The AWS Cloud allows utilities to harness unlimited elastic computing resources that can spin up and down in seconds, as required by changing grid conditions or innovative new programs, notes Pritam Muppuri.
AWS and its partners empower electric, gas, and water utilities to improve reliability and customer satisfaction, lower operating costs, and safeguard critical infrastructure. In essence, we enable business agility – equipping you to respond swiftly to market changes and emerging opportunities with innovative solutions. With AWS, your utility can transform and converge information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) — providing a cohesive foundation to build decentralized delivery networks, expand digital customer engagement, and decarbonize energy and water for your customers.
Benefits of running on AWS:
1. Run a Truly Digital Utility
Realize your innovation aspirations. Manage even your most demanding, high-performance systems with greater efficiency and excellence, slashing on-premises costs. AWS provides elastic, cost-effective compute and storage capacity to run any and all complex utility operations – including demand response and distributed energy forecasting.
2. Access the Global Brainpower of Amazon
Count on the AWS Core infrastructure, designed to meet the world’s most stringent security requirements – and informed by expertise rooted in the unique security, regulatory and compliance obligations utilities face.
3. Get Better Business Insights – Faster
Drive continuous innovation. Apply the most comprehensive service offerings and technology–including analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and Internet of Things (IoT) services – to securely transform massive data volumes into timely, actionable insights
4. Innovate with Proven Solutions & Partners
AWS provides the development platform and a network of global partners to rapidly develop and deploy innovative new applications for you. Spend less time on building your IT infrastructure and more time using it to deliver exceptional experiences.
The Cloud Journey for Utilities
Today, cloud-based applications are ubiquitous in our daily lives. However, while nearly all utilities use the cloud for IT operations to some extent, there are transformative new opportunities the cloud can offer utilities to optimize IT/OT costs and enhance resilience and security. Utilities taking a cloud-first approach can benefit by:
- Building IT/OT integration capabilities
- Leveraging distributed energy resources to quickly assess and capture new market opportunities
- Devising more effective customer engagement tools, including utilization of voice services
As the leading cloud provider, AWS delivers 88 percent higher energy efficiency than on-premise data centers, and AWS is moving steadily toward achieving Amazon’s company-wide goal of using 100 percent renewable energy by 2030. With the cloud, every utility can embrace its innovative potential and achieve the three Ds while simultaneously improving resilience, security, and customer satisfaction in a fast-changing world.
Elastic and Resilient Utility on AWS
Utilities are being asked to innovate at speeds never seen before. For some, that means bracing new models to account for a new mix of resources whose capabilities and costs are changing rapidly. In addition to integrating intermittent renewables at ever-higher penetrations, utilities must also be poised to incorporate thousands and potentially millions of behind-the-meter assets, including batteries, electric vehicles, and “smart” homes and businesses, on a near-real-time basis. Digitalization can unlock this potential, but traditional utility systems may not be equipped to provide the required scale and flexibility. Scaling from hundreds to millions of assets that must be monitored and coordinated requires advanced data ingestion and compute capabilities.
The AWS Cloud allows utilities to harness unlimited elastic computing resources that can spin up and down in seconds, as required by changing grid conditions or innovative new programs. For example, this elasticity is allowing Portland General Electric to quickly build outage management and communication systems that can scale immediately when a storm hits, enabling them to keep customers informed of grid status and minimize outage times. It also enables transformative IT/OT integrations that harness data-intensive machine learning, artificial intelligence, and digital twin approaches. A few years ago, global utility Enel moved more than 10,000 servers in 30 countries to the cloud in nine months. Now, Enel uses cloud-based predictive maintenance for its 30 million smart meters and 16,000 substations to digitally model assets and prevent failures before they occur. The elastic compute power of the cloud empowers utilities to innovate across all areas of their business, allowing them to spin up initiatives, determine whether they work, and deprovision them if they don’t.
Also read: We Have Always Adopted Latest Technologies To Enhance Customer Experience: Tata Power-DDL
Secure Utility with AWS
Security remains the top priority of utilities, regardless of where they stand on their cloud journey. The increased number of assets in a decentralized, distributed grid and the digitalization required for coordination increase the complexity of utility networks and change the threat landscape. AWS customers can achieve equal or more stringent security in the cloud as they can in an on-premise environment. For utilities, AWS and its security partners offer cloud-based services to meet key requirements including identity and access management, data privacy protection, patching and vulnerability management, security event monitoring, and incident response.
With datacenters in multiple geographic regions, AWS also offers a much higher level of resilience and system recovery than can a single on-premise data center. Physical security is ensured by strict access controls to AWS data centers.
Working with AWS also means that utilities don’t have to face security challenges in a vacuum. AWS collaborates closely with customers on security using a “shared responsibility model,” where AWS is responsible for the security “of” the cloud while allowing customers to maintain control over their security “in” the cloud. AWS also offers services, user guides, and other resources tailored to utility needs, simplifying the process of achieving security objectives.
Customer First Utility on AWS
Utilities in both regulated and deregulated environments are eager to embrace customer-first business capabilities. With advanced metering infrastructure increasingly being prevalent, utilities have an unprecedented opportunity to use this data toimprove energy efficiency and demand response offerings. By starting with core programs such as energy efficiency and bill payment, utilities can create new touch points with residential customers by offering proactive, engaging offerings that sit in the cloud. For customers, these provide the potential to save on electricity bills while adding comfort, convenience, and environmental benefits.
In the case of demand response, scaling from hundreds of commercial and industrial program participants to potentially millions of residential customer assets require the data ingestion and IT/OT integration enabled by elastic compute capabilities – but that’s not all. This undertaking also necessitates a more engaging customer experience that makes participating in these programs easy and renders the benefits easy to understand. Utilities have an intuitive new channel to tap customers: voice assistants, including Amazon’s Alexa device. Smart speakers like Alexa are part of a growing ecosystem of smart home devices that encompass home security, comfort, and convenience. Customer-first energy offerings can leverage Amazon’s “working backward” approach, which starts by envisioning the ideal customer end state and uses this goal to guide product development. AWS shares Amazon’s customer-obsessed DNA and works closely with its utility customers to create engaging energy offerings using voice and other channels that bring them closer to their customers.
Know more about AWS for India public sector at https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/worldwide/india/
About the author: Pritam Muppuri is Business Development Manager, WWPS, Amazon Internet Services Pvt Ltd (AWS India). The upcoming India Smart Utility Week 2022 is Powered by AWS
