Weekly Brief

How Data Analytics is Changing Utilities

Utilities Tech Outlook | Tuesday, February 09, 2021

Prosumers are creating innovative business models by bringing in entities like aggregators who are positioning themselves to take customers away from the utility.

FREMONT, CA: The electric utility industry analyzes data to optimize the electric grid operation and its processes. Although data analytics is a vital tool in the utility industry, advanced analytics is still at the initial stage. They need to establish where the sources of value are and what services and abilities they want to offer their customers, employees, regulators, and shareholders.

Here are three instances of how data analytics can help in utility transformation.

Predictive Asset Management

Many major outages result from failure occurring at an untimely moment. Data on equipment usage is present in various sources such as supervisory control and data acquisition, AMI, distribution automation, and more. By using information properly allows for better forecasting of equipment failures, which minimizes cost and customer counts.

Asset Utilization

Smart meter data can be grouped to show transformer loading, allowing utilities to compare usage to capacity and carry out capacity utilization trend analysis.

Power-Quality Issues

The distributed energy resources (DERs) have made power quality a vital issue at the residential level. Utilities can analyze residential DER installation using AMI data and resolve issues instantly, optimizing customer satisfaction and regulatory relationships.

As the utility landscape transforms considerably, it will face various issues that will need robust solutions. Some challenges will be:

• DERs and related technologies will be used extensively, changing how power flows over the distribution grid and influencing the business areas in utility such as generation planning and dispatch, grid design, and operations to field and customer services.

• Prosumers are creating innovative business models by bringing in entities like aggregators who are positioning themselves to take customers away from the utility.

• Since utilities rely on institutional knowledge to find solutions to problems, much of the learning will leave with every retirement.

• Analytics-based technology needs to augment the utility staff’s skill to make sure utilities can sustain the evolving business model. Utilities need to turn their data to useful information so that new employees will have the proper tools to make the right decisions and the right time.