High-stakes industries, like power generation, use sophisticated, lean and streamlined edge technologies to improve reliability, gain ROI and advance sustainability.
I’ve long been fascinated by surfers. Their mastery of the waves, ability to anticipate and adapt to changing conditions, and precise timing in catching the perfect wave at just the right moment are truly remarkable. Surfers must precisely forecast a wave before it unfolds. Surfers who move too soon miss the wave’s sweet spot. Surfers who wait too long may wait even longer for another good wave to come by.
Surfing is a great metaphor for the importance of making sound decisions in the business world. Timing and precision are everything, despite dynamic, challenging conditions. That’s why the edge is so crucial in business. Edge data and the analytics it fuels are enabling smarter, faster and more agile decisions that produce better business outcomes. According to Deloitte1, high-performing organizations are 12 times more likely to support decision-making with advanced analytics.
In critical, high-stakes industries like power generation, data-driven decisions are even weightier. But architecting the edge technology to catalyze smarter decisions is easier said than done. That’s because power generation is one of the most complex—and promising—industries undergoing digital transformation. It’s like going for that big surf wave; complex, yes, but the payoff potential is huge.
Achieving a smarter grid
While the energy industry powers much of our daily lives, it must navigate many unique challenges and complexities. For example, downtime is a constant threat that can be catastrophic and costly, estimated at $300,000 per hour with each incident averaging 5.8 hours or $1.7 million in losses2. Today, power generation companies mitigate downtime with redundancies and sub-optimized manual processes, leaving room for improvement.
Recently, I spoke to Arnaud Langer, Global Managing Partner, Edge & IoT, Atos, about digitally transforming the electric grid. Langer shared the massive scale of the power generation network. “A small European country has about 800 stations that transform current from very high to lower voltage. It then transfers to around 50,000 substations, most of which are not smart. A larger European country like France or Germany can employ 600,000 substations, all of which are just expected to work. If a substation fails, communities lose power, and repair technicians must be dispatched.”
That’s why smart grids are paramount, requiring edge data, analytics and connectivity. As power companies build a smarter grid, microgeneration points that incorporate new energy sources like wind and solar are now part of the grid. These points are at the far edge because they produce power where it’s consumed and their variable power contribution must be balanced with the network load, making their integration difficult. “It’s a massive and complex ecosystem to manage, which increases the complexity of the technology architecture to support it,” said Langer.
Balancing power generation with consumption
Another unique necessity in power management is the need to tightly couple supply and demand—in almost real-time. Once produced, electricity must go somewhere, it cannot orbit until a need for it arises. Like surfing, timing and precision are imperative; in power, operators must accurately time power generation with dynamic consumption needs across thousands of homes, businesses and networks and within very short timeframes.
“The edge and near real-time data intelligence are required for power companies to anticipate power consumption,” Langer shared. He estimates the timelines to plan your power generation needs are “24 hours for oil and gas operations, 1 week for nuclear plants and 10 seconds for solar generation. If you’ve got a cloud, your solar array slows down production.” Balancing those differing forecast periods against dynamic consumption needs is too complex and fast-moving to be effectively addressed by humans.
As digital technology transforms power generation, all edge technology solutions and implementations are not created equal. A deft balance and deep IT expertise are needed to meet distinct power infrastructure and industry requirements. “To effectively manage operations, power generation must be very lean at every site because there are so many sites,” Arnaud stated. “We engineer the right technology for automation and efficiency from the get-go while being very lean on cost so our power customers can optimize ROI right away.”
Getting to a more sustainable edge
Power generation companies also focus on sustainability initiatives to preserve compliance, consumer confidence and the environment. Edge data is being used to guide sustainability decision-making, helping organizations realize a greener future and more sustainable edge.
Advancing sustainability mandates accurate, reliable measurement, reporting and validation processes for carbon tracking and other use cases. Dell’s Data Confidence Fabric solution ensures the trust and transparency of edge data for carbon credits, helping to realize the full potential of edge data.
Decision-making is better with the edge and the analytics it enables. This fundamental truth, applied at a massive scale, is poised to transform the critical and complex power generation industry to improve reliability, increase ROI and advance sustainability. While surfers have mastered instinct and experience to conquer the waves, I’m thankful that high-stakes industries like power generation have the edge to fuel a better future.
Listen to my conversation with Arnaud Langer on the Over the Edge podcast.
View a short video on Dell’s Data Confidence Fabric.