Beyond the Data

To meet the energy transition goals outlined in the Paris accords will require engagement from stakeholders throughout the energy value chain. Utility business models will also need to evolve to support increasing percentages of distributed and renewable energy including solar and EVs. The need for distribution system visibility, control and agility will only grow. This podcast will address some of these issues and will consider these questions with examples from current utility customer deployments.

This episode features an interview with NET2GRID, for more information about NET2GRID please visit www.net2grid.com.

Emerald had been undergoing rapid retail load growth since 2015 and the utility’s Board instructed Staff to look at new ways of marketing energy efficiency. In addition, a resource capacity shortage began to surface in the Northwest around this time and conventional products for dealing with short-term power supply needs became scarce. As a result, the utility desired to study peak demand reduction through real-world demand savings programs and time of use rate design. Rob Currier, Power Resources Supervisor at Emerald People's Utility District (EPUD), and Beth Massey, Director of Connected Analytics at The Energy Authority (TEA) talk about the advanced analytics they performed across Emerald's customer base and how they created a flexible platform for future analytics.

When will data be truly transformational for utilities? Marie Clark, Analytics CoE Lead at Eversource Energy, says it's when utilities can figure out how to monetize data. That doesn't mean selling data, it means understanding the total cost of ownership of data and how Artificial Intelligence can create business efficiencies that enable humans to be better at their jobs.

Data warehouses and data lakes are key components of enterprise architecture, but they lack data context. A data fabric is a layer that sits on top of data repositories and creates contextualized knowledge by linking data sets together using machine learning. Gabe Prado, Sr. Director of Product Marketing for Power & Utilities at Cognite, explains data fabric and why it is important.

We're throwing it back this week to June 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic has been around for just a few months and utilities were starting to realize the changes it was forcing on their organizations. Most notably, the rate of digital transformation was increasing and advanced analytics were playing a central role in running a more decentralized work environment. As we head into the end of 2021, utilities have realized the benefits of these initial disruptions.

The evolution of the electric grid is being driven by technology ecosystems that orchestrate distributed energy, flexible energy, and mobile energy, all of which are underpinned by resilience. Mahesh Sudhakaran, General Manager, Global Energy, Environment & Utilities Industry for IBM talks about these ecosystems and specifically how the City of Copenhagen is tackling flexibility.

Over the past four years, Consumers Energy has been on a journey to analytics excellence and developing their employees through training and learning initiatives like the Analytics University. Vijoy Matthew, Executive Director in the IT department who is responsible for Product Transformation, Architecture and Quality, talks about the four key elements to their success and what's next.

Nearly two-thirds of low-income households in the US suffer from an energy burden. Baltimore Gas and Electric wanted to offer relief to their customers that struggle to pay bills by using data and predictive analytics to encourage enrollment in bill saving and energy efficiency programs. Amanda Janaski, Manager of Energy Efficiency Programs, BGE, and Paul McDonald, Senior Director, OPower Strategy and Marketing, talk about BGE's approach.

CPS Energy wanted to take a more surgical approach to vegetation management without increasing the budget. Amelia Badders, Director of Enterprise Advanced Analytics, talks about how her team combined lidar data with other data sets in a visualization platform to take a more data-driven approach to vegetation management.

The New York Power Authority wanted to make data more accessible to data scientists working on use cases for various business units. They decided to build a platform that ingestions, sorts, and stores data. Qing Wei, Lead Data Scientist, and Ben Ettlinger, Principle Analyst of Emerging Technology, talk about building and implementing the platform.