Elly Yates-Roberts |
Danish energy supplier Ørsted is using Microsoft advanced analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and the cloud to leverage data from its offshore wind turbines to save time and resources, and help employees work more efficiently.
“When we engineer new wind farms, the computations for the foundations alone used to take weeks. Now with the cloud, it takes between four and eight hours,” says Michael Judén, head of digital strategy at Ørsted.
“The strength of our relationship with Microsoft lies in the mission alignment between our companies, of trying to make the world a better and greener place.”
Ørsted is trying to reduce climate change by supplying over 11 million people with renewable energy produced by offshore wind farms. The wind farms are part of the company’s shift from using fossil fuels (also known as black energy) and toward renewable energy (green energy). Ørsted shut down its oil and gas business in 2017 and plans to phase out coal by 2023. It has reduced its coal consumption by 82% in the last 10 years and aims on increasing its offshore wind capacity to 15 gigawatts by 2025 – enough to power more than 30 million people.
“Our vision is to create a world that runs entirely on green energy,” said Michael Biermann, chief information officer at Ørsted. “We’ve turned ourselves from an oil- and coal-based company into a completely green energy system-based company. With the climate change that we’re all experiencing every day, it’s quite obviously an important task.”