Advanced Big Data Solution for Company within Wind and Solar Power Vertical

Client Requirements

The client develops, finances, builds wind and solar farms. Since 2004, the company has developed 56 onshore wind farms and 21 photovoltaic plants corresponding to a total investment of more than EUR 683 million.

The growth in business brought complexity along for the client. There was unorganized data coming from various meter readings and they were unable to track the meter readings in a methodical manner. There were maintenance issues as there was no way they could ascertain in time through a proper alert mechanism if any wind turbine or solar panel had a breakdown.

There was also loss of energy production and billing and the delay in data collation resulted in loss due to business decisions not being made in time.

Solution

The solution developed had all the critical business processes integrated in a synergy:

• Data Extraction - Using an automated script the data is now being extracted from the SOAP interface of their meter reading software and is directly being saved in a SQL Server that has been set up on client Server. All Historical data as well as new data is cleansed, normalized and then fed into the SQL Server
• Data Transformation - Using the business logic and rules, we have transformed the extracted data where the data cleansing, normalization, structure for querying and analysis are made
• Data Load - The transformed data loaded to the cloud database in our environment as different data marts based on the attributes required for analysis and visualization purpose
• Real-Time Data Feed - The extraction script is scheduled to run every 5 minutes on the server and append the data in the SQL Server
• Real-Time Maintenance Tracker - Through API integration alerts are now directly sent to the maintenance team through e-mail and phone notifications about any breakdowns
• Real-Time Business Intelligence - Data is graphically visualized using Tableau to provide an insightful dashboard to the top management to be able to assess the performance of all energy parks and farms. This has helped them to identify the need to change their solar panels from one particular company as the output was not as expected, thereby increasing production

Results

Our solution has not only helped the client to save costs, but also increase their production as well as improve billing. The results have increased the revenue collected as well as increased production which in turn has added to the revenue and turnover of the company

Now the client wants to implement this solution across all the wind and solar farms and parks that they own across Europe. Some benefits:

• Financial benefit : 0.45M Euros in revenue growth; 0.18M Euros in cost reduction
• Operational benefit : TAT reduced to T-18 Days