With the worldwide vitality disaster driving a dramatic spike within the value of fossil fuels, nations around the globe have urgently stepped up their transition to renewable energy to scale back their reliance on imported, carbon-intense gasoline sources. In accordance with the Worldwide Vitality Company (IEA), renewables will account for over 90% of worldwide electrical energy enlargement over the subsequent 5 years, overtaking coal to change into the biggest supply of worldwide electrical energy by early 2025.
Nonetheless, whereas funding in renewables improves nations’ long-term vitality safety, the speedy transition presents energy-security challenges of its personal. As extra renewable vitality sources and Distributed Vitality Useful resource (DER) belongings (resembling rooftop photo voltaic panels and microturbines) are added to the grid, this will result in community congestion and imbalanced vitality distribution, affecting the standard of provide.
A brand new enterprise mannequin for a altering business
An business chief in vitality administration options for greater than 125 years, Landis+Gyr helps utility firms and grid operators to handle their vitality infrastructure extra effectively. For Landis+Gyr, the reply to the challenges offered by a speedy transition to renewables lies in modernizing the standard sensible metering enterprise mannequin through the use of synthetic intelligence (AI) and machine studying (ML) to take advantage of the large quantity of information that its utility prospects are amassing daily.
Nonetheless, Landis+Gyr initially discovered it troublesome to innovate on the tempo required by the quickly altering vitality business, as its legacy on-premises analytics infrastructure lacked AI and ML capabilities.
“We wished to construct a brand new product that enabled superior analytics, together with AI and ML capabilities, which we might provide as a service to our prospects,” says Antonio Hidalgo, VP Digital Options at Landis+Gyr. “We additionally wanted an answer that was simple to arrange, scalable, and which required little or no administration from our aspect. These have been the important thing standards for us and Google Cloud met all of them.”
Google Cloud partnered with Landis+Gyr, making it our mission to assist the corporate to innovate sooner with a unified and clever knowledge platform.
Conserving the lights on with real-time knowledge insights
Due to Landis+Gyr’s smart-metering infrastructure, utility firms all around the globe retrieve granular interval knowledge for hundreds of thousands of gadgets each single day, creating an enormous quantity of information that must be uploaded and processed. Now, with the assistance of Cloud Storage, BigQuery, and Looker, Landis+Gyr can present its utility prospects with a complete knowledge lake and a whole analytics resolution through the use of a cloud knowledge warehouse, enabling them to make full use of their knowledge to achieve highly effective insights in actual time.
“BigQuery was tremendous quick to arrange and it scales seamlessly up and down, which makes the pricing construction very scale-friendly,” says Hidalgo. “Flexibility was additionally key for us. Our utility prospects need to have the ability to outline their very own dashboards on a steady foundation, based mostly on the knowledge that’s related to them. With Looker, we at the moment are in a position to construct and launch one thing in a matter of days, not months. With our on-premises options, that was not possible. However on the cloud, with a contemporary CI/CD pipeline and the fitting stage of automation, we are able to do it.”
Landis+Gyr is now in a position to present its prospects with knowledge insights to handle all elements of the ability provide and distribution extra successfully, from figuring out the standard of vitality provide, via forecasting vitality demand, to serving to utilities keep a distribution community with a rising quantity of DER belongings.
“Close to real-time monitoring of sensor knowledge streams permits our utility prospects to foretell many community points prematurely,” says Hidalgo. “Through the use of Pub/Sub, we are able to ingest occasions and stream them in actual time to BigQuery with Dataflow. Utilities can then analyze the community knowledge to determine the issue and make selections accordingly.”
Mapping the ability grid with machine studying
Landis+Gyr can also be making use of Google Cloud ML instruments to enhance the way in which utility firms keep an correct community connectivity mannequin. Understanding the ability system’s community topology, or how the assorted elements resembling mills, transformers and transmission traces are related, is essential for sustaining dependable and environment friendly grid operations, resembling community planning, outage administration and fault detection. This topology is historically maintained utilizing Geographic Info Methods (GIS), which Hidalgo says are liable to inaccuracy.
“On common, GIS programs sometimes have 5-20% inaccuracy when it comes to the place the tip shoppers are positioned in relation to the community,” Hidalgo notes. “With the introduction of recent ML capabilities with Vertex AI, we are able to develop one thing way more correct with out the necessity to go to the sector to substantiate something. A prediction with 97-98% accuracy is much extra useful from an operational standpoint than the present GIS programs.”
Safe knowledge for vitality safety
As knowledge turns into more and more essential to utility firms, Landis+Gyr understands how crucial it’s to safe that knowledge, and has been working with Google Cloud to use cloud safety finest practices as a cornerstone of its new analytics resolution.
“Earlier than partnering with Google Cloud, we made a cautious evaluation of the info safety safeguards and safety compliance of the completely different cloud suppliers,” says Hidalgo. “Google Cloud affords us state-of-the-art knowledge safety and safety requirements, which signifies that our prospects are the one ones who’re accessing their knowledge.”
Future-proofing the business for a greener tomorrow
The previous two years of this partnership have constructed the foundations for future improvements, not solely from a know-how perspective, but additionally from an organizational and operational perspective. And because the transition to renewables continues to rework the vitality business as an entire, Hidalgo is satisfied that Landis+Gyr can use ML and AI to rework the way in which the business meets the continued challenges of this transition.
“With Google Cloud, we’re engineering a scalable, versatile resolution that allows our prospects to launch new options rapidly, to fulfill the fast-changing situations we at the moment are dealing with within the vitality sector,” Hidalgo says. “And with AI and ML, now we have the chance to create utterly new insights with way more accuracy when it comes to predictions, offering a completely new approach for the utility firms to function the grid. ”
Everyone knows how essential the transition to renewables is. That’s why we’re proud to associate with Landis+Gyr to steer the info transformation within the utilities sector and make sure that utilities can handle the safety of provide with a strong analytics resolution.
