Key Challenges Plaguing CIOs of the Energy Segment to make Data Driven Decisions

Introduction

In this blog post, you will learn about the key challenges grappling the energy industry as the focus on Renewable energy grows. We specifically present a view in the challenges of a CIO and what his key goals are when identifying a key solution for data driven decision making. The post then discusses Locuz’s Data to Insight solution and its offering and how it covers key requirements of the business leader and helps scale their business, followed by an example of how a leading renewable energy company is using this solution to reshape the future.

Where can data insights accelerate the Power Sector?

Within the power sector, and specifically in the renewables energy space, the following use cases are of interest to the Executives

However, there are significant challenges in front of the industry.

Architecture challenge:

Most of the CIOs and CEOs are challenged to find the right solution. This can be time-consuming and confusing with hundreds of tools and approaches available to architect a solution.

Will an approach that works, scale at 10x or 100x?

Is it secure?

Is it cost effective?

How will the new tech jive with our legacy systems?

Data Challenges:

The quality of data insight is directly proportional to the quality of data. There are a variety of data challenges which needs to be tackled.

• Volume of data being produced across distributed and intelligent devices
• Variety of data that could span different systems and formats
• Velocity of data from real time data to a traditional batching approach
• Data silos and not having a single source of truth
• Data quality and integrity issues which can lead to trust issue, wrong modelling and worst case, wrong business decisions.

Return on Investment challenges:

• Path to experimenting with the right solution is complex, time-consuming & expensive
• Time for meaningful insight is too long.
• Decisions between Reskilling team’s vs bringing on partners can be a complex balance to maintain.
• Lack of knowledge & skills in modern IoT, Cloud, AI/ML & Data tools, and architectures

Data to insight solution overview

The data to insights solutions is overcoming the above listed challenges. It is a hybrid solution, that delivers a portion of prepacked solution, that have been tested and deployed at scale, with certain specs implemented based on customer requirements.

The solution runs on an AWS environment and is capable of handling different types of data ingestion methods, including batch, near real-time or real-time data. Specifically for energy companies, our solution leverages Kepware or similar tools to ingest data to S3. The solution further uses AWS IoT and data ingestion services, as part of the pre-packed integrations.The deployment on AWS will take about 4 hours, but onsite agent deployment, data ingestion configuration, testing, and dashboard designing may take from a few days to a few weeks depending on the number of data sources, sites, and connectivity.

The solution requires an AWS Marketplace subscription and can be deployed in either pay as you go or bring your license model.

Like AWS's shared responsibility model, the solution deployment follows a joint responsibility model.

Approach for POC to implementation

With the solution, the approach is to help carry out a POC for customer in under 6 Weeks of time. This time should be enough for a customer to spell out an MVP (Minimal viable product) and productionize the solution.

The recommended approach for the solution deployment is to go through a POC and then plan a rollout across facilities, energy generation plants and more.

How did our solution help Greenko complete their vision of revolutionizing the renewables energy space?

Greenko Group (Greenko) is helping drive this change to RE in India. Greenko is a leading energy solution provider in the changing energy landscape of India. With a total installed capacity of 7.5 GW, which includes wind (2000+ wind turbines), solar (5+ million solar panels) and hydro (25 sites), Greenko has electrified over 6.3 million households and has removed an equivalent of over 17 million tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

The first biggest challenge for Greenko was to get a Real time monitoring of Wind Turbine Assets with dashboards. This would help them visualize total number of connected assets, wind speed, power output, average power output, power generation and more.

Keeping the existing challenges and KPI’s in mind, Locuz designed and implemented a highly scalable AWS data pipe and across 4 pillars, Data Ingestion, Data Lake Hydration, Data Visualization and Analytics.

You can read a full coverage of the solution and more about the Greenko story on the AWS blog (https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/industries/how-greenko-uses-aws-iot-and-serverless-solutions-for-wind-monitoring/ ).