Rebecca Gibson |
Now the world is working towards net zero, plants and grid operators are juggling renewables and conventional energy under increasingly dynamic and challenging conditions.
While this shift represents a positive and essential move towards meeting the Paris Climate Agreement goals, the energy transition calls for new pathways to producing, transporting and consuming clean energy. Currently, renewables such as wind and solar can only produce power intermittently, and the industry needs to get better at moving power to the places where renewable energy resources aren’t available.
The rise of electric vehicles is bringing further challenges – energy demand is becoming increasingly unpredictable. How can grid operators ensure that just the right amount of power is put onto the grid at the right time and in the right place?
In response, power companies are leveraging today’s big technologies – such as artificial intelligence, analytics, augmented reality, machine learning and the cloud – to help optimise load balancing, increase reliability, reduce power wastage and identify opportunities for energy conservation.
AVEVA’s technologies can add exponential value to the modern grid ecosystem. A digital twin of the smart grid network can serve as the virtual representation of its physical and digital components (generation, transmission, distribution, consumer and distributed energy resources assets), so that stakeholders are able to analyse, predict and react to operation events dynamically.
As the physical grid becomes less centralised and comprises multiple power sources, flexibility and visibility are critical. Therefore, today’s grid infrastructure requires rock-solid reliability, resilience and foresight to perform at its best.
All of this can only be made possible with a robust data infrastructure, serving as the bedrock for advanced analyses. In addition, adopting an infrastructure-oriented approach to operational technology is critical to building a strong data foundation.
Rock solid data infrastructure for grids
This industrial future will not be founded simply on cloud, edge or on-premises; it will be enabled by flexible architecture that has the ability to support any use case at any point across the enterprise.
A robust data infrastructure enables trusted, organised and enriched industrial data to be leveraged 24/7 for critical operations, as well as the real-time data collection from sensors, industrial internet of things devices and remote assets. It also allows scalable data services for a wider array of users, tools and applications.
By leveraging this foundation to support secure sharing, everyone from energy generators to grid operators and utilities and service providers can ensure supply meets demand.
Data from all sources is growing every day. Around 50 per cent of all industrial data was created in the last two years, and that will still be true in 2024. Integrating and analysing information from an increasingly diverse group of data sources in real time will be key to breaking down silos and building a holistic view of the grid so power companies can keep it reliable and resilient.
Hundreds of our clients globally are already seeing the benefits of a flexible but robust data infrastructure that unlocks the potential of AI and analytics solutions. Take Italy-based renewable energy provider Enel, which needed to build a remote predictive diagnostic centre to identify and report abnormal asset behaviour to avoid failures and reduce maintenance costs. The firm relied on a robust data infrastructure and over 5,000 predictive models to monitor assets across five countries. As a result, it saved over €40 million in asset failure avoidance and maintenance costs.
Another example is Southern Company, which maximised the availability of renewable power generation assets across solar, wind, gas, battery assets and fuel cells from Bloom Energy. Developing a solar and wind asset monitoring strategy based on inverter temperatures, generator step up bushings and medium voltage transformers, Southern Company built over 2,700 models for solar and wind asset health monitoring and saved over $700,000.
To maximise the value of data, it is essential for power firms to have a solid infrastructure framework that can manage increasingly complex data in a secure and scalable way. The utility sector’s resilience lies in its ability to embrace data-powered insights within a connected and trusted stakeholder community. Successful next-generation power networks will be those that generate a single source of truth within a solid data infrastructure foundation.
Learn how AVEVA’s AI solutions can help businesses maximise the value of their data on the AVEVA website
Harpreet Gulati is executive vice president for sustainability and the PI System business unit at AVEVA
This article was originally published in the Summer 2024 issue of Technology Record. To get future issues delivered directly to your inbox, sign up for a free subscription.