Expert Interview
Discover the key advantages of digital transformation from our in-house expert
Energy and utility companies are undergoing drastic change. Worldwide, we are enabling a massive energy transition, electrifying everything (causing increased loads), and experiencing extreme and unpredictable weather patterns. Accompanying all these changes are vast quantities of data that must be stored, managed and analyzed to operate today’s grid and plan for its future. In this era of change, digital transformation is widely considered to be key to business’ survival (Forbes). Rich Graves, VP of Product Management at Energy Exemplar, notes that the key tenants of digital transformation are collaboration, scalability, and taking advantage of advanced capabilities and technologies provided in the cloud.
Graves also notes that digital transformation begins with updating processes and moving to tools and technologies that provide more value than older, traditional resources. Moving to cloud technologies will allow energy and utility companies to uplevel their processes and gain competitive advantage. Accenture notes: “Energy companies that fail to take advantage of cloud’s connectivity, flexibility, and security will find it exceedingly difficult to achieve the business resilience, variable cost modes and value optimization capabilities that enable competitiveness.”
Ready to learn more about how cloud technology can enable your digital transformation journey? Look no further. Explore this page for resources to get you started.
Discover the key advantages of digital transformation from our in-house expert
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PLEXOS Cloud brings more interaction, greater precision, and deeper contextual insights to energy market modeling. With PLEXOS Cloud’s flexible infrastructure, stay ahead of the curve by scaling compute capacity for peak study periods and stochastic runs.
Zach Tzavelis, Senior Consultant
E3
"I would recommend PLEXOS Cloud for its scaling capabilities. You know, running on premises can get you far enough sometimes, but oftentimes when you need to do a lot of simulations, having the ability to scale up and do thousands of simulations in a very short timeframe and be able to parallelize all of that is something that's crucial, especially for our work as consultants - that's often on short timelines and we need to iterate a lot. So, I'd say that's probably the best use case that we've found so far."
Ian Luciani, Head of Power Sector
BP
"PLEXOS is used by members of my team, and they often collaborate together - both users in Europe as well as users in the US. We have the Cloud version of PLEXOS, so everyone can view each other's runs, their cases. My interaction personally as a manager of users is primarily focused on understanding how my team have chosen to model the way they've modeled. And then of course, interrogating the results, doing the quality assurance on them."
Jerome Declerck, Group Manager – Enterprise Application Services
AEMO
"If I look at the modeling scenarios that AEMO produces - one is called an Integrated System Plan and this projects what the national electricity market, which is the eastern seaboard effectively of Australia, what it will look like in the next 20 years.
That's not easy to forecast, to model. So, we run a number of different types of scenarios, a central scenario and a step change scenario [in PLEXOS Cloud]. The step change is more of an accelerated transition of the energy sector.
We’re seeing improvements of up to 77% in our central modeling scenarios and upwards in the 90%s of our step change scenarios."