How cloud, analytics and mobile will revolutionize renewable energy

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When you look at government policies from all over the world, it is clear that power generation from renewable energy sources is here to stay and potentially grow at an exponential rate. For example, the European Union has set a goal to generate 20 percent of all the energy in 2020 from renewable energy sources. This kind of transformation in energy mix (the total combination of energy generated from fossil, renewable and nuclear sources) can only be achieved if the technology for renewable power generation sources and the associated generation processes graduate from boutique to industrial scale.

There are a few key challenges faced by renewable generators, including:

• Reducing operations and maintenance (O&M) costs to maximize productivity and asset utilization.
• Creating agility and flexibility to respond to demands for growth and change through standards-based integration.

Operators recognize the value in O&M but are struggling with aspects like the scalability of in-house solutions, a divide between OT and IT, as well as few resources to support in-house development and management. Improved efficiency leveraging specialized and scarce skills through centralized information access can help improve remote operations. Internal and external standardization is also important.

Industrialization of the generation processes such as O&M promises to provide substantial competitive advantage for the industry. Information systems, particularly analytics and optimization toolsets, can and are playing key roles in this industrialization by meeting challenges such as dispersed geographical locations and dependence on natural environment factors such as wind, sun intensity and tidal phenomena in the sea.

IBM has been actively supporting the renewable industry to industrialize O&M processes with its smarter renewable O&M offerings.

The recently announced Bharat Light and Power (BLP) $11 million strategic outsourcing engagement with IBM is an example of how cloud, analytics and mobility can be leveraged for industrialization of renewable energy generation and integration.  The integration of disparate systems across the enterprise is critical so all users have access to the same correct information and a fuller view of the most comprehensive data, regardless of their department or role. Cloud computing can provide the fastest, most efficient delivery of IT resources for integration without the need for extensive start-up or capital budgeting.

As part of the engagement, IBM will work with BLP to help the company manage and effectively use the vast amount of data generated by the power generation sources. With efficient and predictive analysis of data, energy producers can better manage their resources, take necessary precautionary measures and improve overall productivity. IBM will deploy its SoftLayer cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to centrally monitor and manage BLP’s existing and future generation plants as well as store and manage the data on cloud.

Big data analytics capabilities will help gather valuable insights from the data generated, which will ensure that BLP has an integrated view of its operations and is equipped to take proactive measures. Using IBM mobile technology, the company will be able to provide all the information analyzed on the cloud platform to its ground staff on their handsets and alert them well in advance. This will enable BLP to build smarter operations with higher efficiency and greater utilization.

A powerful combination of analytics, mobility and cloud is industrializing power generation from renewable energy sources. This smarter combination is probably one of the only ways you can economically cater to the computing needs of real-time data analysis and making information available at the point of action. What do you think about the role that analytics, mobility and cloud can play? Comment below, or connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter @gandhibiren.