Over the past 200 years, the world has experienced two major waves of innovation. Firstly, the Industrial Revolution brought us machines and factories, railways, electricity and our lives have never been the same. Then the Internet Revolution brought us computing power, data networks, unprecedented access to information and communication, and again, our lives have never been the same. Now we are at the point where Moore law meets with Metcalfe’s Law. Bob Metcalfe came out of Xerox park and stated that the power of a network is a function based on the square of the number of nodes in the network. At this cross-section point, at an exponential trend of data points with increasing network power, we are experiencing another metamorphic change: Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT). It will bring together billions of sensors, intelligent machines, cloud and advanced analytics. And our lives will never be the same again…
Energy industry needs to disrupt itself, otherwise it will get disrupted.. Actually the IIOT disruption has already started. The power of next-generation technologies including wireless sensor networks, real-time streaming analytics, machine learning, and elastic cloud computing deliver a new class of smart applications that support predictive decision making, optimize operational efficiency, and minimize industrial risks in energy domain. As value chains across energy production, transmission, distribution and consumption become increasingly sensored and connected, there is immense potential for the integration, processing, and analysis of big data to enhance the safety, reliability, resilience, and environmental integrity of large-scale systems and provide extraordinary social and economic benefits.
What are the implications of that wave on energy & utilities domain? You know energy utilities have traditionally been amongst the lowest data intensity companies. As the grid becomes increasingly sensored, it becomes a fully connected sensor network (think of it as the Internet of Energy) and unprecedented amounts of data is produced. These data volumes can be harnessed and analyzed in order to optimize the power generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption value chain. However, that is not as easy as it sounds. There are some grand challenges ahead:
Firstly, right now most IoT data analytics solutions are thrown together out of various incomplete systems most of which are only designed to store data and run a few basic rules. There is no intelligent unified platform that simplifies all these processes particularly in energy domain. Secondly, each individual enterprise tries to build a custom IoT platform from the scratch for its own specific problem; it results in wasted time and resources, difficulty, complexity, high risk.
Addressing these problems, we figured out that best way to enable digital energy transformation is to provide a tool covering analytical libraries, connectivity, edge intelligence services to these enterprises so they can rapidly adopt or even design, develop, and test their own Energy IoT applications 10x cheaper and faster.
Reengen Energy IOT platform is a PaaS Data Analytics Solution for Energy and Utilities Industry. It lets you rapidly develop and deploy enterprise applications that collect, store, organize, analyze, and operationalize your data so you can address such enormous challenges as:
- Increasing energy and operational costs
- The difficulty of collecting and unifying data across different sensors, meters, SCADA, BMS, ERP etc.
- An explosion of data without context, lack of analytical capability
- The high complexity and risk of developing and managing end-to-end IoT solutions internally
As Reengen we are enabling the ‘’third technological revolution’’ which combines all the technologies we have been getting excited about lately; IoT, big data analytics, data science and smart grid… Our platform utilizes the power of next-generation technologies, including real-time stream analytics, machine learning, and cloud computing, to deliver a new class of smart applications that support predictive decision making, optimize operational efficiency, and minimize industrial risks, improve sustainability across your enterprise with real-time actionable intelligence. From generation to consumption, it delivers various vertical applications to portfolio managers, energy services companies, utilities, building operators and so on. These implementations have potential to save tens of millions of dollars annually from improved fraud detection, energy/operational efficiency and reduced equipment failure; increasing customer engagement; and significantly lowering energy costs and greenhouse emissions.
We started applying the platform with a bottom up approach, starting from commercial buildings and industrial facilities. Using our platform, operators can collect any data across their facility in real time and turn this data into actionable intelligence for managing increasing energy and operational costs. Collecting clear and accurate data is the key. Great analytics can not be achieved without great data.
Once technicians and facility managers have their accurate data, it’s time to turn it into actionable insights. But even before that can happen, they need to first set specific goals; goals that answer specific questions regarding sustainability, cost reduction, tenant comfort, etc., as well as specific metric values and benchmarks to determine if a metric’s value is meaningful and if your insight is worth tracking.
After you’ve determined what’s meaningful and important, it’s time to turn your data into easy to read and understand visualizations. Using charts or graphs allows you and decision makers to understand how buildings are consuming energy, identify any areas that need improvement, and more easily see and grasp difficult concepts or discover new patterns. Decision makers who fully understand how their buildings use energy can then make smarter investments, design better policies, and apply effective energy efficiency programs.
Track, measure, verify, manage, optimize… Once you’ve taken action based off your meaningful insights, you should then continue tracking data to measure and verify your results. Start by again setting goals and using key performance indicators, then assess your performance by comparing your buildings and looking at both overall and normalized energy use, continually track your progress by evaluating your main KPIs, share and celebrate achieved results, and finally reassess your process based off your goals to see how you’re really doing.
In addition to the financial savings associated with detecting changing conditions immediately instead of hours, days, or weeks after the fact automatic detection and push notifications are crucial to even getting the attention of facility managers. Facility management is by nature a reactive profession and facility managers are dealing with fires on a daily basis, with the hottest fire being the one they deal with next. As a result, getting the attention of a facility manager to make them proactive, you need to inject data driven notifications such as an automated email or text message into their reactive flow.
Building IoT (B-IOT) is just the beginning. By holistically correlating and analyzing all of the dynamics and interactions associated with the end-to-end power infrastructure — including current and predicted demand, consumption, electrical vehicle load, storage, distributed generation capacity, technical and non-technical losses, weather — across the entire value chain, we will realize dramatic advances in safety, reliability, infrastructure security, and energy efficiency! So do not be afraid, we are disrupting your industry, but that’s ok!
