Utilities

The future utility is data driven

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GOING DIGITAL IS JUST THE BEGINNING

Electricity, water and gas utilities offer essential services. They’re expected to not only to function 24/7 error-free, but also keep pace with ever-changing regulations, standards and new market conditions.

Distributed generation, new digital technologies and a more competitive landscape will give utility customers the freedom to interact with a choice of competitive energy services that enable the exchange of energy, information, and a range of additional solutions. Utilities must respond to this disruption. But to play an active role in this future world, they must look both at modernizing the grid and their IT architecture.

Legacy applications frequently represent a major roadblock to digital transformation. These systems are not built for a distributed energy system and are notoriously difficult and expensive to operate. A composable architecture and integration platform designed for utilities, enable modernization in a manageable, step-by-step manner instead of the traditional approach to system updates and replacement.

We help utilities manage the complexities of data integration so they can continue to improve core operations and reduce costs with actionable insights, while building new capabilities and innovative services to meet the changing expectations of their customers. Our technology and industry expertise are designed to help you get ahead of the trends in a rapidly changing industry.

Next-gen AMI

Smart meters were originally built for basic outage management that touted cost-saving benefits to entice adoption, but largely fell flat of expectations beyond billing. This approach barely satisfied cost-benefit analysis and underutilized a company’s AMI. It relegated smart metering to getting consumption data and applying it to create invoices for the client. As big data integration and data lake storage adoption increase so too does the shift towards leveraging smart meter data for more than just billing and cost savings.

Modernizing the AMI landscape to leverage AMI data for intelligent grid operations requires the seamless integration of different types of meters, devices and sensors. And they need to be integrated across the entire value chain to simplify operations, management and monitoring. The value of smart metering can be further increased by sharing and connecting distributed data sources—including data from weather, the grid, usage consumption, tariffs, and more.

By leveraging Utilihive Smart Metering Operations Center (SMOC), utilities have the possibility to process millions of data points in real-time and distil them into actionable insights that benefit more than just their bottom line. It offers all the functionality needed to monitor and oversee the health and daily operations of all deployed smart meters. It provides a “birds eye view” of the entire AMI operation and offers a platform to liaise with other utility operational teams and departments to ensure services provided to customers are of the highest quality.

AMI

AMI Use cases

Meter to cash

Efficient management of the meter to cash process is critical to financial performance and improves customer services.

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Intelligent grid

The transition from the traditional power distribution grid to a digitalized distribution grid requires sophisticated techniques for monitoring, control and protection of the power system. While utilities have deployed smart grid services and devices, these systems typically create silos of information making it difficult for utilities to gain situational awareness across the low, mid and high voltage networks.

So how can the smart grid become intelligent? It starts with digitalizing the entire network from high voltage to behind the meter for transparency and observability. This allows utilities to turn the data generated into actionable insights.


Utilihive provides the integration, data cleansing, storage, provisioning and end-to-end monitoring capabilities needed in a modern OT and IT domain. It offers significantly enhanced grid visibility and observability in various complicated operational scenarios. It allows utilities to introduce big data analytics and advanced machine learning techniques to power system operations, augmenting operational intelligence. With this comprehensive system-wide knowledge, utilities can make better decisions.

Intelligent grid

Intelligent grid use cases

DER Management

Traditional centralized power production grids operate on 15-minute output update cycles that force operators to over-generate power to compensate for potential blackouts or unexpected new power demands on the grid. Additionally, efficiently integrating distributed, intermittent renewable power sources such as solar panels or wind turbines is a highly complex task.


Integrating data from Distributed Energy Resources (DER) and making it available to grid operators offers real-time analytics and control, increase efficiencies and flexibility in this legacy process. Integration helps DER operators ensure power is generated more accurately and reliably, making the grid more resilient and secure in the process.


Utilihive provides the platform that supports hybrid DER integration, ensuring a seamless flow of data between production units and those managing grid planning and operations. Utilihive ensures reliable big data is available for optimized planning and manages data exchange for grid operators in order to re-despatch DERs. The result? Better quality energy supply and more reliable service in the network.

Der management

DER management use cases

Prosumer engagement

At the heart of this push toward digital is improving the customer experience. The goal is to motivate users to become part of the energy transition. Consumer expectations continue to evolve as a new generation of energy users enters the market. Market forces are becoming increasingly competitive. And utilities are looking to their data for help. But all too often, data isn’t easily accessible or isn’t integrated and can’t offer the solutions utilities need. But now is the time to grab this strategic opportunity and drive innovation by integrating energy data across the entire value chain in a holistic way, and deliver new customer-centric service innovations.


A modern digital utility understands the value of integration to a growing number of systems and partners. This collaboration opens a new path for energy providers and energy market entrants such as banks, smart home manufactures, HVAC or EV charging solutions providers. These partnerships can deliver highly engaging energy insights and new services via customer facing platforms or apps.


As utilities are forced to rapidly transform into digital and data-driven businesses, the unique know-how we bring can be used to create long-term value from data. Utilihive is specifically designed to unlock, obtain and deliver 15-30-60 minute time series data from national data hubs, smart meter head-end systems and modular IT infrastructures. It forms the data foundation for all energy disaggregation services and innovative digital lifestyle apps.

Prosumers

prosumer engagement use cases