Energy and Utilities Systems
The European energy systems are facing a major transition into the use of renewable energy sources. This transition resembles huge challenges and an overall increasing complexity in terms of control and coordination. The dynamic interplay of massive amounts of heterogeneous distributed power sources, with variable power output, will require completely new ways of operation to achieve energy security and stability, profitability and sustainability.
The main challenge is centered on data; how process massive amounts of data, often in real-time in models and simulations to forecast and predict the dynamic response on short-term and long-term.
Policy makers and energy system developers need tools to assess and plan the extension of new wind and solar plants.
Renewable energy sources are by nature strongly linked to the external environment, particularly the weather but also several other externalities. As such, the modern energy system represents a highly dynamic spatio-temporal system which integrated and utilizes numerous factors and variables.
The whole task involves deployment of solutions for reliably large scale data acquisition on remote distributed devices enabled by new wireless connectivity networks, smart sensors and distributed computing (edge-fog-cloud) concepts, and effective big-data processing (e.g. by use of ML and AI).
The ability to predict the energy system performance and the energy market for the coming days or weeks, or even months and years will be the key to operate and plan economically viable solutions. Energy planning tools are predicted to be a major growing market segment.