The COVID-19 pandemic put a great deal of pressure on the grid, as people’s homes also turned into their offices and school. With appliances running around the clock, keeping the lights on became even more rigorous for utility providers.
Thanks to data virtualization, these providers were able to keep an eye on energy use in real-time, making sure that homeowners and businesses alike were able to operate uninterrupted. Here are some ways that data virtuality created a roadmap to keep the juice flowing.
Understanding Electric Plans
If you’re searching for an energy retailer, it’s as simple as Googling the service that you want, followed by your location such as “compare electricity NSW.” Remember, there are two types of energy contracts: Standard and market. Standard contracts operate for Australians under a set price called the Default Market Offer, or DMO. Market contracts allow you to negotiate your energy rates, possibly landing discounts and rebates on your electricity prices. Through data virtualization, energy providers are able to look into the analytics and see what pricing is working for the corresponding energy usage.
Data virtualization provides a data layer that enables businesses of all types to combine, access, and transform datasets in a cost-effective manner. This kind of technology allows for almost any data type to be transformed into results at breakthrough speed to make business decisions with urgency. This spares energy providers and other businesses alike to save money on a data warehouse, and extract/transform/load, or ETL, time and cost.
Monitoring Outages
With a greater urgency for countries to have an electricity infrastructure roadmap, data virtualization software has become a key source for real-time access to consumers and energy retailers alike. The proper data platform makes utilities aware of outages with immediacy, working to quickly dispatch a crew to the site of a significant blackout. This data access allows crews to remain informed of the technical details while on the road, and get the right data to understand the workload that awaits them at the site of the outage.
Working with a litany of data sources, energy service retailers can look into the core of an issue, relying on data integration to isolate the issue before it becomes a widespread problem. These infrastructure upgrades in the energy field have come to the forefront in recent months following a failure to deliver real-time data on outages during deadly winter storms in the U.S., specifically in Texas.
Data virtualization is able to operate through the regulatory constraints on moving data. With long-duration storage, providers can create a data integration solution to prevent issues that have impacted the grid in the past. This better prepares both the utility and its customers for what’s to come.
Customer Satisfaction
One of the great achievements of business intelligence is the ability to turn raw data on customer service into greater reliability for consumers. A traditional data integration model would take months, if not years, to isolate the important figures from big data. With data virtualization, energy retailers are able to get an instant idea of how their customers view their current cost of electricity, their energy storage, or their attentiveness to outstanding issues.
This has allowed energy providers to create a roadmap to success, highlighting the issues within their customer base that they need to address, going down the scale in priority. This real-time data acquisition also alerts providers to any outstanding issues that customers may have with their electric bills.
Data sources are able to be monitored under a cloud-based system, and also able to recognize energy use on the grid. This could also help a utility provider to bring about renewable energy generation, directing towards greener initiatives to benefit the environment.
About the author:
Chetan Sharma is a professional digital marketer and blogger at heart. He owns multiple educational blogs like Samacheer Kalvi Books and many others.
