energy intensive performance.

There are many indications that blockchains will gain a foothold in the energy sector — an efficient decentralised energy world requires appropriate decentralized technologies. Blockchains could represent and execute various business processes of the energy world and would be an ideal instrument for IoT devices to manage their transactions.

Blockchains are also useful as a trust-building element to provide transaction logs for energy to manage power flows and the accounting of cellular systems, automate proof of origin, enable P2P trading and the administration of asset registers. Companies and foundations are currently developing the next generation of blockchains for the energy industry, which protect privacy, are fast enough, and have the usual interfaces.

For a wide implementation, developers still struggle to identify the specific business model for the different use cases and simultaneously comply with regulatory requirements. A tremendous regulatory hurdle is the European General Data Protection Regulation and the right to be forgotten. Blockchain is actually not designed for meeting the current state of regulation since one of its major features is immutability. Another hurdle is the handling of personal data. With peer-to-peer deliveries one can draw many conclusions on the personal behaviour. From this aspect a way to aggregate and de-personalise data has to be found. In addition, energy law varies from country to country, which means that the application must be adapted to national law or national law has to assimilate to the principles of blockchain.

Euphoria and reality

In truth, blockchain technology can barely justify the current hype around it. Blockchains are not a panacea, but should rather be seen as one of many technologies that could form the basis for next-generation service infrastructure in the energy sector.

Many digital services are already possible today without blockchains. While many ideas are being developed around the technology, a clear direction of where and with what economic benefits blockchain-based applications could be used is still far from apparent. Most of the current applications are attempting to solve fractional parts of the energy market problems, being far away from the often-named vision of a blockchain of everything.

Meanwhile, research and use would clarify limitations of the technology in the state of the art, for example, limited rate of transactions, long response times between the connected network peers, or the ever-growing volume of data. We are currently experiencing a phase where the blockchain energy pilots from a few years ago are under pressure to deliver concrete results and pathways for commercialisation.

The blockchain euphoria alone is not sufficient to maintain the funding for projects in eternal proof of concept stage. Therefore, the priority at the moment should be to prove the existence of a viable business model by focusing on a real, existing problem that consumers or energy actors are facing.

Disruption vs Enabling

Although utilities should actively engage with blockchain technology, there is no reason to be alarmed as the technology is still young for use in the energy sector. Blockchain technologies work wherever transaction costs exceed the transaction value – for energy trading, processes in high temporal resolution (real-time energy economy) become necessary. However, both the related opportunities and risks are already apparent. They should be examined with respect to each company’s own position and strategy in order to derive strategic options. For the majority of companies, the fast-follower strategy is possibly the most appropriate one, but future-proofing the business is even more important.

As with any new technology, the existing market players should invest time and resources to understand the potential and develop use cases. The incumbents can be disrupted if they stop innovating and adapting to new business models. A number of European utilities have understood this and they are actively researching this area.

Another relevant question that remains unanswered is “will blockchain enable a renewable future?” Interestingly enough, the majority of the existing projects, especially crowdfunding-focused startups, are somewhat exaggerating the greenness in their communication.

Despite this, the reduction in market friction by the future blockchain application will have a positive impact on the future of renewables. The current electricity market is still struggling to integrate a high share of intermittent generation and operate the grid in a smarter way. The blockchain applications that we are seeing today could create the basis for a more digitalised and automated market where it will be easier to trade flexibility, cheaper to balance intermittent generation, or perhaps even remove the need for balancing by implementing real time nodal pricing.

Although the technology is not yet sufficiently scalable and regulatory hurdles have to be overcome, these examples set the vision for a number of passionate players to develop the market of the future."