INTRAROM: Smart Solutions for a challenging industry - Energy
Subtle realistic perspective, by Athanasios Vamvakas - Smart Grids Director Intracom Telecom
2016-06-23 22:19:53 - From the Print Edition
During the recent months the business of delivering energy to end customers has been largely affected by a deep drop in oil prices. This has led to Utilities being pressured for cost savings and quick reorganizations in order to meet a sharp deficit in their balance sheets. This market turbulence seems to pass through its volatility period and now energy providers and DSO's are left with a series of challenges on how to optimize their business and prepare for the future.
Such tasks are especially apparent in the relationship that they need to have with their energy consumers. Customers today are demanding not only for better prices but a more comprehensive set of tools for energy efficiency, billing info, customer care and others. This shift is very close to the market changes that dominated the telco business in the late 90's with their effects still ongoing today.
In the Energy business though we have not one but two serious advantages on our side. Firstly, technology is now ready to support customer centric initiatives and secondly we don't need to reinvent the wheel, as we have the know-how from the transformation of the telco organizations.
As such today Utilities and DSO's are investing in Smart Grids to collect, measure and inform their consumers, but at the same time to advance their infrastructures by reducing operational costs and allowing them to enter new market segments. But they are moving even further as the deployment of Smart Grids and Smart Meters has led to an abundance of data, that can provide valuable information. Thus they are organizing Big Data analytics that can drill down and extract answers to questions such as "who is our best customer segment?" and "where should we invest in the next years to keep up with demand?".
In many countries we're seeing Smart Grids used for "near real time" rebalancing of the energy networks in order to cope with congestion and service failures and in other countries demand-response programs are taking place in order to provide incentives to the end users, for a more efficient use of the network.
In any case it is apparent that the energy stakeholders will have to make a lot of steering decisions within the near future, but if they make the right ones and base them on bold initiatives, they will be leading their peers ahead
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