Significant savings in expenses are possible for energy and water utilities once they are able to see deeply in their operational systems. That requires a data analytics platform designed to alert utilities to actionable decisions.
“It really starts with the idea of transparency – you can’t act on what you can’t see,” said Scott Stallard, Vice President and Director of Smart Analytics for Black & Veatch. “Within a big, complex system, that 5 or 10 percent of what could be eroding profitability might not be visible without this information.”
Black & Veatch’s data analytics platform, called ASSET360, supports monitoring and diagnostics functions that can alert a user to potential issues and help determine causes and impacts. For instance, early problem detection allows utilities to replace or fix parts before a full failure or outage occurs.
“You can develop strategies to take action to improve performance, to remedy equipment that’s not performing correctly, to understand how emerging issues are affecting capacity or reliability. Once armed with that, then you can save significant money both in terms of operational costs and as well as replacement costs.”
Scott Stallard, Vice President and Director of Smart Analytics for Black & Veatch
The Smart City Transformation
Stallard noted that distributed generation, microgrids and energy storage are types of intelligent infrastructure solutions that will be deployed at scale in the near future.
“We’re moving from a centralized production system into a very distributed, very diverse set of assets and owners, and these assets need to work and effectively scale together,” Stallard said. “We’re talking about an infusion of cash into our infrastructure systems that will fundamentally reshape how these industries act and perform.”
Distributed generation is forcing the electrical grid to be much more fluid and intelligent, while enabling deeper contributions from renewables. The goal is to modernize the electric grid and create intelligent infrastructure in order to increase resiliency, reduce operating costs and to improve the quality of life.
“There’s this bilateral opportunity to trade energy produced locally at a customer site back to the grid and, conversely, share energy from the grid when the customer needs it. That interactive component is the reality of where we’re heading in the energy space.”
Scott Stallard, Vice President and Director of Smart Analytics for Black & Veatch
Subject Matter Experts
Fred Ellermeier: EllermeierFJ@bv.com
Scott Stallard: StallardGS@bv.com
