# Presentation: 721098

## The Importance of GIS in Policy Development and Issues Management 

**Rich Halvey**
**Western Governors’ Association**
**January 23, 2007**

## Why is GIS crucial to decision makers?

- Efficiency
- Research time
- Project management
- Visual depictions are generally easier to absorb
- Reveal relationships in data sets not discernable when the data are displayed in tables or charts

## Basic Questions

- Does information drive policy or does policy drive information?
- How do you know what the right information is?
- When do you know when you have enough information?

## Important elements

- Simplicity
- If it looks like a Jackson Pollack painting...
- Accessibility
- Responsiveness
- It answers the questions being asked
- Current
- Accurate
- Relevant

## Eyes in the Heat – Jackson Pollock

## Basic answers

- Information without context has limited usefulness
- Policy should drive information collection, but information should drive the evolution of policy
- The right information must correctly answer the questions being asked and probably a few that weren’t yet asked
- There cannot be a long distance between the decision maker and the information manager

## WGA and GIS

- Identifying synergies (e.g., wind-coal facilities)
- Transmission and power generation
- Regional and state level information
- Other drivers (e.g., location of coal plants and location of potential sequestration areas)

## Wind Power Density at 70-M Height

- Utility-Scale Wind Resources Technical Potential at 70-M Height

- Small-Scale Wind Resources Technical Potential at 50-M Height

- Wind Economic Potential at 70-M Height, 2017

**Notes:**
Sacramento, California, USA
 Contact 
Lian Duan

Data Source(s) 
California Energy Commission, Teale Data Center, AWS TrueWind, LLC, and U.S. Geological Survey 
Description:
California is committed to meeting electricity demand challenges with an aggressive Renewable Portfolio Standard and Energy Action Plan calling for 20 percent renewable energy resources by 2010. The California Energy Commission's Strategic Value Analysis (SVA) develops a pathway for the growth and integration of future renewable energy generation (wind, geothermal, biomass, solar, and water). This will address and prevent future electrical grid problems while simultaneously prioritizing transmission needs, deferring costly upgrades, and providing additional nonenergy benefits for the environment and economy. The assessment of renewable wind resources is a part of the SVA project. Using GIS, this analysis displays wind energy potential areas and quantifies gross, technical, and economic potential of wind energy.
Substantial amounts of California's renewable wind energy remain untapped. Using the annual mean wind speed and power density data from AWS TrueWind, LLC, the Fire and Resource Assessment Program of the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, under contract to the California Energy Commission, created a number of wind speed and power density surface models corresponding to four different heights (hub height) above ground. Based on these surface models, suitable windy lands are classified.

## Conclusion	

- You have to be careful if you don’t know where you are going because you might not get there.
- Yogi Berra
- Governors are smart people who often have to make a myriad of decisions in a time constrained environment