Valuing and perceiving energy in the community.

In this third post of a mini-series of three, I want to explain this further through a value proposition of how community energy can work and the realism that proposes a radical rethinking of how we are thinking about the present-day Energy Transition and shifting this from a centralized approach into this transition of a decentralized community that generates, consumes, perceives and owns its energy destiny.

This radical concept envisions the energy transition as a living, evolving entity that bridges technology and nature, sparking profound shifts in how communities generate, consume, and perceive energy. It challenges established norms and prompts a complete reimagining of our relationship with energy and the environment.

My underlying thinking is through ecosystem thinking and design, triggering innovation engagement and activation strategies to promote innovation and change the energy transition dynamics within a community setting, offering decentralized community energy.

Empower Your Community’s Energy Future with Decentralized Energy Cooperatives

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A new Energy Transition for a profound community shift

In this second post of a mini-series of three, I want to explain this decentralized community energy concept further: “This radical concept envisions the energy transition as a living, evolving entity that bridges technology and nature, sparking profound shifts in how communities generate, consume, and perceive energy. It challenges established norms and prompts a complete reimagining of our relationship with energy and the environment”.

By introducing the concept of the “Energy Transition Nexus: A Living Energy Organism” and how it challenges the conventional approach to the energy transition:

While the concept described in my first and introductory post, “Envision Energy as a living, evolving community,” is indeed a radical departure from the existing way we see energy delivery and its transition, it takes an essential step in connecting much of the parts of the energy transition, its importance to our living.

I feel it is essential to bridge the gap between the natural world and the business world in a more closely aligned way, going beyond existing frameworks or thinking but still grounding this into business-orientated understanding to relate more.

Let’s explore a business-oriented, yet still disruptive, approach that brings a conceptual leap to the energy transition with this decentralized community proposal while maintaining some degree of continuity with business practices but set in an ecosystem way of thinking and design:

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Envision Energy as a living, evolving community

In this first post of a mini-series of three, I want to introduce a radical concept that envisions the energy transition as a living, evolving entity that bridges technology and nature, sparking profound shifts in how communities generate, consume, and perceive energy.

It challenges established norms and prompts a complete reimagining of our relationship with energy and the environment. It focuses on the community in a decentralized way for its energy.

My underlying thinking is through ecosystem thinking and design, triggering innovation engagement and activation strategies to promote innovation and change the energy transition dynamics within a community setting, offering decentralized community energy.

It comprises the following parts to consider shifting our thinking away from the presently accepted, more highly centralised thinking on energy provision into community enablement. It is conceptualized upon the following thoughts:

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Our Power Grids require Reliability, Resilience and Risk management.

The pressure on our Power Grids needs urgent attention

There is a growing, possibly intense focus and awareness that our Energy Grids worldwide are in serious trouble.

The significant changing consumption needs and generation patterns are causing significant concerns that existing ageing infrastructure is becoming a major source of risk to power grid safety, reliability and financial exposure and in failing to deliver power on the expected 24 x 7, we need.

If you look at ten of the top issues that are causing a growing crisis

  1. Ageing or outdated infrastructure
  2. Supply chain failures are delaying infrastructure equipment changes.
  3. A continued public opposition delaying infrastructure options and bureaucratic barriers
  4. There is a continued lack of sizable funding to make major changes
  5. System redundancies and stranded assets and the issues of legacy write-offs
  6. The increased complexity of the grid is still unclear in its final generation mix design
  7. Cyber Attacks are continuing and exposing significant weakness
  8. Extreme weather events are growing and exposing grid vulnerabilities.
  9. Previously poor project management, inconsistencies in capital spending
  10. Changing demand needs, the acceleration of electrification and the lack of new infrastructure

The need is to find effective responses and considerations of the options, managing change simultaneously while maintaining increasing power demand.

The energy system is being disrupted, and where there are levels of high disruption, there is always uncertainty, debate and learning to take risker views of the future, creating a lot of unease and hesitation. As quoted by one senior person, “we have an inadequate view of what – positively, and in detail – we’re building towards.

As the sector transforms at such an accelerating rate, the move towards ambitious decarbonization targets has required that clean energy is explored in all those options and required to be pushed to the forefront of future solutions. Integrating that variable green energy onto the grid and hardening infrastructure assets against extreme weather are proving some industry’s most pressing challenges.

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Exploring Siemens relaunch of their next generation of Meter Data Management

Image rights Siemens EnergyIP Mosaic®

I was looking at the changes made by Siemens on their meter data management software on their recent relaunched EnergyIP Mosaic®; their next generation of the leading EnergyIP® Meter Data Management.

“Siemens is taking its market-leading meter data management software to the next level, supporting customers to get ready for future changes to the energy system,” said Sabine Erlinghagen, CEO of Digital Grid at Siemens Smart Infrastructure.

Siemens has taken a design thinking and co-creation approach to understanding customer needs.  Siemens worked extensively with multiple customers globally to understand their exact needs when it comes to meter data management.

The relaunched MDM software focused on enhancing user-centricity

EnergyIP Mosaic® has not only changed its look and feel but opened up new efficient ways of performing tasks, providing better situational awareness for customers.  The solution has focused explicitly on workflow improvements, giving the new software a more efficient, intuitive, insightful, adaptable and ready to use sense and feel.

With the new relaunched software, users can see everything clearly on one screen through EnergyIP Mosaic’s new, modern interface that can swiftly bring together all the information you need on one screen.

This update differs significantly from the past EnergyIP Mosaic® offers a new, modern interface that swiftly brings together all the information on one screen, whereas in the past, there were requirements to open multiple tabs in the UI. Data, correlations, root causes, and other advanced functionalities are intuitive and easily understandable with interactive visualizations and shortcuts.

“EnergyIP Mosaic® lets you find what you need and understand what you see.”

Image rights Siemens EnergyIP Mosaic®

This next-generation solution offers far greater efficiency and flexibility to busy users. The modern interface is easy to learn and use, improving customer experience. Management can quickly review dashboards and data on the go using a tablet to help in any facilitation or deliver a quicker answer for actions and insights.

New capabilities of EnergyIP® MDM

A significantly increased focus on Event Data and Action Management (EDAM)

Do you want to save time by detecting anomalies automatically?
There is so much your data is telling you: the health of your hardware, safety issues, revenue loss, meter installation issues and operational issues. EDAM automatically analyses AMI data, events and interval read with multiple detection rules created by you for your business needs.

Achieving greater Business Monitoring

Do you know what is going on with your operations on a daily basis?

Remove the “black box” and increase the transparency of AMI data to make quick, confident decisions. Users can drill down to investigate data collection and quality issues, see trends and spot geographical clusters of potential service issues points. The users can quickly gain situational awareness and better visibility into data quality issues for effective resolution.

KPI’s significantly improve through this increased transparency. For instance, now it provides KPI potential for what percentage of service points have complete data from a business perspective, improving the data quality. Also built-in is the ability for KPI’s to be constructed for different ratepayer groups, customer classes, AMI systems etc.

The new software gives easier viewing, more informed data to make quicker, confident decisions from data collection and exception management to billing and data exporting, as well as monitoring of usage anomalies; you will have insight into the data and be equipped to act. The real value of providing actionable interactive dashboards for both ongoing and exception resolution handling has become a critical feature.

The availability of Software-as-a-Service is part of this relaunch

Are your critical IT personnel overloaded with maintaining an ever-changing IT landscape? The new EnergyIP Mosaic® offers three different EnergyIP Deployment Models.

So what are the different benefits and trade-offs?

The most traditional MDM model is EnergyIP MDM On-Premise. This MDM model offers the utilities a license model. As the customer, they are responsible for purchasing the licenses, storing the data and additional costs that will occur regarding maintenance updates and/or software upgrades. It is highly customizable and configurable but has its limits and cost considerations to evaluate, depending on the future business plans and the available capital.

The second option is the Hosted one; this is growing in its popularity with the increasing need for data to be stored in the Cloud. Hosted offers the customization and configuration of on-premise, but customers save space and reduce IT costs by storing data in the Cloud. Therefore, the data is NOT stored in a data centre at a customer’s physical location. It is stored in a private cloud environment that only the customer has access to.

The third option is Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and is rapidly becoming the future for software and is now available for EnergyIP® MDM SaaS globally. EnergyIP MDM SaaS was launched in early 2021 in the United States. SaaS offers unique benefits because it is a subscription model, and data is stored on a secure but public hosted site. EnergyIP MDM SaaS uses AWS, Amazon Web Services. SaaS is lower cost and has a faster implementation time.

SaaS has all the great benefits of EnergyIP MDM.

Having available all the functionalities, SaaS provides the real option of reducing your risks, cost and complexity in a preconfigured service with Cloud-based security and regular upgrades to allow the MDM provider to focus on their core business and have a very limited IT infrastructure investment and workload pressures. This option is an all-in-one subscription. Implementation can be rapid, possibly within three months, depending on the connectivity and the existing designed communications network and its integration into any more comprehensive technology solutions planned or in use and dependencies on its interoperability and cybersecurity assessments.

Intelligence and building sustainable action capabilities

As Sabine Erlinghagen, CEO of Digital Grid at Siemens Smart Infrastructure, states: “We need intelligence – be it automation or artificial intelligence – to provide improved guidance to grid operators. Digitalization is the key enabler to make grids flexible enough to handle the rising complexity caused by an ever-increasing infeed of renewable energy and a growing share of EVs on the road while remaining resilient.

To master the new complexity, we have to turn data into knowledge and knowledge into sustainable action. With our digital technologies, we want to help utilities safeguard and even accelerate the energy transition.

We need to find better ways to use the already collected data for new purposes. For example, in the past, smart meter data was used for billing purposes only. But data collected by smart meters is extremely valuable for other processes as well.”

EnergyIP can be central to current or future add-on applications.

EnergyIP will be ready to support what customers change or try to accomplish in the future (e.g. changing rates, changing AMI infrastructure, new data privacy and cyber security regulations, exchanging IT landscape, new value add use cases.

EnergyIP Portfolio leads the market in MDM and related applications

Discover the full potential of your data beyond meter-to-cash with add on applications such as Analytics Foundation, Revenue Protection, Integration Adaptors, Low Voltage Outage Management, Advanced Device Management, Energy Engage, Prepay and Front End Processor.

Siemens sums up the result of this relaunch.

“We worked extensively with our User Advisory Board, the largest global user community dedicated exclusively to MDM, to understand their exact operational needs. EnergyIP Mosaic® has not only changed its look and feel but opened up new efficient ways of performing tasks, providing better situational awareness for customers. We’ve improved task efficiency by up to 85%, and situational assessment time has been reduced by 60%. By focusing on workflow improvements, the new software is more efficient, intuitive, insightful, and adaptable,” states Ming Ho, Senior Director of User Experience and Strategic Innovations.

Find out more on the relaunched EnergyIP Mosaic®, the next generation of the leading EnergyIP® Meter Data Management.

Image rights Siemens EnergyIP Mosaic®

So to unlock the full value of your smart metering investment, take a visit and learn more about EnergyIP®’s Metering Solutions on the Siemens site here, where you’ll find all the latest EnergyIP Metering materials, including brochures and datasheets as well as customer support information.

Siemens EnergyIP Mosaic® “lets you find what you need and understand what you see”

 

 

Energy Complexity needs the Digital Twin to help

Providing a digital twin solution in the manufacturing environment is becoming a critical part of managing the complexity of those environments that many companies have to increasingly operate within.

As digital twins become critically important, entities are beginning to adopt this “twinning” concept dramatically, and within the Energy Transition we are undertaking, it will be no different.

A digital twin enables a Utility, for example, to visualize its assets, track the constant changes occurring consistently, and make better decisions on performance optimization. Continue reading

Empowering Cities for a Net Zero Future

Today, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released a timely report on Cities and how critically important they are to achieve a net-zero world.

The report “Empowering Cities for a Net Zero Future” covers all aspects of the issues and challenges that Cities are facing on climate action.

The IEA states that “Cities are key to a net-zero emissions future where affordable and sustainable energy is accessible to all. The global population living in cities is expected to surge from 50% in 2021 to 70% in 2050. Cities today account for 70% of global CO2 emissions and 75% of global energy use. But with size comes opportunity.”

The report covers a wide range of opportunities, challenges and policy solutions that can help city-level governments capture the significant value of efficient and smart digital energy systems, no matter their unique context by illustration, through more than 100 examples and case studies,

The report also provides actionable guidance on ways national governments can help cities overcome barriers to progress and accelerate clean energy transitions using digitalisation.

Let me summarize some of the main findings here:

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Mobilizing Innovation around Energy Poverty

Mobilizing Innovation around Energy Poverty

Credit Muhammad Muzamil, Unsplash

As we look across innovation for our energy transition solutions, let’s think a little more about social innovation. What is energy poverty? Why is this important to turn our innovative abilities towards resolving?

Energy poverty has no universal definition. Each country is at different levels of understanding. Here in Europe, I read a white paper by Schneider Electric, released in 2018, entitled “Overcoming poverty in Europe.”

There is no official definition of “energy poverty”, but to start somewhere, it can be described as the struggle to afford the ever-increasing cost of heating or lighting in homes or being able to cook food or heat water as a result of low income or bills that are too high. Energy poverty leads to suffering from the cold in winter and from the heat in summer. Continue reading

Shaping the Power Generation sector

I recently viewed a Power Generation survey conducted a year or so back and found it valuable to motivate change. It was centred on the Middle East Power Generation sector and conducted by Siemens to help them understand future power generation’s underlying trends.

This Siemens survey had as the main question to the survey: “Which trends do you think are currently having the biggest impact on the power generation sector in your region“.

Now in reading this, we have to recognize this is the Middle East with an abundance of oil and gas, but are the trends similar for other regions of the world? The responses I would suggest are certainly reflecting a global movement; the ranking orders might vary. They bring out the opportunities and challenges all power generation is going through presently, I would think. Continue reading

Complexity, Debate and Many Starting Points in the Energy Transition

Image source and rights: Siemens Energy

I have just finished the third and final day of panel events offered by #SiemensEnergyME in their #EnergyWeek. I took the time to attend all of the panels, the debates, the complexities, and the significant differences as starting points in the #energytransition we are all undertaking was well brought home.

The panels were full of highly knowledgeable people, the hands-on ones that are dealing with the energy issues of today each day, and thinking through the ones for tomorrow. Siemens drew in Ministers, CEO’s, Senior Management, CFO’s, CTO’s and Director-Generals to offer insights and create the atmosphere for what I would call “creative tension” that good knowledge brings to a debate.

The third day was positioned on Sustainability with digitalization as key to the future of solving grid complexity and the growing challenges of renewable integration. Continue reading