22
BIG DATA - THE NEW DATA REALITY AND INDUSTRY IMPACT
TRANSFORMING INDUSTRIES:
ENERGY GRID MANAGEMENT
The energy mix is changing, with increasing inclusion of volatile renewables. This poses considerable challenges for grid management, load balancing, and energy security. In addition, implementation of “smart meters” and “smart grids” is spreading. The huge investments in these technologies create enormous amounts of data, which, in turn, create business opportunities for companies that are able to analyse and act upon this knowledge. All the large grid players, such as GE, Siemens, ABB, Alstom, Schneider Electric, and Eaton/Cooper Power, are investing to establish businesses and services for “smart grids”. This can be exemplified by GE´s cloud-based “Grid IQ Solutions as a Service”. In this, for a structured fee, they offer to utilities hosting of their data on dedicated servers in its GE Digital Energy data centre in Atlanta, with the opportunity for the utilities to choose from a list of products and functions that they would like to deploy. In this emerging market, the seven highest valued data analytics applications are:
Grid analytics ■■ Outage management ■■ Voltage optimisation ■■ Asset management Consumer analytics ■■ Revenue protection ■■ Load forecasting ■■ Detailed customer segmentation ■■ Energy efficiency, advice and assessment In addition to the change in energy mix, there is also a growing deregulation of markets; the emergence of consumers as producers and of micro-power plants will make the picture even more complicated. Utilities face some regulatory challenges and uncertainties in turning over key parts of their operations to a third party. At the same time, they are under pressure to meet a whole new array of requirements, including smart grid security and data privacy, which may well be better managed by a big central provider than individually by each small utility. Ultimately, services, most of them probably founded in big data analytics, will be the key to unlocking the small utility smart grid market.