Our capacity to supply and consume ever more energy will soon reach the physical limits of our planet. The growing price and scarcity of natural resources, increasingly stringent regulations and the responsibility of individuals and companies are inexorably driving the need for better management of energy and the CO2 emissions it generates. Find out what's at stake with Big Data in this context of global contraction of the energy market.
Over the entire cycle, from energy suppliers to end consumers, smart grids (from the supplier's point of view) and smart energy management (from the end consumer's point of view) represent the ability to better manage, control and anticipate these challenges from a distance.
Energy is by its very nature a global issue, which means that we need to create, transmit, store, compare, analyze and retrieve a huge volume of energy data and heterogeneous metadata on an ongoing basis, anywhere in the world, in order to make energy management intelligent.
Worldwide, the volume of energy-related data is growing at a rate of 60% a year, and by 2030 will be counted in exabytes, i.e. billions of billions of raw data to be transmitted and stored every year. That's the equivalent of today's daily mobile Internet traffic alone, but the stakes are already crucial given the already high tensions in terms of fuel poverty, blackouts and geopolitical stability in certain parts of the world.
Worldwide, the volume of energy-related data is growing at a rate of 60% a year, and will be measured in exabytes by 2020, i.e. billions of billions of raw data to be transmitted and stored every year. That's the equivalent of today's daily mobile Internet traffic alone, but the stakes are already crucial given the already high tensions in terms of fuel poverty, blackouts and geopolitical stability in certain parts of the world.
Manufacturers are also investing in communicating meters to regain competitiveness through energy. An industrial electricity meter that measures active and reactive three-phase energy consumption every ten minutes alone generates at least 315,360 data per year. A plant can have up to 100 meters (all energies combined), representing 32 million data items per year and as much metadata to manage.
Just like electricity grid operators for private customers, industrial companies need to prepare for this tidal wave: most still read their meters by hand only a few times a year. The connected meter and, above all, Big Data are the key to putting an end to tedious manual meter reading and haphazard spreadsheet processing.
Unlike private individuals, the industrial sector concentrates few consumers and a great deal of raw data that is often unusable on its own: it needs to be continuously consolidated at a useful time scale, then cross-referenced with other information systems to make sense. For example, knowing how much energy is consumed by a workshop or a product family as it leaves the factory requires more than just communicating meters: it requires real, continuous, big-data analytical energy accounting via the cloud.
