This is an innovative initiative aimed at maximizing energy generation, optimizing operational costs, and improving process efficiency through the automation and remote management of IoT devices. EDP IoT Global Platform has transformed data into valuable business insights, driving growth and efficiency.
The EDP IoT reference architecture integrates Operational Technology (OT), Information Technology (IT), and IoT platforms, balancing flexibility and standardization to meet diverse business needs. This use case exemplifies the transformation of proprietary edge hardware into standard IoT gateways, with remote management and update capabilities. The architecture also integrates IT business applications, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and data sharing through business APIs.
The Data and IoT strategy extends the capabilities of the current solution (proprietary SaaS) with the additional flexibility of the EDP IoT Global Platform, allowing teams to have full control over the data. Our Data Lake centralizes data and serves as a single source of truth, facilitating reports and automations. Data and AI governance is a critical part of this initiative, planned to accelerate and optimize operations.
In the previous environment, there were two isolated SaaS IoT platforms, manual work in consolidating generation data, and a lack of global and adjusted monitoring. Additionally, there were no edge cache resources, resulting in manual filling of data gaps in case of communication loss. There were 2,000 edge software devices from SaaS IoT vendor #1 (vendor lock-in with no security and remote management features) and 1,000 edge hardware devices from SaaS IoT vendor #2 with vendor-specific software. New 800 proprietary edge hardware devices were not usable by any other vendor.
In the new environment, automated data capture is done by the EDP IoT Global Platform or external sources based on the standard EDP IoT edge image (hardware agnostic) and real-time Cloud to Cloud integrations (developed by EDP). Data capture is automated and consolidated in the EDP Data Lake, enabling real-time monitoring and advanced analytics. Edge gateways from SaaS IoT vendor #1 were converted “over-the-air” to have the EDP IoT edge image installed. SaaS IoT vendor #2 has new 800 and existing proprietary edge devices installed with the EDP IoT image (for replacement and new projects). There is an ongoing procurement process for new simplified edge equipment from multiple vendors. Using standard IoT platforms like Azure IoT, the EDP IoT Global Platform achieves hardware agnosticism, allowing the reuse of proprietary edge hardware. This approach resulted in significant cost savings – over €500k in hardware.
Results and Benefits:
Operational Efficiency: Phase I of the implementation of EDP IoT global platform and the Data Lake has been completed, enabling the onboarding and remote management of Edge devices at scale and cybersecurity monitoring on agnostic hardware.
Automation and Monitoring: Automated data capture is done by EDP IoT global platform, consolidated in EDP Datalake, enabling real-time monitoring and advanced analytics.
Cost Savings: The usage of EDP IoT global platform, based on standard cloud platforms like Azure IoT, resulted in significant cost savings – over €500k in hardware.
Global Scalability: EDP IoT edge image built in this project, is being used in other geographies like Brazil and Portugal, demonstrating the global replicability of the solution.
Customer Impact: Integrated and real-time reports for digital customers include a real-time channel with cloud to cloud integration based on event-driven architecture and a customer web portal, offering digital and automated self-service access to generation and asset data. SLA management and reporting are integrated, increasing value for customers and company performance.
The next steps for this project is to focus on further enhancing monitorization and analytics capabilities:
- Advanced Analytics: Implementing more sophisticated data analysis techniques to extract deeper insights and drive further optimizations.
- Billing Integration: Integrating billing systems to streamline financial processes and improve accuracy in invoicing.
- AI and GenAI on Efficiency: Leveraging Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI to enhance efficiency in areas such as field service and asset performance, ensuring continuous improvement and innovation.
This project represents a significant advancement in the integration and automation of IoT technologies, resulting in operational improvements, cost savings, and increased customer satisfaction. This project exemplifies EDP’s ability to innovate and lead in the energy sector, deserving recognition in external awards.