Energy Evolving Landscape: Top Challenges and Opportunities

Q. The energy sector continues to evolve, with a strong push towards renewable energy sources. What are the key trends you’re seeing?  

A: The energy industry is at a fascinating crossroads right now in balancing necessity and innovation.  The demand for power has never been higher, whereas reliability and resiliency are non-negotiable. Meanwhile, environmental concerns and regulations are pushing the industry towards capitalizing on renewable energy sources like solar, battery storage, and wind.  

As part of this shift continues to renewables, there are increased complexities. For instance, storing energy is critical due to the unpredictable weather patterns that impact solar and wind energy generation. However, storage is newer to the industry as it's not needed with traditional energy sources.  Also, we’ve seen a strong growth of microgrids and ‘home grown’ solutions to support remote areas that are more vulnerable to disruptions. Which has its own unique challenges relative to overall management and ensuring regulatory compliance. 

Renewable energy has come a long way. Though based on its evolution and complexities, the growth of traditional sources will also continue to meet overall growing needs for energy.

Q: What do you see as the key challenges facing companies in the energy sector?   

A: Keeping up with growing energy demands is on top of the list. Although, I’d say figuring out how best to manage increased complexities is even more challenging. Ensuring uptime, safety, customer and regulatory compliance will always be mission critical regardless of the energy source. How operations teams accomplish these goals continues to add new levels of complexities based on increased geographically dispersed infrastructure and microgrids. Such as, unpredictable weather patterns, new technologies, systems and assets to manage; dealing with aging infrastructure and technologies. The list goes on and on, the known variables are perplexing, but it's the unknown variables that contribute to many sleepless nights. 

An example of the complexities being introduced in the evolving landscape includes the lower output of alternative energy sources which in turn requires more infrastructure and devices to provide the same output of power compared to the legacy generation sources; how do you best manage that? Plus, the infrastructure is often geographically spread across hundreds or thousands of miles. Being able to quickly identify and triage issues is not an easy task when monitoring remotely, and truck rolls aren’t always feasible from a geographical or cost standpoint.   

Another example is bringing online and actively managing storage capacity. As it introduces yet another resource-intensive and different set of variables that needs to be accounted for and incorporated into operational SOPs.   

Q: What advice do you have for energy companies as they navigate these challenges?  

A: The evolving energy landscape continues to introduce more complexities and variables. How best to address these challenges? It’s all about data. Accessing it. Leveraging it. Being able to use it to its greatest potential. There are thousands if not millions of datapoints that are created across systems, assets, infrastructures every day. Data is relied upon to monitor critical infrastructure, identify issues, manage the operations, plan for capital expenses, allocate resources, ensure compliance, and so forth.  And the typical time and resources needed to monitor or dig out the data needed to draw meaningful conclusions will continue to hamper the industry as complexities grow.  

The good news is with the proliferation of new analytical tools and technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), there are great opportunities to generate better and faster insights from your data than ever before. But if you don't have access to clean, reliable and real-time data, these tools will not provide the outcomes you are looking for.

Data is the x-factor that separates the most profitable, innovative, and sustainable companies from the rest. The more timely, quality data you have, the more informed choices you can make. That kind of insight will give you the chance to manage complexities and the evolving landscape and new variables better and help address those recurring issues that keep you up at night.  

Q: How does the Radix IoT solution help energy companies with these challenges?   

A: Radix IoT’s robust Mango solution unifies data across systems, equipment and assets into one centralized platform.  As a result, operations teams get quicker access to the data they need to monitor and manage their critical infrastructure more effectively – remotely and in real-time. For example, issues or potential problems can be identified faster from a central command location, triaged according to severity, and neutralized before they turn into downtime. It helps make truck rolls more efficient, by informing the technician of the problem before they arrive so they are prepared to fix the problem on the first trip. 

The key to unifying the data and being able to deliver those data insights is that our solution is a hardware- and vendor-agnostic platform.  We can sync all the different equipment across the entire operations ecosystem. For instance, with a renewable energy operation, this could include data from solar panels, inverters, panels, turbines, battery storage devices, sensors, meteorological equipment, transformers, grids, and more.  

And then the exciting part is what you do with that data beyond monitoring and managing issues. You can easily turn it into actionable data intelligence to drive broader and more impactful decisions – from resource allocation to predictive maintenance, to capital expense planning and more.

Whether it's via custom dashboards and reports, or syncing that data with other analytics tools and systems, the opportunities to improve your operations, such as improving uptime and reducing costs ... are limitless.

Q. And why is the Radix IoT solution ideal for this fast-growing, evolving landscape?   

A: Radix IoT scales extremely quickly to accommodate rapid change. As the energy landscape evolves, Radix IoT acts as a seamless bridge between all the different energy sources, equipment, and locations so operations teams have one place to monitor everything while avoiding costly rip and replace scenarios. This allows companies to evolve at their own pace. If you have an analytics platform already in place, we can integrate with that. Or if you have a ticketing system that’s working for you, we’ll work with that as well. Our entire platform is based on lowering operating costs while increasing your reliability and ability to meet evolving demands.  

More importantly, Radix IoT works with many of the largest energy companies around the world. We have our fingers on the pulse of what’s happening in the energy space and use this expertise to help our clients with their evolving operational challenges.