With the rise of green energy initiatives like Masdar city in Abu Dhabi – a city running entirely on its own self-made renewable energy – difficulties from a data management perspective are now emerging that challenge the growth and stability of the green energy industry.
One significant challenge is that green energy is still relatively new in comparison to others in the industry. With the vast wealth of data exchanges and the number of sectors involved, there’s certainly some cause for concern in terms of the difficulties that exist when collecting and managing new data for this industry.
In brief, here are my top eight challenges for those working in data management for the green energy industry:
1. Change
A common property in green energy elements is change. Not only is the industry itself undergoing rapid innovation and new technologies, green initiatives are being challenged from two main angles; namely optimizing production and optimizing consumption.
In the case of optimizing production, the characteristic availability of green source(s) differs minute by minute along time. Optimizing energy production requires predicting future values, which in return requires a lot of scientific analysis. In addition to time, the inputs to those analyses are also sensitive to quality control.
In terms of consumption optimization, this involves a tremendous amount of timely generated data. In a perfect world, when proper building and energy management systems are in place, they should all represent a slight change somewhere.
2. Adaptation
In a place where green energy is the only possible source of power (like in Masdar City), different power generating systems are used to cover the gaps of sources available. Adding to the consumption and metering systems is the need for an adaptive solution that is flexible enough to read from different data sources with minimum change requirements and that has a unified output. The need is for one system to understand all, not all to understand one.
3. Inputs and Meta Data
Today, the industry is collaborating to provide innovative solutions and more information through their systems and intelligent analysis. Every provider has a set of assumptions and standards governing their outputs. These assumptions are crucial to the value and quality of data. They need to be accommodated and understood when certain data is used. In addition, multiple sources may complete each other, if known and treated intelligently. The backbone solution dealing with these data must have the intelligence to optimize these inputs and work with it dynamically without the need for human intervention whenever change happens.
4. Integration
The old-school system of ‘mesh integration’, where the relation between systems is many-to-many, has become impossible to maintain. Instead, consolidating to a single system encourages proper integration. The integration of many-to-one-to-many is the key to performing control and security. This means that the “One” system is not only capable of handling all the data, but it also performs necessary controls and connects with all systems intelligently. It has to also be flexible system that can communicate with different systems according to their standards to reduce other’s involvement.
5. Right Analysis
Not only do new industries need more intelligent and powerful analysis, they also need global collaboration on updating all users across the data universe with the latest findings and best practices as they happen. No matter how good the data is, if it is not analyzed intelligently, quickly, represented effectively, and published to the right audience on time; then it is not yet useful.
6. Ease of use
More information should not lead to confusion. However its inevitable if say the information is presented in bulk or without proper grouping or if it requires technical skills to pull data and to analyze them. It can also be confusing if decision makers don’t have the ability to manipulate data solely or if sharing is not dynamic and others can’t build on top of others outputs. The marriage between ease of use and comprehensiveness in features is must.
7. Access
Complicated systems normally face a huge risk of security and data integrity. The norm among solutions is to maximize blocking access and minimize user rights. In fact, this practice contradicts completely with what these solutions are built for; to minimize access. Instead, access should be given to maximum number of relevant users, allowing for greater creativity and innovation. In our ZEMA software solution, we enable users to manipulate data and save changes (data and formulas) without affecting the original sources.
8. Learning
The industry of green energy is still in the “learn and develop” stage. The key to accelerating research and development for leaders in this industry are as follows:
- Keeping a good record of history,;
- Enabling users the ability to demonstrate the effect of changing some parameters over time on historic data;
- Comprehensively applying scientific equations to predict future data; and
- Sharing and presenting analysis in an easy and flexible way so that it understood by all.
Implementing these points can arm innovative businesses to grow. It’s important to say that these can be addressed properly using the right solution, or the very opposite can happen. In an industry where every second counts, we make sure that one thing stays the most stable; the information infrastructure. This is where all efforts are represented for more to come and better to use.
How Can We Tackle These Challenges
A fundamental solution to overcome these challenges is to enable modern systems take central role. Here at ZE PowerGroup Inc we have created the ZEMA Suite -an intelligent suite of products used for data aggregation that adapts with different formats, timings, frequencies, standards, and units of inputs. What’s more ZEMA can process them to a unified standard form in one large database. To book a free demonstration, please feel free to contact us.