Introduction

Urbanization is bringing more and more people to cities. The technological advancements in consumer electronics make more and more people use those devices than ever before. It makes the demand for energy keeps increasing. Even though renewable energy is becoming more and more usable and cost-effective, it is yet to fulfill the continuity requirement of energy demand. Building more and more traditional energy-producing plants (e.g. coal) is impacting “climate change”. We should reduce the carbon footprint. It is a quite complicated problem to solve. At the same time, it is not something that we can keep aside. As technologists, what can we do to save the world?

Let’s try to break down this complicated problem into a set of requirements and try to work on those items as much we can from the technology perspective. Given below is a list of requirements in the energy industry that we can address through the application of technology.

Achieving these requirements needs a detailed analysis of the existing IT ecosystem and the technical challenges and come up with a solid technical framework or a reference architecture.

The below figure depicts the transition of the energy industry from the traditional model of generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption to the more advanced aspects that are evolving with the usage of technology.

Transformation of the energy industry

Figure: Transformation of the energy industry

As depicted in the above figure, the energy industry needs to deal with not only an increase in energy demand but also the technology and consumer advancements around it. With the innovations happening around electric vehicles, battery systems, renewable energy sources, and consumer expectations, having your technology backbone supporting these advancements is a critical step to achieve success in the energy industry.

This means that the dynamics around the energy industry is shaping into a common model that is similar to industries like financial services, the automotive industry with specific aspects like markets, operations, and 3rd party service providers are involved in the energy industry. The below graphic depicts the correlation of these components along with the traditional energy business model.

Enterprise Energy Conceptual Model

Figure: Enterprise Energy Conceptual Model

The above figure depicts a model of the energy industry along with its interaction with the market, operations, and service providers. It is a conceptual model that explains the interconnection of the traditional energy lifecycle of generation, transmission, distribution through distributed energy resources (DERs) and consumption with the energy market, continuous operations, and involvement of 3rd party service providers and energy companies. It does show that these interconnections (or integrations) are critical to providing a quality service to the customers.

Let’s come back to our main topic of using IT technologies to support the modern energy industry demands. Given below is a list of high-level requirements that need to be supported through the technology.

These high-level requirements can be further divided into a set of technical requirements as mentioned below.

With the understanding of technical requirements to succeed in the energy industry, let’s try to figure out what needs to be done to the existing IT ecosystem. To fulfill the above requirements, there are a certain set of technical challenges that need to be addressed in the IT ecosystem of energy companies. Given below is a list of challenges that exist in most of the energy industry organizations.

Solving these technical challenges paves the way to solve the more complex domain-specific problems mentioned at the beginning of the article. Fortunately, there are technical solutions to solve most of these challenges. Let’s figure out what can be done.

It is excellent to understand the business requirements, technical requirements, existing technical gaps, and come up with a set of technical solutions that can support those requirements. It is useful to have this information in a graphical representation so that it is easy to grasp and communicate across teams. The below figure depicts a solution architecture framework developed by IBM for the energy industry.

Solution Architecture Framework for the Energy industry

Figure: Solution Architecture Framework for the Energy industry

According to the above figure, there are 7 main areas that require the involvement of technology to drive the transformation within the energy industry. It discusses various stages of energy distribution and related functional components. Then it suggests technical solutions to each aspect. Given below are the main technical functionalities required in the energy industry according to the above figure.

Asset, Device, and Service monitoring

Asset lifecycle management

Informed decision making

Improve customer experience

Business process automation

Regulatory, Risk and Compliance management

Security solutions

With all the details in hand, let’s try to build a solid technical architecture that can support most (if not all) of the requirements mentioned above.

Technical Reference Architecture

Building a solution architecture requires identifying the main building blocks and how they are interconnected. Based on the information provided in the previous sections, here are the main components that need to be included in the solution architecture.

In addition to these main components, there can be 10s of other systems like device management software (MDM), HR management software (HRIS), etc. to support various parts of the operations within the organization. The below figure depicts how these components are laid out to build the solution architecture.

Technical Reference Architecture for Energy industry

Figure: Technical Reference Architecture for Energy industry

As depicted in the above figure, “Integration Layer” is the main component that integrates disparate systems that are required to execute various business processes and make sure that data is transferred in a swift manner. This functionality is called the “ESB” or “Integration” in most cases. It makes sure that systems are connected as and when required with minimum effort or customization on those systems. Based on the requirements of a particular organization, the same layer provides the functionality to implement long-running business processes with human interactions with BPM tools.

The “API Management Layer” exposes the data that needs to exposed to internal and external users with security and control. These users can use different channels to interact with data through this layer. As an example, the operations center of the organization will use their interactive website to connect through WebSockets to listen to real-time notifications about system failures while energy consumers will use their mobile applications to check the current month’s energy usage. It also helps when interacting with various regulatory, compliance bodies and makes sure that processes are well integrated and maintained with the necessary access and auditing capabilities.

The “Identity and Access Management” layer is responsible for securing the data from fraudulent access and also makes life easier for the internal users to access multiple systems with a single login using Single-Sign-On capabilities. In addition to that, it also helps to implement advanced security for consumer access with Multi-Factor-Authentication (MFA) schemes.

One of the critical aspects of providing a continuous service is to keep monitoring every aspect of the energy generation, transmission, and distribution with proper tools. In addition to that, the consumer side also needs to be monitored. That is the functionality of various devices used at different locations within the grid and those devices generate millions of events every minute. These events need to be collected and processed in real-time to identify any abnormal behaviors in the grid and the distribution network. That is the task of the event broker and the real-time event processing components which are mentioned in the above figure.

The above figure provides a strong foundation to build an effective IT ecosystem for the energy industry. This architecture can be implemented with various software components available in the market.

Future improvements

The above architecture can be expanded to support modern requirements like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and cloud computing with the usage of appropriate technologies. As an example, AI and ML related functionalities can be integrated with the event broker and real-time event processing components easily. All the required integration points are available for such improvements to the system. Given this architecture is independent of any particular vendor or specific technology, users can use their preferred cloud vendor that offers these basic functional components with their offering. The good news for such users is that most of the major public cloud vendors provide these functional capabilities as cloud services.

References