Energy
The energy industry is in transition. The energy supply chain is under intense pressure from the accelerating pace of change in the energy mix, new competitors and increasingly stringent regulatory environment in which the environment, sustainability and security are paramount. At the same time, there is increasingly vocal demand for more accountable, effective and cost effective service provision within a low carbon economy. They need every advantage that information can give them, and Informix information management solutions are helping create that.
- Smart metering - using the power of TimeSeries data
- Gathering global data - with Geodetic and Geospatial data
Smart Metering
Smart Metering enables suppliers to remotely monitor energy consumption from vast numbers of homes and businesses. Managing the vast quantities of data that they can collect can be a real challenge, but companies which achieve this have the potential for much greater insight into consumption patterns. This in turn will improve energy supply planning and influence tariffs, amongst other things. Better insight into energy consumption can be of huge value to city or national authorities, enabling them to optimize energy use and plan ahead. TimeSeries data is handled natively by Informix, and it has been at the heart of several exciting developments in smart metering.
- As technology consultants on the Digital Environment Home Energy Management System (DEHEMS) project, the Hildebrand team was asked by the UK government to find a way to scale up its energy monitoring solution and enable it to monitor three million homes. Working with the software laboratory at IBM Hursley, Hildebrand ran several proofs-of-concept and created a solution based on Informix that has the potential to collect, store and analyse detailed energy usage information from millions of homes in real-time.
- Working with the IBM Hursley Innovation Centre, AMT-SYBEX developed and tested Smart DTS – a solution which embeds Informix TimeSeries technology, which is designed specifically to handle time series data such as sequential meter readings. During a proof of concept, the team simulated a system that received and processed data from 10 million smart meters. The solution processed more than 200,000 transactions per second, and completed the job within 96 minutes on a single eight-processor server.
- IBM and Cable & Wireless Worldwide have announced that they are working together to develop a new intelligent data and communications solution, UK Smart Energy Cloud, to support the UK's Smart Meter Implementation Programme. Combining IBM’s software and middleware (scalable WebSphere enterprise messaging infrastructure and an Informix time-series database) and C&W Worldwide’s secure, next-generation network and communications capability, UK Smart Energy Cloud is designed to provide a complete overview of energy usage across the country.
Data is going global
As smart technologies pervade the industry, and as concern for the environment grows, it will increasingly be possible to collect greater volumes of many kinds of other relevant data which energy organisations can utilise. Whether this is to gain real-time insight into oil-well production and undersea pipeline flows, or assessing seawater quality around the site of a rig, it is easy to see that the energy industry may be at the forefront of testing the limits of data management models in the future. Informix will undoubtedly be part of that process, delivering not only native Time Series data handling but also Geodetic data handling which means that datapoints can be indexed to their location on the globe, as well as over time. This reveals new views and insights which would simply not have been possible before.
