We are excited to share more about our work to maximize its reach and beneficial impact. This includes posts that highlight our thinking, resources that explain what we are building, and sharing novel datasets that we think can benefit the work of others. Please stay tuned for updates or reach out to learn more.
Finding ideal sites for infrastructure isn’t about map layers 🗺 — it’s about actionable answers 💡
At Othersphere we are constantly working to make it easier for our users to site, design, and vet infrastructure assets. For example, we recently integrated our Global Land Cost Model 🌍 , which estimates land values globally. This 5-tier ensemble model is trained on terabytes of data, considering factors such as infrastructure, land use, topography, population density, and GDP.
Included within our Explorer tool, this new data helps users more quickly assess one of the many (many) considerations that go into infrastructure developments. In this case, land cost can have a significant impact on project economics, especially for assets with large physical footprints and more modest hardware or operating costs.
Curious about the key factors influencing the results? The example SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations) graph provides a breakdown of the six most impactful drivers for a rural landscape, highlighting GDP, population density, and water stress as important drivers of land value.
We recently integrated our Global Land Cost Model, which estimates land values globally and adds this new level of depth into results in Othersphere Explorer.
Equipment sizing and operating strategy LCOH optimizations for hydrogen electrolysis plants are cumbersome and time-consuming. It can take days to weeks to get the data, with each optimization run often taking hours. This limits analytical efforts to a handful of potential sites, leaving many opportunities unexplored.
The result — sub-optimal capital allocation and higher risks, with countless missed opportunities.The difference between initial cost calculations versus hourly optimizations can be dramatic, and highlights location as a critical element of project success.
Othersphere has revolutionized this process by combining the power of our underlying spatial economics platform with neural networks for dimensionality reduction and surrogate modeling.
Our global search engine now recommends pre-optimized projects in seconds, having already run an hourly optimization considering:
1) Hourly day-ahead wholesale power market pricing
2) Grid upgrade CAPEX (developed with a global leader in grid transmission engineering and equipment)
3) Grid fees associated with transmission connections
4) Variable stack efficiency by load, incorporating operational ranges
5) System economies of scale, as well as commercial and technical nuances between PEM and alkaline plants
6) Hourly carbon intensity data
7) Demand profiles and cost of storage
8) Co-located renewables CAPEX
9) High-spatial resolution hourly solar and wind capacity factor data
All of this is delivered through the Othersphere Explorer tool, which provides a novel, bottom-up view of potential hydrogen projects, evaluating key factors such as production costs, emissions, available offtakers, and fit with local surroundings.
Introducing the world’s first global optimizer for hydrogen projects
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Topography is one of the many variables within the Othersphere Explorer tool used to reveal and diligence optimal siting of sustainable infrastructure projects. To inform this analysis we use licensed data, open data, and novel datasets we have created or augmented. Our topography data is an example of the latter, where we built upon the exceptional work within the Multi-Error-Removed Improved-Terrain Digital Elevation Model (MERIT DEM).
🔍 Augmented for massive-scale analysis
To make this sophisticated dataset even more accessible, we have introduced tiling to the MERIT DEM. Each tile offers detailed elevation and ruggedness data, enhancing usability for systematic geographical analyses.
🚀 Tackling climate must be a group effort
We are excited to release this tiled dataset derived from MERIT DEM, adhering to licensing requirements and aiming to benefit the broader community working on topographical challenges. This data is provided as a parquet file (~4.5GB) and is access through Google Cloud Storage. Please click here to learn more about setting up a Google account to access the data and here to learn more about gsutil for downloading files. Alternatively, please contact explore@othersphere.io can we can work with you to determine other file delivery options.
Multi-Error-Removed Improved-Terrain Digital Elevation Model (MERIT DEM) is a sophisticated dataset that addresses terrain issues common in other mapping efforts.
Ensuring sufficient market demand is essential for any infrastructure project, and hydrogen is no different.
But a key challenge facing project developers today is finding and engaging offtakers for lower GHG hydrogen, especially those willing to sign long-term offtake agreements.
At Othersphere, we're focused on simplifying this complex challenge. Our Othersphere Explorer tool is designed to empower developers by providing instant assessments of potential offtakers accessible from any project site around the globe, and how competitive various hydrogen production technologies will be in serving them.
🌍 Today
Our tool currently models delivered prices to over 8,000 industrial facilities, including refineries, ammonia plants, methanol plants, ports, and steel mills (yellow points).
🚀 In progress
We are currently adding fueling stations and airports (white points), adding over half a million emerging hydrogen demand locations.
🔍 Future
We have a number of other offtaker types queued up for integration, and so please reach out if you have suggestions or simply want to learn about how we source and process this complex data.
🤝 Collaboration
If you're a project developer or offtaker navigating these challenges, we're here to help. Please reach out to explore@othersphere.io or schedule a demo to learn more.
Ensuring sufficient market demand is essential for any infrastructure project, and hydrogen is no different. But a key challenge facing project developers today is finding and engaging offtakers for lower GHG hydrogen, especially those willing to sign long-term offtake agreements.
🚀 We’re live! 🚀
After months of development and refinement, we're thrilled to unveil Othersphere Explorer. Our tool reveals the ideal locations to build hydrogen production assets—where economics will be best, emissions lowest, and projects will be a beneficial fit with local surroundings.
We’ve built Othersphere Explorer to give project developers, financiers, and offtakers a whole new way to seek new opportunities, manage portfolios, and assess competitiveness.
This is powered by the underlying Othersphere platform, our patent-pending global search engine for high performance, sustainable infrastructure.
None of the above would have been possible without the companies and teams who provided invaluable feedback during our beta program, our financial supporters (Breakthrough Energy , Active Impact Investments, Thin Line Capital, Keiki Capital, and KDX Management LLC), and the many others who have guided us along the way.
If you are working on hydrogen projects, or simply trying to separate fundamentals and fiction in this complex, fast-moving space—we’re here to help!
After months of development and refinement, we're thrilled to unveil Othersphere Explorer.
CERA Week is a usually superb bellwether of energy sector moods, and this year was no exception.
Overall I found the tone last week to be pragmatic, occasionally even downbeat.
Amin Nasser of Saudi Aramco captured the general mood in his comments (https://lnkd.in/gMSQViKF), noting that consumers “want energy that helps protect the planet and their pocket books, with minimal disruption to supplies and their daily lives”.
His full comments are worth reading, and don’t mince words on critical points I agree with such as:
😡 Tribalism and hyperbole are deeply counterproductive to addressing our collective climate challenge
📈 Consumers in lower and middle income countries (who use far less resources than those in the wealthier world today) will increasingly drive the climate agenda
🏔 The hashtag#energytransition is not on track
The final point is a serious concern, because out in the real world the clock is ticking.
Just prior to CERA I had an update from the Berkeley Earth team, and though I was aware of recent increases in ocean temperature, it was still shocking to see record daily temperatures now observed for over a year.
But unfortunately the conversations and presentations at CERA highlighted how difficult it will be to pull off the badly needed shift away from fossil fuels, especially natural gas.
For example, although ⚡ electrification is a primary pathway to decarbonize a range of consumer and industrial demand, there is simply not enough power, transmission capacity, and even just grid hardware to go around. Particularly as the power demands of data centers grow and tech companies fill up grid connection queues, planners and policymakers will need to take extra care to ensure decarbonization projects aren’t pushed back in the line.
So in the end I left Houston exhausted and concerned, but still optimistic.
To quote Nasser one final time “the world has been trying to transition in fog, without a compass”.
This compass is precisely what we are building at Othersphere, helping those scaling sustainable infrastructure to build better projects, faster. The energy transition is a global challenge that will be solved at the local level—step-by-step, project-by-project.
CERA was full of smart people working together to make this happen.
CERA Week is a usually superb bellwether of energy sector moods, and this year was no exception. Overall I found the tone last week to be pragmatic, occasionally even downbeat.
Please reach out if you would like to learn more about Othersphere, our products, and opportunities to partner in accelerating global industrial decarbonization.
