Technical Solution Series

BIG DATA IN ENERGY & UTILITIES Sougata Mitra, Business Leader, ICT Solution, India

Background

Electric utilities are undergoing tremendous changes due to deregulation and rapid advancement in information technology (IT). While deregulation has brought about both threats and opportunities, along with many uncertainties to utilities, modern IT has often been regarded as an important tool in order to meet the challenges ahead. However, due to the increased complexity of IT and its potential business impacts, there is need for an effective IT strategy to fully exploit its benefits. Many utilities have recognized this and have formulated their IT strategies. However, the effectiveness of the IT strategies has largely remained unexplored. In this technology Series we will enumerate on the major components and trending the smart solutions.

Given the torrents of data from the multitude of sources currently flooding utilities, trading firms and other wholesale energy market participants, managing that mass of data is extremely challenging — finding actionable market intelligence and using that data to rapidly respond to market developments is even more so. Given the impending exponential growth of data coming from the “Smart Grid,” increased regulatory oversight of energy markets, and the lost commercial opportunities buried in all that data, traditional capture, storage, retrieval and analysis techniques will prove ineffectual for many companies in this market.

Big Data solutions, already established and in use in other industries, have the potential to address the data management and analysis issues faced by energy market participants in a rapidly evolving market and regulatory environment

Big Data Beneficiaries

Customer Engagement Asset

The less competitive nature of this sector has seen dramatic changes in the recent past owing to several factors like privatization, regulatory reforms, political and economic environment and emergence of new technologies. Customers appear right at the center of any strategy developed by Utilities. There is a fundamental refactoring happening in customer touching processes. Customers are no longer seen as just meter end points. With the introduction of smart meters, there is lot more data on customers now available than in the past. Smart meters provide usage information at a granular level that can be analyzed to derive a variety of useful information.

Following are the key customer-touching processes that will significantly benefit from big data analytics:

Tailored product offering for customers

New business services to increase customer stickiness – e.g. Home maintenance services, energy efficiency services etc.

Proactive service initiation and completion for customers to enhance customer experience

Big data has a huge role to play on the asset side of the business in improving reliability, security and availability of a plant or a network. There has been significant innovation in operations technology that has paved way for a truly self-healing grid or a resilient plant. With right analytics models, one can predict trips, outages and leakages thereby avoiding huge financial, environment and human losses. The analytics can also be used in better planning of investments - new build outs versus upgrades, employees versus contractors.

Commercial

Billions of dollars can be saved if there is better and timely visibility to the demand and supply information. Big data solutions allows one to more accurately model factors influencing demand and supply such as weather, fuel availability, equipment efficiency, network load, fuel price, emission level, demographics etc.

Environment, Health, Safety and Risk departments in Utilities will considerably benefit from advanced risk scoring techniques enabled by integrating variety of risks that Utilities are subjected to: Asset led risks, Competency led risks, Process led risks, Security led risks, Geo-political risks and Environmental risks.

Roadblocks

The primary reasons include concern over high costs and the sheer complexity of data. The massive increase in installations of smart meters and the corresponding rise in data usage will necessitate significant investment in data storage infrastructure and information management programs. Indeed, utility spending on smart grid infrastructure, of which data centers are key, is expected to cumulatively total hundreds of billions in dollars over the next two decades.

Many utilities were concerned that Big Data sets were too complex to collect and store, and required a lot of time for analysis. In particular, unstructured data was highlighted as being too difficult to interpret. The added concern was that the volume of unstructured data had increased over the last two years. Apart from complexity, data access and privacy issues were also cited as the top implementation challenge. Data access issues include silos that prevent data from being pooled for the benefit of the entire organization, while data privacy concerns security and confidentiality of sensitive data.