Recently listening to the police scanner, Alex and I heard a call come across the air to summon the fire department to “Allegheny Center Associates” on the North Shore in response to a fire alarm. For those unfamiliar with Pittsburgh, “Allegheny Center Associates” refers to what is known locally as Allegheny Center Mall, a retail space/mall from the 1960’s that has now been turned into office and living space(!) in an effort to revitalize both the facility and the Northside as a whole. The mall’s living spaces have a local reputation for being student living space for both Point Park and Art Institute of Pittsburgh students. What is most interesting about the mall, though, is its conversion from a retail to office/living space and the story behind it.

I don’t know all of the back story, but when you go into the building, what clearly used to be an “anchor store” is now a home loan bank customer service center, and what used to be smaller stores off the main concourse are now mostly telecom companies, one of which was my destination: switch and data. Even the kiosks and platers from the building’s former retail life remain untouched–everything is “dated” in appearance; the building empty and quiet.

The Pittsburgh Business Times printed an article back in 2000 on the building’s transformation from a mall to an office space, and termed the facility a “telecom hotel”. Evidently, (and not surprisingly) the building’s manager has had a hard time finding companies that want to locate in the mall. Instead, they’ve found a eager and willing audience in telecommunications companies. Reasons cited in the article for their interest include the cement architecture of the building and its close proximity to the power grid, both important to companies looking to keep computers cool, protected and running 24/7/365.

What I also find interesting, and not mentioned in the article, is the necessity of fiber optic links to run a telecom company in today’s global age. Conveniently, and perhaps one of its failings as a retail mall, there is a major freeway (I-279) and multiple railroad tracks just south of the mall (map). These imposing rights of way may cut off the mall from the rest of downtown, but they also usually carry fiber optics (freeways and railroads usually being places safe from digging). The mall’s close proximity to the office towers that house Pittsburgh’s (few) large multi-national companies make the mall a more cost-effective, but still convenient place to keep associated communications and IT equipment.

It’d be an ironic turn of fate for something that may have killed the building’s original purpose to be the thing that saves it from the wrecking ball. It also just proves that when you have an asset (especially a tangible one), there is always both an audience and a way to present that asset to that audience, that can turn the asset into a sustainable, revenue generating part of your organization. “It’s all in the presentation…”

I know this might not be anything new, but I recently noticed a trend in some of my collected photos of things energy-related: the branding of various legacy energy sources as “eco”. So far, I’ve seen gasoline, coal and ethanol branded as “eco-friendly”. No doubt you’ve seen the TV ads from BP, Chevron or Shell extolling their new “clean energy” initiatives; but have you seen the latest railcars or billboards?

Despite increasingly prolific evidence to the contrary, big energy companies seem to think that if they keep saying it enough, it will become true. “Coal: clean green energy.” Granted, West Virginia (and parts of Pennsylvania) *is* coal country, so nobody around here wants to see “old coal” go away. This was confirmed during my work in MacDowell County, WV. During interviews with the economic development agency and other locals, the loss of coal operations was spoken about as a huge blow to the state; losing the little bit that’s left would be seen as even worse. It’s been hard for people to find new jobs after working for coal companies all their lives. How is coal supposed to stay relevant in today’s eco-fetish society? (Besides China being a huge new consumer of coal–maybe not from West Virginia, but still…) Personally, I think coal is a struggling, but likely soon to die enterprise.

In my opinion, there’s clear winners in the alternative energy fest, and clear losers. Losers? Big coal. American auto companies (with crappy, unpopular hybrid offerings). Big winners? Asian automakers (think Prius. Think profit.). And ethanol. Ethanol’s all the buzz, and who’s on the “receiving end” of this huge revenue stream? Check out ADM’s stock performance. Not bad. Can’t beat those government subsidies, and fickle environmental trends both going your way–nothing’s better for the stock price!

When Alex and I went to Millvale this past weekend, we saw a “real gem” of an infrastructure: an *analog* gas pressure logger! Seeing this system still in use made me realize that one of two things is true.

One, the gas distribution system, at least in Pittsburgh, is antiquated. There seems to be no, or very little, central logging or telemetry data collection infrastructure for the gas distribution network. The system would be slow to respond to an abnormality, as people would have to drive around and collect these paper discs to get a full picture of the system and isolate the problem. The electrical grid, on the other hand, seems much more modern and centrally monitored and controlled.

Or, possibility two: infrastructure’s modernization is place-contextual. That is, infrastructure is newer in newer neighborhoods (obvious), but more interestingly, maybe older neighborhood’s infrastructure is not *updated* as newer technology is released. Maybe infrastructure “decays” or ages along with the neighborhood. Pipes would, of course, but maybe above-ground things (control systems, for instance) do the same. If this is true, it seems like an awfully big burden on the system operators, as they would then have to support a multitude of different systems that report data in different ways. But then again, why upgrade a system if you don’t have to?

One really interesting example of this is the cable TV network. In Larimer, a disadvantaged neighborhood in Pittsburgh, the water mains suck. We saw a few leaky ones in our informal walks through the neighborhood. The neighborhood does have, however, a modern (hybrid fiber-coax) cable TV network. Interesting.

Back to the gas, I’m guessing the real reason is the first. Equitable Gas (or Equitable Resources as they now want to be called) invested a lot of capital in fixing the underground gas pipelines in Pittsburgh–I’m guessing they’re just pushing investment of control/telemetry systems off as long as they can. Gotta’ please those investors!

We started the day off with the Toyota Corolla. I was hesitant about its usefulness in off-road environments, but it proved to be up to the challenge. We drove a few hours to just outside Fort MacLeod where we began to see evidence of the Alberta beef industry. None of the places we stopped had actual slaughterhouses on them (it’s hard to tell from the satellite photos), but we did see plenty of feed lots. These raise the cows until they are ready for slaughter–sometimes raising cows on contract for their owners. The smell wasn’t as bad as I would have thought, and some of the cows roamed freely on a plain, as seen in the pictures below. Buffalo were also on some of the lots.

We then stopped at the original slaughterhouse, Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump. An interesting place, with a beautiful view of the Alberta plains.

On the way back, we saw a wind farm–a probably good way to make money from your land if you’re a farmer in Alberta. The wind mills were really beautiful, and spinning when we saw them. In the pictures, you can see the control station with a microwave tower for telemetry. In some of the pictures of the plains, you can also see microwave towers. I also noticed some fiber optic markers, but it seems for these long distances over flat terrain, microwave was more common.