AI-R ... for AI Research, or AI-Ruins?

In my last post I covered (briefly) the S1500 buoyant wind turbine, and I closed by saying I would continue the series with a bit more about wind energy from a project perspective.

In this post I provide readers with the result of some back and forth with AI that yielded a set of myths and facts about wind energy that was educational for me on two fronts.

1. It solidified some background science around wind turbines
2. It re-confirmed what I have been ‘preaching’ about AI – it takes a CON-VER-SATION and critical thinking to create anything of value with AI.

In fact, I must say, this turned out to be more of an exercise on AI use and lessons learned than on wind power.

So, without further delay, here are three infographics that cover myths and facts about wind turbines (and related projects).  I will comment about what it took to generate these and where AI succeeded, and where it fell down miserably.

First up: Birds

Next up: Whales

Next up: Windmills are not green (??)

And lastly, I asked AI to keep the same theme and give me sources.  Here it failed miserably, putting some of the valid sources under the MYTH column, counter-productive to the prompting and previous parts of the conversation. 
You need to watch AI’s outputs very carefully!  And even then, the source links it provided were often dead ends and I needed to go find them myself.

I gave up having it draw these and below I provide the sources in link form for you.

But wait!  I thought I would check the sources.  I did.  Many were wrong. Many were dead ends.  I think in many cases they were sites that have been edited by the new US Administration.  But whatever the reason, there is a lesson learned here - do not take verbatim what AI gives you, even something like a link for a source.  Maybe especially a link for a citation or a source!

Sources

Birds

U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service – Bird mortality data: https://www.fws.gov

May et al. (2020) – Blade painting study: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10336-020-01738-2

WRONG!  Here is a more valid link: https://tethys.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/publications/May_EcolEvol_2020.pdf

Arnett et al. (2013, 2016) – Curtailment studies: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320712005052

WRONG!  Here is a more valid link: https://tethys.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/publications/Arnett-2016-Bats.pdf

WRONG!  Here is a more valid link:  National Audubon Society – Wind energy policy: https://www.audubon.org/conservation/wind-energy

Whales

NOAA Fisheries – Offshore wind & whales FAQ: https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov

WRONG – Or at least too high up in the web structure!  Here is a more valid, specific link:

https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/new-england-mid-atlantic/marine-life-distress/frequent-questions-offshore-wind-and-whales

Marine Mammal Commission – Fact sheet: https://www.mmc.gov

WRONG – Or at least too high up in the web structure!  Here is a more valid, specific link:

https://www.mmc.gov/priority-topics/offshore-energy-development-and-marine-mammals/renewable-energy-development-and-marine-mammals/

With this (and other problems with links, such as being sent to “Forbidden” sites, I  gave up.  I stopped going to AI for sources and the remainder you see here were done by the (human)author.

Human-found sources:

Green/Energy Payback

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383304335_Determining_Payback_Period_and_Comparing_Two_Small-Scale_Vertical_Axis_Wind_Turbines_Installed_at_the_Top_of_Residential_Buildings IEA –

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/392309203_Empirical_life_cycle_analysis_LCA_of_wind_turbines

So, my friends, please.  Use AI.  It can be helpful.  But each interaction requires your ATTENTION and CRITICAL THINKING to what it gives you - don't take it verbatim.  This applies to images, text, and, as I learned here, references and citations.

In this post I will discuss some new developments in wind power.

Wind power:  It has been a (in my opinion unnecessarily) controversial topic for some time, most particularly in the past 8 years or so.

For example, here are some recent comments from US President Donald Trump with his opinions about wind energy:

..and here is a more ‘engineering’ -based analysis and criticism:

But here, finally, is a fairly even-handed assessment from Newcastle, Australia.  Frankly, in my humble opinion, if you are going to watch one - this one is worth your attention because of its balanced and fact-based approach (with - of course - some Australian sense of humor thrown in).

One interesting (and cited) fact from that video is that cats kill more birds in an hour than wind turbines kill in a year. (Reference 1, Reference 2)

However, despite all the hubbub over towered wind turbines, and wherever you stand - even if it is in a bird graveyard under a wind turbine, this post is about some glowering over a non-tower-power from which some may cower.  China recently released very interesting news about its S1500.  Most information about this project is coming from the Chinese government and it is new and not as peer-reviewed as I would like it to be.

Here's a story from AviationWeek: https://aviationweek.com/aerospace/emerging-technologies/china-tests-worlds-largest-buoyant-airborne-turbine

...and a brief video about it:

Given the lack of information on this new 'launch', what I have done is provided you a table that shows – from my research – what the S1500 can do (again according to what is available mostly from the government – see below) and which compares it to other non-tower wind projects.

This idea is not new, by the way.  Back in 2014, MIT was touting its flying turbine.

Here’s the story on that effort from MIT: https://news.mit.edu/2014/high-flying-turbine-produces-more-power-0515

I will have more about this in a second post, hopefully not full of hot air – before the end of the month.

Inspired by the film, Cities of the Future (see last blog post, “An Optimist’s View of Construction Projects and Programs”), I wanted to look at the engineering, project management, and specifically to dig even further into the sponsorship and chartering of the initiatives I saw in the film. 

How did they get started?  What was the rationale?  Who were the sponsors?  How did they identify the key stakeholders for inception, construction, and use?  How did they get stakeholders to align?

Having already covered The Edge, an amazing office building in Amsterdam, I shift here to Singapore, partially because the IMAX images of things like the Gardens by the Bay, the Marina Sands Expansion Project, and the tree-planting efforts literally evoked a collective gasp from the audience.  I admit it – I was one of the louder gaspers.

It turns out that these efforts (as you may have figured) don’t happen on their own.  It takes a collaboration of government, industry, academia, as well as engineering prowess and, of course, great project leadership to get things like this started, done – done well, and maintained – thoughtfully.

I came across an interview in ASCE’s  with civil engineer Paul Lee, who was featured in the film – pretty much your tour guide to go along with John Krasinski’s narration.

In the interview from ASCE’s Civil Engineering Source magazine, one particular Q and A caught my attention:

CE (Q): Your own career path has not followed that of a typical civil engineer — you’ve worked as an engineer in technical and governmental policy positions. How might the civil engineers who design future cities need to expand their own experience or expertise in perhaps nontraditional ways?

PL (A): A lot of times we think of civil engineering as a field that has discrete, specific areas. In school, we talk about our track or specialization, such as structural or geotechnical engineering. But more and more, from what I’ve noticed, civil engineers have greater roles and responsibilities as far as project management, planning, and policymaking. And there will be greater opportunities in which our work will be more intersectional, more policy related, more holistic.

I think this speaks to the blurred lines we see even in my work at Boston University.  Civil Engineers need project management (and project LEADERSHIP) skills and traits.  Project Managers (and the certifications and training that go along with our field) need to know more about the technical fields in which they work.

Bloomberg has produced a short video which gives some context about the drivers for these initiatives – watch it here.

Singapore’s Green Plan is the portfolio of programs and projects.  I think that’s worth a deeper dive.

Singapore Green Plan

The portfolio has 5 key pillars (we can think of these as programs).

1. City in Nature
2. Sustainable Living
3. Energy Reset
4. Green Economy
5. Resilient Future

Here is a breakdown of the key initiatives within each pillar: 

1. City in Nature

This pillar aims to create a greener, more livable, and sustainable home for Singaporeans by restoring nature to the urban landscape. 

• Key initiatives:
  • Plant one million more trees across Singapore by 2030.
  • Increase the land area of nature parks by over 50%.
  • Ensure every household is within a 10-minute walk of a park.
  • Strengthen the connectivity between green spaces through park connectors. 

2. Sustainable Living

This pillar focuses on encouraging Singaporeans to adopt a more sustainable way of life, with an emphasis on reducing carbon emissions and waste. 

• Key initiatives:
  • Reduce waste sent to landfill per capita per day by 30% by 2030.
  • Encourage water efficiency and reduce household water consumption.
  • Reduce carbon emissions in schools and implement eco-stewardship programs.
  • Promote sustainable transportation habits, including public transport, cycling, and walking. 

3. Energy Reset

The goal of this pillar is to lower Singapore's carbon footprint by using cleaner energy and increasing energy efficiency. 

• Key initiatives:
  • Quadruple solar energy deployment by 2025 and increase it to at least 2 GWp by 2030.
  • Transition all newly registered cars to cleaner-energy models by 2030.
  • Deploy 60,000 electric vehicle (EV) charging points nationwide by 2030.
  • Make 80% of buildings in Singapore "green" by 2030 under the Green Mark scheme. 

4. Green Economy

This pillar seeks to create new job opportunities and transform industries by leveraging sustainability as a competitive advantage. 

• Key initiatives:
  • Position Singapore as a leading hub for green finance and carbon services in Asia.
  • Develop Jurong Island into a sustainable energy and chemicals park.
  • Implement programs, like the Enterprise Sustainability Programme, to help companies, especially SMEs, develop sustainability capabilities.
  • Attract and foster sustainable tourism. 

5. Resilient Future

This pillar focuses on strengthening Singapore's resilience against climate change, including addressing rising sea levels and ensuring food security. 

• Key initiatives:
  • Develop coastal protection measures for vulnerable areas.
  • Enhance food security by targeting to meet 30% of Singapore's nutritional needs with local produce by 2030.
  • Mitigate the urban heat island effect.
  • Strengthen research and development in climate resilience. 

Here’s a short summary video that covers the Green Plan, coming from the Singapore government (with more detail here).

Finally, since this month’s posts have been about optimism, I leave you with an enjoyable walkthrough of Gardens by the Bay

I recently had a chance to see a tremendous film at the Boston Museum of Science, in the Mugar Auditorium (in IMAX mode).  The film was “Cities of the Future”.  It was narrated by John Krasinski of “The Office” fame, and for those of you who are fans, you’ll understand that I kept thinking I would see him (as his character, Jim Halpern) turn to the camera and make an ironic face (as below)  However, that did not happen. 

It's OK.  If I want more of this, I can watch reruns.  

What did happen is that I saw – rather, experienced – a heartwarming, uplifting, optimistic view of some amazing infrastructure projects in progress, and some being imagined.  The film takes you on sweeping, beautiful views of Amsterdam, Singapore, Los Angeles and more, featuring construction projects that should inspire you as a project leader.

Here’s the trailer from the film:

As an example of one of the featured completed projects, here is an example from The Netherlands:  The Edge – a building in Amsterdam considered the greenest building in the world, and featuring 30,000 sensors connected to a single app for the community, making it also one of the smartest, most connected buildings on the planet.  Bloomberg has produced a wonderful 5-minute video about it which, although not the IMAX movie, gives you a sense of what kinds of wonders you’ll find in Cities of the Future.  Please have a look:

Although the projects were amazing and fascinating, it may be a program that really touched my heart.  

One of the most heartwarming threads of the film was the coverage of the Future City competition.  This is a STEM program for kids in Middle School and High School.  It’s a science fair on steroids.  more than 85,000 students annually from the US, Canada, China, Egypt, and Nigeria and other countries.

The kids are so passionate and interested in their projects.  If we could capture even one-tenth of this energy for our projects (construction or otherwise) and sprinkle it on our teams (and you can do this as a project leader), imagine the innovation and motivation it would produce.

Do you want to be inspired?  Watch this:

Or this:

I’m planning to do a follow-up post on some of the other content from the film, so be on the lookout here at People, Planet, Profits, and Projects.  But in the meantime, I do urge you to watch the short videos contained here for some inspiration and optimism!  I think we need it.

In a recent post, I discussed breaking the bonds of bureaucracy – with lots of the thought leadership coming from Yuval Harari’s Nexus.  I continue to be fascinated with this book, and wanted to share one more insight that will be helpful to you as a project leader.

This one deals with self-correcting systems.  Harari talks about it mainly in the context of large organizations, especially governments.  Although he is not shy about covering its flaws, he talks about the American government system established by the Founding Fathers, which has three independent parts – all given significant power – Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Judicial Branch, calling it the closest thing to perfection so far in history, in terms of self-correcting governmental systems.  He has some strong words of warning about how that is in grave danger in the US as the Executive Branch swells with power at the cost of the other two, as well as entities such as Universities and the media.  I will stay away from politics, but since it’s such a good example of how a self-correcting system CAN and SHOULD work, it needs to be brought up for context.

Harari has an entire chapter called Errors: The Fantasy of Infallibility.  As project leaders we know if we are too overconfident in estimation and in identifying (or probably more likely FAILING to identify) risk, we will have project ‘errors’ like not accounting for high-impact/high probability risks.  How do we keep our egos in check, and avoid the ‘fantasy of infallability’?  With systems of checks and balances.  With an environment in which it’s okay to raise a potential threat.  Applying an agile mindset that gives us permission to try something new early on.  All of these things help. 

Harari’s insight is deep – he goes into the complexity of self-correcting system and how it’s actually important to make the system complex and interrelated.  In fact, he says that one of the things that help dictators and authoritarian governments succeed is simplicity and ease of action by an Executive branch that can use simple, quick orders to get things done (without all of the inconvenience of potential checks and balances). 

I am not suggesting that projects need to become complex for the sake of complexity.  Instead, my suggestion is that decision making needs feedback loops, good, solid, facts from which to work, and, as the diagram shows, some mechanisms to check and balance the decisions.  See my other post from today about Seattle’s plumbing for examples of where this was not done – and they ended up with sewage geysers, centuries later, toilets which cost US$1M each which were sold for $1200 later due to missed threat identification and unchecked decisions.

I’d like to quote from another blogger, Jared Mabry who posted on LinkedIn recently, also inspired by this part of Harari’s Nexus:

He opens by defining a self-corrective system, and he uses a thermostat as an example – not a bad idea.  But we can stick with toilets.  They fill up with water until they sense that the fill-up of their tank is juuuust right, then they (hopefully) shut off the flow itself.  It’s a self-correcting system.  It’s just that the humans who use them are not necessarily so self-correcting!

He goes on to talk about some of the techniques and the necessary environment to have self-correcting systems in projects and that’s what inspired me (not AI!) to create the diagram below which I hope you find helpful.

What sorts of self-correcting systems do you have in your projects?  In your PMO?  I am interested to hear about them, please do respond in the comments.

Referenced Linked in post by Jared Mabry

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/self-correcting-organization-key-thriving-uncertainty-jared-mabry-hqvye/