The energy industry is in a state of flux. While overall energy demand continues to rise, there is a global shift towards low carbon sources and for energy security. The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that global energy consumption will increase nearly 50% over the next 30 years.
While petroleum and other liquid fuels will remain the world’s largest energy source in 2050, the US EIA states that renewable energy sources like wind and solar are on pace to grow to the same level. This puts pressure on the energy industry to transform across the value chain to reduce the carbon footprint associated with energy production and usage, and ultimately accelerate the energy transition. To achieve this, the industry is embracing digital transformation, and through practical innovations, working to deliver energy more efficiently, reliably, and responsibly.
Big data challenge
Addressing environmental sustainability and energy transition are big data challenges. Cloud computing enables the fundamental shift that organisations need to unlock their data and transform how they function. The energy industry is primed for unprecedented opportunities and the cloud is helping organisations from across the value chain unlock and leverage data, which is the first step towards building the industry of the future.
Energy companies have traditionally relied on an on-prem IT infrastructure, which is costly and has its own carbon footprint. By moving to the cloud, an organisation only pays for the IT services that it consumes while also reducing the costs associated with maintaining and managing an on-prem IT infrastructure. Moving to the cloud is also significantly more energy efficient.
A recent study by international analyst firm 451 Research found that Amazon Web Services‘ (AWS) infrastructure is several times more efficient than performing those same workloads in on-premises data centers. By operating with more energy efficiency, the cloud can also help lower an organisation’s carbon footprint. After analysing several geographies, 451 Research found that AWS can lower customers’ carbon footprint related to specific workloads by nearly 80% compared to surveyed enterprise data centers—and up to 96% once AWS is powered with 100% renewable energy, a target it is on path to meet by 2025.
Reinventing energy
Across the entire energy value chain, organisations are working to connect complex, distributed workflows and workloads—transformative cloud-based services like data lakes, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and internet of things (IoT) are the tools helping them achieve this and drive their digital transformation forward.
Multinational energy company CEPSA built a data lake on AWS to analyze real-time data from more than 300,000 sensors (generating 170m data points each day) at eight refineries in various locations across the globe. Through this deployment the company has so far reduced its emissions by an estimated 70,000 metrics tons of carbon dioxide per year (the equivalent of removing more than 15,000 cars from the road) and reduced overall energy consumption by two percent across its operations, while increasing the production of some refinery products by nearly three percent.
Global utility company Engie built its data lake on AWS, enabling the company’s business units to collect and analyse data to support a data-driven strategy and to lead the zero-carbon transition. The company is collecting 200TB of data across 1,000 projects. Leveraging AWS cloud services, the company is automating energy predictions for its customers, increasing productivity across its business units, and maximising wind farm energy production.
Engie is also using Amazon SageMaker to build, train, and deploy ML models for predictive maintenance at its power plants. More than 1,000 prediction models have been developed and trained for different types of equipment, including valves, pumps, ventilation and heating systems. Over the course of five years, approximately 10,000 pieces of equipment will be connected and benefit from predictive maintenance, which will result in an estimated savings of approximately 800,000 euros.
The future of energy
There is no question that the energy industry faces significant pressure to transform across the value chain to reduce the carbon footprint associated with energy production and usage, and accelerate the energy transition.
Cloud computing provides the fundamental shift that organisations need to reshape their business. From oil and gas to power and utilities and renewable energy development, emerging cloud technologies like ML and AI are helping organisations optimise their operations and meet growing demand for energy in a more sustainable manner.
