Empowering Centrica's customers with energy usage insights
TCS helps British Gas Business (BGB), a division of Centrica, comply with a government mandate to provide business customers with their energy consumption data.
INDUSTRY
Energy, Resources & Utilities
Rebalance the energy equation
HIGHLIGHTS
- The UK government makes it a mandate for energy companies to help users manage their energy consumption effectively and empower business customers with energy insights and data.
- TCS partnered with British Gas Business (BGB), a division of Centrica plc, to empower its business customers with easily accessible energy usage data by leveraging AWS Cloud.
- With a highly efficient, cloud-native distributed data processing framework on AWS, BGB was able to comply with a government mandate to provide business customers with their energy consumption data.
On this page
Overview
The global energy sector is undergoing a transformative shift due to the urgent need to accelerate the move to net zero.
Relying more on renewable energy to reduce carbon footprint and monitoring and managing energy consumption have become essential for enterprises the world over. British Gas Business (BGB), a division of Centrica plc, is a leading energy supplier and services provider in the United Kingdom (UK) and Ireland. BGB and its parent company are committed to meeting the evolving needs of their business customers and helping them accelerate their path to net zero with innovative offerings.
Challenge
Centrica’s BGB unit joined forces with TCS and AWS to build energy consumption analytics capabilities using AWS Cloud.
When the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, DESNZ (formerly called BEIS)—a department of the UK government responsible for managing business, industrial strategy, science, research and innovation, and energy and climate change policy—came out with a mandate for energy suppliers and distributors in 2022, BGB had to comply with the mandate. The mandate required energy suppliers to provide business customers with accessible energy use data, including up to a year's historical data from their smart meters. With detailed half-hourly or hourly readings for electricity and gas, the data would give business customers the insights needed to make informed decisions about their energy usage.
However, BGB’s existing technology and infrastructure could not cope with the massive data influx, making compliance with the government mandate difficult.
Solution
TCS helped BGB build robust data-handling capabilities to effectively manage its business customers’ consumption data and provide them with the energy usage insights they needed.
To meet the DESNZ mandate and enhance its data management capabilities, BGB leveraged second generation Smart Metering Equipment Technical Specifications, or SMETS2 meters. While this improved the reliability and accessibility of energy consumption data both for itself and its business customers, managing the sheer volume of data that these devices generated was tough.
To empower BGB with robust data-handling capabilities, TCS built an efficient data pipeline, or in other words, a data processing framework using AWS Cloud to work with large volumes of data via parallel processing and provide the required insights to business customers for operational reporting and adherence to industry norms. The solution leveraged AWS Glue to discover, prepare, and integrate all the data available and Amazon S3 for data storage and retrieval.
We made the most of our demonstrated competencies in AWS solutions, contextual knowledge of BGB’s business, and years of experience working in the energy, resources, and utilities industry to get the best out of the AWS capabilities to solve BGB’s challenges. Additionally, we implemented an open lake-house data architecture that allowed retrieval of previous data versions for enhanced operational reporting and for atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID)—all of which helped maintain data integrity and reliability.
With the highly efficient, cloud-native data processing framework TCS developed, BGB was able to meet business demands, comply with the DESNZ mandate, and gain business customers’ trust.
Benefits
BGB was able to boost regulatory compliance and customer satisfaction by empowering its business customers to make informed decisions based on their energy use.
It gained not just a competitive advantage, but also business customers’ trust. Key benefits:
- Increased customer satisfaction through easy access to insights into their multi-site energy use, enabling them to accelerate the move toward their net zero goals.
- Compliance with the DESNZ mandate.
- Competitive advantage with tariff optimization and superior energy analytics based on granular consumption data.
- Increased cost efficiencies and agility by leveraging a modern serverless architecture to manage application infrastructure.
- Generated insights rapidly and cost effectively with effective management of data from SMETS2 smart meters.
- Paved the way for BGB to offer potential near-real-time insights into energy consumption in the future.
What the client says
Modernizing data management is critical for driving innovation and sustainable growth to prepare enterprises for the future. This partnership with TCS has enabled us to leverage modern data architecture on AWS and empower our business customers with near-real-time energy insights, to accelerate energy transition."