Services
IoT and Digital Engineering
Bringing Together IoT and Digital Engineering to Create Rich Experiences
Highlights
- The energy sector encounters significant opportunities alongside intricate challenges due to decreasing renewable costs, increasing climate activism, regulatory changes, and heightened consumer demand for sustainability.
- Digital transformation is crucial for accelerating energy management and the transition to a sustainable future. By harnessing AI, IoT, digital twins, and cloud platforms, enterprises can optimise operations, boost asset performance, and elevate customer experience.
- The integrated platform approach, built on a digital spine, intelligent enterprise, and experience-first design, enables a connected energy ecosystem. Through a consultative model, a tailored approach can align with each enterprise’s unique energy and sustainability goals.
On this page
The urgency
The evolving preferences of consumers, the continuously rising demand for energy, and the transition towards more sustainable energy sources are hastening the process of energy management and transition.
Driven by plummeting renewable costs, rising climate activism, sweeping regulatory mandates, and growing consumer demand for cleaner energy, the power sector faces both unprecedented opportunities and formidable challenges. Yet, the current trajectory of the global energy system is incompatible with the 2°C carbon budget. To meet this target, we must accelerate the ‘energy’ transition away from fossil fuels, scale up renewable energy deployment, and enhance energy efficiency.
Energy management and energy transition are deeply interconnected. While energy management focuses on optimising consumption to reduce costs and minimise environmental impact, energy transition involves transitioning to renewable sources and adopting sustainable practices. Together, they form the backbone of a low-carbon future. This transformation cannot happen overnight. It requires a step-by-step approach—starting with reducing reliance on fossil fuels and increasing the use of renewables. Intelligent energy management plays a pivotal role in enabling this shift, making it a key factor in the success of the transition.
The convergence of energy transition and management is unlocking a dynamic spectrum of investment opportunities. These span across sectors and geographies, attracting a diverse array of stakeholders, including traditional utilities, financial investors, governments, emerging energy developers, and energy-intensive businesses.
Decoding change
The energy, utilities, and industrial sectors are transitioning from centralised fossil fuel sources to decentralised renewable energy sources, transforming the way energy is produced and consumed. Climate change, net-zero targets, and new technologies require intelligent energy management, collaboration, and innovation. To stay competitive, enterprises need an AI-powered platform that captures real-time data at the edge, fueling analytics, automation, and intelligent decisions throughout the system.
Let us explore the diverse set of capabilities required to address the energy transition ecosystem.
Paths to accelerate global energy transition
These varied and intricate services, combined with an unpredictable future, require open innovation and seamless integration across the entire energy supply chain, anchored by the Energy Internet Cloud. Supported by an AI-driven IoT platform, this software-centric approach optimises stakeholder interests in real-time. It reimagines the energy ecosystem as a digital network encompassing the complete value chain, enabling complex, bidirectional flows of both information and energy. This platform adeptly manages the nonlinear challenges posed by distributed renewables, smart grids, micro-grids, and emerging technologies. This platform can optimise the management of intermittent renewable sources with stable small modular reactors (SMR), manage the production and consumption of green hydrogen, balance load with DERMS and microgrids, and facilitate dynamic pricing and trading in retail energy markets. This industry initiative necessitates industry-driven data standards, along with cutting-edge authentication and encryption technologies, accommodating a myriad of device clusters.
The approach of the integrated energy cloud platform, based on a digital backbone, intelligent enterprise, and experience-focused design, fosters a cohesive open energy ecosystem. It is only through this open energy ecosystem that enterprises can adjust to the highly volatile and uncertain market conditions that we are all encountering in the energy sector.
By utilising a consultative model, tailored solutions can be aligned with the specific energy and sustainability goals of each enterprise.
Industry view
The energy landscape is shaped by a global consensus to triple renewable energy, double energy efficiency, and shift away from fossil fuels, driving significant investments in green technologies to limit global warming. Key drivers include regulatory policies, investment priorities, environmentally conscious customers, and a changing business environment. Industries are modernising equipment, plants, and processes, embracing digital transformation to achieve energy efficiency and meet business KPIs. Flexible business models aligned with regulations position energy management and transition as transformative tools for industry sectors.
Utilities
The energy transition, with its focus on shifting from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, involves a complex and nonlinear value chain encompassing generation, distribution, and retail. The changing roles of customers, such as prosumers, flexible demand responders, and V-G-V participants, have enabled the reimagination of the future of energy. The regulatory responsiveness towards energy transition, digitalisation, and decarbonisation has paved the way for energy democracy in a genuine manner.
Today's more agile energy ecosystem, with an integrated power portfolio at its center, presents an increased opportunity to leverage digital interventions to integrate, operate, manage, and balance the grid, prioritising safety, reliability, resiliency, and stability.
Manufacturing
The modern factory's future lies in procuring or generating green energy to power its equipment, running its processes efficiently, and optimising its energy consumption.
The future lies in resource optimisation, waste management, and the practice of recyclability and traceability. In other words, we refer to this as "Sustainable Industry 4.0 Transformation." By embracing DERs, green energy sources, and smart energy management utilising data analytics and Gen AI, industrial plants and factories can play a vital role in shaping a more sustainable, reliable, and cost-effective decarbonisation pathway.
Energy
The oil and gas industry is rapidly digitalising across the value chain, unlocking opportunities for electrification, process and resource optimisation, and supply chain decarbonisation. The sector is evolving into integrated energy hubs, producing lower-carbon products such as green fuels, biofuels, and green and blue hydrogen.
Looking ahead, the industry is shifting toward a diversified energy mix, integrating renewables and transforming operations to deliver both traditional and low-carbon energy products as part of a unified, sustainable ecosystem.
Building and construction
The transition to sustainable energy necessitates a transformation in the design, construction, and operation of buildings to minimise their environmental footprint while enhancing their energy efficiency. Commercial and residential structures are substantial contributors to carbon emissions, accounting for nearly 40% of annual global CO2 emissions, both during construction and in ongoing operation. Recognising this imperative, governments worldwide have introduced stringent regulations, mandating that new constructions and major modernisations achieve net-zero emissions in accordance with these regulations.
The construction industry can significantly leverage the energy transition to hydrogen by utilising hydrogen for various purposes and developing related infrastructure. This includes utilising hydrogen as a fuel in construction equipment, adopting hydrogen fuel cells for power generation on construction sites, and establishing hydrogen-related infrastructure, such as pipelines and storage facilities.
Green buildings can incorporate passive design, utilise renewable energy sources, implement smart HVAC systems, employ eco-friendly building services, and utilise sustainable materials.
New AI data centres
AI is transforming the utilities industry, with data centers now requiring megawatts of power due to their intensive computational demands. These centers are pivotal in the future energy ecosystem, acting as major consumers and active grid participants. Their high energy needs require innovative sourcing and consumption strategies. Increasingly, AI data centers are joining demand response programs and adopting advanced energy management systems for real-time load forecasting and dynamic workload allocation. This symbiotic relationship underscores the importance of collaboration in the energy transition.
Realise the future
With apt investments in clean technology and modernisation of plant, process and deploying deep tech tools such as IoT, sensors, smart metering infrastructure, data-analytics, digital twins, and responsible AI, GenAI capabilities along with required skilling of workforce, it is possible to achieve business KPIs, Energy KPIs and Sustainability KPIs enhancing operational efficiency, cost optimisation, regulatory alignment, building agile and adaptive ecosystem with collaboration and innovation.
Opportunities for businesses to advance the energy transition forward
Beyond the horizon
Emerging from a significant period of disruption and uncertainty, businesses are presented with a unique opportunity to evolve into a new era where energy, sustainability, and prosperity are intertwined as essential elements of the same goal and criteria for success.
In addition to the ongoing transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, the future entails a comprehensive transformation toward a fully decarbonised, highly decentralised, and digitally integrated global energy system. This transition emphasises social equity and economic fairness for all communities. Beyond the initial focus on solar and wind energy, the future will be characterised by the extensive integration of smart grid technologies, advanced energy storage solutions, the commercialisation of green hydrogen, the electrification of both transportation and industry, and the application of artificial intelligence to manage a complex network of interconnected energy sources within an 'Internet of Energy.'
There is no one-size-fits-all approach. The transition and management of energy is exceptionally intricate. Moving forward, it necessitates collaboration with a digital transformation partner to develop a flexible energy transition strategy, identify sustainable business models centered around prosumers, and create a cooperative ecosystem that utilises both established ideas and novel innovations, thereby uncovering new opportunities and broadening the focus beyond mere energy.