The Global Energy Challenge

We need to reduce our global CO2 emissions ASAP while still supplying power for the world’s growing population; therefore, we need to get serious with renewable energy integration challenges and solutions. We need to rethink our electricity systems and ultimately decarbonize our power grid. This requires decentralizing and integrating Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) from renewable energy sources into our current electric grid. Decentralization is not so simple and requires a crucial step – Digitalization. The digital transformation of data is key to speeding up decentralization but is a massive uphill battle.

Digitalization

For many reasons, the first step in accommodating a decentralized energy economy is digitalization, often called digital transformation, beginning with data. The complexities and costs of creating a hybrid centralized/decentralized electricity system require the help of powerful software applications and data analytics, and getting the massive amounts of supporting data in shape with today’s manual processes takes too long and is too expensive. Fortunately, the Awesense Open Energy Data Model helps utilities, industrial energy users, energy producers, and consumers shift economically and rapidly to data-driven business models. These models better integrate renewable energy, analyze production and consumption at the edge, and prepare for a different energy future from the status quo.

Decentralization

Digitalization is critical for the decentralization of the modern grid to accelerate and deploy sufficiently to meet demand. Over the past decade, technological advances have dramatically lowered electricity prices derived from wind and solar power, batteries and EVs, making these decentralized solutions remarkably better in performance and dramatically more affordable. Complementing these improvements is the ever-more pressing need to lower carbon emissions. We have witnessed a dramatic expansion of distributed energy resources (DER). Still, for energy transformation to reach its full potential in time to address our mitigation and adaptation goals, the complexities of integrating DERs at scale with the distribution grid need to be addressed. The ultimate goal of accelerated decarbonization at scale is thus reliant on digitalization and decentralization.

Decarbonization

As the world’s energy system gets closer to ditching fossil fuels, old ways of managing complexity are becoming less and less effective. We have endless data streams that we need to effectively collate and streamline to paint a picture of our electricity consumption and production. This way, we can move forward with planning for a decentralized grid – based on data-driven decision-making. Benefits are not limited to utilities. All types of energy consumers and producers, even entire industries, will need to develop new capabilities to understand their energy production and consumption at the digital level. Clipboards and spreadsheets must be replaced by energy data, supporting new software applications and data analytics. Decarbonization will require tracking Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) scoring, enabling new carbon markets and peer-to-peer trading, and enhancing utility efforts to keep up with ever-more rapid change. Utilities, for example, are shifting from traditional reliability goals to ever greater resilience in the face of disruptions caused by new, more extreme weather patterns bringing devastating fire, wind and rain.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
– African Proverb

The Awesense Digital Energy Ecosystem

An African proverb says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Today’s complex electricity management challenges make stakeholder collaboration a necessity. The Awesense Digital Energy Ecosystem is a solution repository that provides a common framework for stakeholders to collaborate on renewable energy integration challenges and solutions using digital transformation to accelerate the future of clean energy. Our Ecosystem enables top-tier vendors, system integrators & utilities access to an active platform for communication, stimulating the adoption and commercialization of innovative digital solutions. This network provides all stakeholders access to: