Business Applications

Industry analysts estimate only 1-2% of total industry spending goes to IT and digital enhancements. Energy companies also allocate 20% less of their IT budgets to digital transformations than companies in other industries. Compared to digital leaders, they spend 55% less [1].

Energy companies must transition from their legacy core applications (both enterprise and core business) to cloud-native architecture to take maximum advantage of integrated processes and data.

42% of energy providers are currently investing in digital channels to improve the customer experience, and 35% are investing in sales and service analytics [2].

The metaverse presents the utility industry with an opportunity to transform customer and community engagement. It creates an immersive approach that enhances the nuances of a transformed utility-customer relationship. It will be used to educate and engage customers on energy efficient technologies, local energy markets, EV route planning and charging, and much more. And it will be used to train a new generation of utility employee and support engineers working in the field.

Blockchain is another technology that help streamline and coordinate traditionally centralised processes through a more distributed energy ecosystem. Use cases include; trading Renewavle Energy Certificates (REC), peer-to-peer energy generation (microgrids), real-time transactions to balance supply and demand, and energy payments for EV charging stations. 

 Compute & Cloud

Cloud technologies are foundational to facilitating a more complex energy system that requires orchestrating DERs, balancing renewables and offering deeper insight and control over energy usage. Beyond improving the current energy system, the cloud also has the potential to create platform energy economies and open innovation, bringing together data and services from multiple providers.

73% of utilities have already deployed cloud-based solutions in some form, but many of these are in specific areas of the business or for point applications rather than large-scale cloud transformations. Utilities’ slow move to cloud is for good reason. Historically, accounting treatments for cloud shifted much of the cost to operational expenditures rather than capital. For many  utilities, the cost, accounting and regulatory approach to cloud made the business case difficult to justify. This has changed.

Cloud can enhance business agility and resilience, optimize IT spending, accelerate innovation, enable new business capabilities and revenue streams—all while reducing technology related carbon emissions. Cloud can transform Utilities in two ways; breaking the data and technological silos that have hindered the industry’s transformation, and enabling key capabilities such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.

As the grid evolves to more Distributed Energy Resources (DER) there are practical limits on the timescales and resolution of grid analytics. There is only so much data that can be collected and analysed before computation and communication limits are encountered. Even the deployment of new fast solutions such as 5G cannot solve many practical issues. Therefore Edge computing is a key enabler of smart grid networks, bringing computation closer to the energy producers and consumers, enabling better control, smarter management, and new services. New software solutions can be deployed to enable:

• voltage, demand and generation monitoring;
• transformer regulation and control;
• fault detection and remediation;
• energy management;
• analytics and prediction; and
• predictive maintenance and more, together with an
enhanced cybersecurity.

ABI Research has found that cloud spending in the industry is expected to rise by 4-5 times over the next five to six years.

Digital Workplace

Utilites have two distinct types of workforce; thsoe that are mobile field workers either at the plant or supporring distribution networks, and those that are traditionally office based, such as billing or customer management. Analysis suggests that 57% of workers can work from home or in a hybrid model [1]. 

A modern collaborative digital workplace is critical to a remotely located workforce. It ranges from access to HR applications and core business applications to e-mail, instant messaging and enterprise social media tools and virtual meeting tools. 

Equipping field workers with mobile IoT sensors, analytics and wearable technology could facilitate a more effective execution of work activities, achieving new levels of operational performance and safety.

Security, Compliance & Data Privacy

Security and data breaches are a high priority issue. Energy is a high profile industry with attack potential from criminal, political and governmental sources. Stakeholders would expect them to operate at a very high level of security and privacy, this includes identity management, data security, privacy management and cybersecurity. 

By their very nature, utilities operate a geographically distributed infrastructure across many sites that makes it difficult to maintain the necessary visibility across IT and OT systems, much less correlate network activity against physical security systems, such as badge access logs and server room surveillance feeds.

This is further complicated as the industry becomes more connected, digitised and distributed it is becoming important to secure the connected energy ecosystem. For example a coordinated cyber attack on EV charging stations could have devastating impacts to a country. Devices connected to the energy system could include smart home consumer devices with limited security, or IoT devices within the grid that have very long asset lifetimes. Service providers and operators within the connected energy ecosystem need therefore to move away from trust-based models. They should instead adopt a zero-trust security model in which no identity is trusted, and all actions are validated against a set of predefined rules. This is the only means by which an ecosystem member can interact with others safely and securely.

In 2015 the power grid of Ukraine was hacked, which resulted in power outages for roughly 230,000 consumers for 1-6 hours. Further attacks on the Colonial Pipeline in the US, and the 2022 attack on the Montenegro state utility infrastructure are good examples of the threat. Concern is so high that the EU has €100m of funding, which utilities can use to  strengthen their defences.