Electrical power has been universally available for decades, and while the tech-heavy telco sector is struggling to retain its margins, fighting the inevitable commodity, dumb-pipe fate, and is gradually forced to find new revenue streams and innovate, the traditional and commodity-driven power sector is forced to innovate for completely different reasons. The result is probably the biggest technology shift since Nikola Tesla and Edison invented the electric current. Once traditional and archaic, the power producers, TSOs, and DSOs are slowly becoming the high-tech champions as they implement Smart Grids, the electrical networks of the future.
The underlying reason is really a combination of different trends. There is, of course, general technology development, IoT, and cheaper, more widely available sensors that provide data not so easily available till now. It is also much easier to transfer larger amounts of data. The steadily increasing capacity of WDM fiber technology and the availability of 4G coverage make it easy to send gigabytes of data practically from anywhere. NB-IoT technology, on the other hand, reduces power consumption, enabling battery-powered sensors to send data for multiple years. IP technology and convergence are also simplifying traditional SCADA technology stacks, making sensor data more easily accessible. With more affordable storage, memory, and CPU power, and technologies like Hadoop, Spark, and in-memory databases, it is now possible to store petabytes of data and analyze it efficiently using both batch processing and streaming techniques.
On the other hand, climate change and the shift to renewable energy, electric cars driven by rechargeable batteries or hydrogen, as well as plug-in hybrids, demand more electricity and increase overall power consumption, especially during peak hours. Wind and solar power are also very difficult to control, and changes in supply must be quickly compensated for by other energy sources, such as gas turbines. New AMS (Advanced Metering Services) power meters offer new possibilities for more dynamic energy pricing. It is now possible to influence consumer behavior by adjusting prices and shifting some peak load to times of the day with lower energy demand. With smart home technology, it will soon be possible to control energy consumption and instantly cut off water heaters or car chargers. Moreover, with the use of technology, it is easy for the energy providers to predict the energy price changes and gain a bigger market this way, which in turn puts pressure on the TSOs and regulators to develop much more comprehensive and real-time models to control the networks (e.g., ENTSO-E Common Grid Model)
The result is that the DSOs, TSOs, and producers are simply forced to transition into high-tech companies. Using IoT to collect new streams of data that can then be used to better predict the remaining lifetime of the assets or schedule the repair and maintenance more precisely. Using Big Data analytics to predict the faults before they occur and employing machine learning to analyze these huge quantities of data. All of this requires significant CPU power, as well as flexibility and scalability, thus pushing the energy sector toward the use of cloud computing, Big Data (Spark and Hadoop), and other traditional methods for handling and analyzing large volumes of data, such as OsiSoft PI. Moreover, RDF stores and triple stores are technologies that are becoming increasingly important for modeling networks, analyzing and predicting, planning capacity allocation, and managing congestion.
All of this is happening as we speak. Take the example of FINGRID and their newly completed ELVIS project, or look at the ENTSO-E Common Grid project, Statnett SAMBA project, which aims to optimize asset maintenance, as well as AutoDIG, which automates fault analysis and condition monitoring. Also, Dutch Alliander is known for heavy and successful use of Advanced Analytics.
The last question remains: is this just a short-lived phenomenon or a long-term trend, and will these trends be enough to transform power & utilities?
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