In The Energy Sector, Data Analytics Has The Potential To Be A Game Changer

Energy Business Review | Tuesday, August 03, 2021

Businesses can capitalize on their data, but very few have succeeded. The execution gap is elaborated on here.

FREMONT, CA: The exponentially changing energy market facilitates a data landscape underpinning the rapid and un-relentless disruption. Data plays a prominent role in supporting security and reliability as the system moves into a more varying, decentralized generation and innovation-driven technologies and services.

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It is a renowned fact that businesses of all sizes in the energy sector are queued to capitalize on the data they possess. The information gives knowledge that actionable, real-time insights underlie the capacity of these firms to drive efficient markets.

Still, businesses have regulatory and technical barriers while on the verge of supporting digital and data transformation, particularly when conventional approaches are adopted. It seems impracticable, too cumbersome even, and prohibitively costly. Is there a solution on the horizon?

Real-Time Data Interoperability is Essential for Efficient Markets:

Ridding the data friction before inaccurate and incompatible data and increasing transparency are necessary for a continually re-inventing market to perform much more efficiently.

The endpoint is to solve this with real-time enhanced, seamless data interoperability between Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), Distributed Energy Systems (DESs), Operational Technology, and IT systems.

Organizations are hardly securing the integrated data within and among entities, which is far-fetched.

Recently, organizations have learned the value of data in delivering seamless end-user experiences. As a result, supply chain integration, innovation, and new business models have been applied recently. Yet, there exist many challenges:

• The crowd of systems, processes and applications, legacy and advanced technologies, all full of data and none of it functioning together as a whole;

• Traditional and present technological systems which aren’t built to deal with the surplus of unstructured data;

• An inefficiency in creating a real-time, unified view of a customer or a company;

• Rising necessarily to satiate data sharing internal and external to organizations, entities, and technologies in real-time; and

• Problems with data security, cybersecurity, and data regulatory compliance.

Also, the realities of business complications include, but are not limited to:

• The integration of data with all mergers and acquisitions;

• Business partners at one firm and competitors in another;

• Third-party vendor networking;

• Complex relationships; and

• Blurred boundaries amongst the customers and suppliers.

These occurrences pinpoint companies spending excess capital on unsuccessful attempts to handle, organize, and control data. For example, a recent study by IDC indicated that more than 80 percent of the time is spent on discovery, preparation, and data protection, and only a mere 20 percent on conducting actual analytics to obtain insights.

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