The Power of Big Data and Analytics in Advancing the Future of Energy
Published on : Friday 17-04-2020
The energy industry is undergoing a large-scale transformation with the growing innovation in technologies. The sector has evolved from a long way, including from the fire and fossil fuels to non-renewable to renewable energy sources. Since the industry is driven by data insights, to make better decisions at the right time, energy and utility companies need to explore the capabilities of Big Data and Analytics software. While big data helps improve the ability of a large amount of data processing, analytics powers businesses by visualizing the value of data and enabling them to gain improved outcomes.
Leveraging Big Data Analytics in the energy and utility industry is crucial as the organizations are increasingly implementing smart technology such as sensors, cloud computing, wireless, IoT devices, and network communication, among others. These advanced technologies generate a massive amount of data and create large data sets that get collected over a period of time. So big data analyzes and processes these large data sets to drive business performance.
The hybrid renewable energy forecasting solution utilizes data collected from monitoring devices and analytics technology to deliver precise weather forecasting within a wind farm to the extent of one month in advance. The lack of fossil fuels that is pushing the world to look for other alternative sources of energy, including solar, wave, and wind turbines, whose consumption is increasing rapidly. In this way, it has become vital to use big data-driven analytical tools that can help comprehend the behavior or adaption of these sources of energy.
Additionally, the instability in oil prices is leading to high expenditure in energy-related projects, which, in turn, is creating the demand for big data analytics. According to reports, the big data analytics market in the energy sector is predicted to grow at a CAGR of 10.22%, from 2020 to 2025. However, the scarcity of skilled employees with relevant expertise is likely to create an impediment to market growth.
Along with big data technologies, energy and utility companies can also use IoT solutions in order to gain greater flexibility and scalability. For example, the UK’s largest utility company, National Grid, is utilizing Open Energi’s Direct Demand technology platform to stabilize supply and demand across the UK’s power grid. So, the use of Big Data and IoT can facilitate utilities to improve their customer relationship, determine outages/leakages and spot faults by evaluating the massive amount of data coming from various IoT-enabled sensors and smart meters.
Moreover, big data analytics can deliver a vital role in minimizing energy consumption and increasing energy efficiency in the energy sector. However, this factor, together with other related advantages is anticipated to drive the demand for analytics in the sector.
In brief, big data analytics is very effective in the energy sector, since the sector requires high maintenance of machinery and equipment monitoring. We believe the technology will help energy and utility companies by optimizing power generation and planning.