Introducing the Data Intelligence Platform for Energy

Fostering a paradigm shift towards a smarter, cleaner & reliable energy system

Electricity is the new oil. Sources of energy are becoming more diversified, and the uses of energy becoming more electric. Electricity is rapidly becoming a primary energy source, with renewables now providing 30% of global power—a 10% increase since 2010. As customer preferences and market forces push for renewable energy and decarbonization, we are in a transition phase where old and new energy systems coexist, causing price volatility with economic implications. Data and AI are essential during this transition, offering up to $5 trillion in value over the next decade, according to McKinsey, and are crucial for achieving net-zero emissions by 2050. The coming years will see leading energy firms leveraging data and AI to capitalize on the transition while managing volatility risks.

However, the energy sector must overcome significant hurdles to harness the full potential of AI, including:

• Proprietary data formats and closed ecosystems from legacy infrastructure and data models, preventing interoperability & collaboration
• Volume & complexity of unstructured data, particularly from physical assets, impact quality of data needed to power business-critical decisions
• Traditional data architectures are not built to support Generative AI and ML use cases, severely impacting the success rate of AI initiatives
• Scarcity of talent that can bridge between AI and complex energy systems, furthering the divide between domain experts and AI experts

A comprehensive data platform is needed to unlock the value of diverse energy data, paving the way for a smarter, sustainable, and reliable energy future.

"Embracing Databricks has been transformative for our organization's digital transformation-it's the engine that powers our data-driven innovation for asset operations. With Databricks, we've accelerated our data analytics and AI capabilities, helping to unlock real-time insights that drive strategic decisions and create process improvements, cost reductions and production increases across our business."

— Dan Jeavons, Vice President Digital Innovation, Shell

Introducing the Data Intelligence Platform for Energy

Today, we are thrilled to announce the world's first Data Intelligence Platform with enhanced capabilities for the Energy industry. Built atop our Lakehouse architecture, the Data Intelligence Platform combines all the best features of a Data Lakehouse with generative AI capabilities. This means an open, unified foundation for all your data along with unprecedented access to analytics and AI across your organization.

We built the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to help organizations better succeed with AI, democratize insights, and drive down costs. Teams can develop generative AI applications on their data without sacrificing data privacy or confidential IP. More professionals across the organization can discover insights from more data in the language of their business and industry. And teams can gain efficiency and simplify complexity by unifying data, governance, and AI together. This is only possible on a Data Intelligence Platform.

"In our experience, Databricks has demonstrated remarkable agility in its product iteration to address the latest challenges in the Data & AI domain. The customer service has been consistently supportive, which played a crucial role in our Enterprise data services improvement process. Furthermore, the Unity Catalog has been instrumental in facilitating a Data CoE model within our organisation. Overall, Databricks is pivotal in our organisation's data strategic roadmap."

— Christopher Tao, Manager, Data Management - Enterprise Data Services, Australian Australian Energy Market Operator

Databricks is a strategic partner for energy organizations. Let's explore some of the most critical imperatives in the industry for data-driven transformation and how data and AI on a unified platform deliver on each challenge.

Asset Performance Management

The energy industry is all about physical assets (rigs, grids, wind turbines, and pipelines) that are operated for long periods of time, often running into decades. This complex machinery generates high-frequency sensor data (millions of data points per equipment) that can be used to reduce unplanned downtime, maximize output and drive a high degree of process automation, ultimately driving safer operations and higher performance.

The Databricks Advantage: The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform stands out in the energy sector as a revolutionary force, uniquely tailored to harness the vast streams of high-frequency sensor data emitted by the industry's robust physical assets. With the capacity to process and analyze millions of data points per piece of equipment, the platform offers unparalleled insights that empower companies to preemptively address maintenance needs, thereby reducing unplanned downtime. By leveraging advanced AI algorithms, the platform facilitates not only the maximization of output but also the advancement of process automation, ensuring operations that are not only more efficient but also significantly safer. Databricks serves as a catalyst for superior performance, transforming the energy industry's complex data into actionable intelligence for a more sustainable and productive future.

"Databricks stands among the most forward-thinking companies in the Data & AI space. They operate with transparency. They help their customers think strategically about all their data and AI (particularly Generative AI) objectives. Databricks has helped CPChem tremendously in helping us extract more value from all our data: from structured to unstructured, from financial to industrial-resulting in a competitive advantage through better business decisions, predictive insights, unexpected automation, safer and more reliable operations, better product quality, and ultimately a better experience for our customers and employees."

— Brent Railey, Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Chevron Phillips Chemical

Renewable Energy Forecasting

The inherently variable nature of renewable energy sources like wind, solar, and hydro necessitates building advanced capabilities in prediction and planning. The capabilities to forecast renewable energy generation factoring in dynamics such as wind speed, solar irradiance, and hydro inflow, etc. in order to match better with expected load and price signals - will help companies reduce uncertainty, efficiency, and profits in the renewable energy market.

The Databricks Advantage: The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform stands as the premier choice for mastering the challenges of renewable energy forecasting. The unpredictable nature of wind, solar, and hydropower sources demands sophisticated predictive and planning capabilities, which Databricks adeptly provides. By leveraging the platform's advanced analytics, companies can accurately forecast energy generation by taking into account variables such as wind speed, solar irradiance, and water inflow. This precise forecasting aligns closely with anticipated demand and pricing trends, enabling energy firms to minimize uncertainty and maximize both operational efficiency and profitability in the volatile renewable energy market. The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform is not just a tool; it's an essential ally in the pursuit of a more sustainable and economically sound energy future.

Grid Optimization

With the deployment of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), utilities can gain real-time visibility into grid conditions. With AI capabilities, companies can better forecast load, predict outages, and uncover usage patterns to help utilities drive better servicing of demand, at lower cost and lower disruptions, opening the door to a more proactive and predictive approach to grid management.

The Databricks Advantage: The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform is the optimal solution for achieving Grid Optimization, thanks to its robust AI capabilities. By harnessing real-time data, utilities can achieve unprecedented visibility into grid conditions. Databricks enables enhanced forecasting of load demands, accurate prediction of potential outages, and the identification of intricate usage patterns. This intelligence allows utilities to not only respond more effectively to consumer demand but also to do so with reduced costs and fewer disruptions. The platform propels utility companies into a new era of grid management—one that is both proactive and predictive—ensuring a smarter, more resilient, and cost-efficient power grid.

Energy Trading

Electricity markets are highly volatile and require very short timeframes for decisions: lack of data accuracy and timeliness in analysis can result in significant financial downside. By bringing together asset performance predictions, market pricing, and risk management practices, companies can optimize value capture through better day-ahead offers and optimize trading strategies.

The Databricks Advantage: The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform is the quintessential tool for navigating the complexities of Energy Trading. In an arena where electricity markets fluctuate rapidly and decisions must be made within tight timeframes, the accuracy and speed of data analysis are critical to financial success. Databricks excels by integrating real-time asset performance predictions with market pricing and sophisticated risk management practices. This synergy empowers companies to enhance their value capture by refining day-ahead market offers and honing their trading strategies. With Databricks, traders can confidently make informed decisions, minimize financial risks, and capitalize on market opportunities, securing a competitive edge in the fast-paced world of energy trading.

Decarbonization

Data is at the heart of decarbonization - it is what makes sustainability real and operational. Organizations are looking to gain a deeper view of their carbon footprint across their end-to-end activities - to analyze drivers of energy consumption, incorporate direct environmental impact into critical operational decisions (in addition to financial impact), and report the effectiveness of multiple decarbonization initiatives across the organization.

The Databricks Advantage: The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform is ideally positioned to address the challenges of Decarbonization, where data is the key enabler of actionable sustainability. It offers organizations a comprehensive view of their carbon footprint by seamlessly aggregating data across all operational activities. With Databricks, businesses can dissect the factors driving energy consumption, integrate environmental impacts with financial considerations in decision-making, and accurately measure the success of various decarbonization efforts. The platform's powerful analytics capabilities ensure that sustainability is not just a concept but a quantifiable and achievable goal, facilitating informed strategies that lead to a significant reduction in carbon emissions and a tangible step toward a more sustainable future.

"Octopus Energy is transforming energy systems through tech, delivering exceptional customer service while bringing bills down for customers. Databricks' Data Intelligence Platform for Energy plays a key role in this, allowing us to process and analyse large data sets generated by smart meters. By gaining deeper insights into customer behaviour and energy consumption, we can continue to create innovations and services our customers love so much, and ultimately drive the green energy revolution globally."

— David Sykes, Head of Data at Octopus Energy

Personalization

Personalization is rapidly becoming a game-changer in the energy sector as consumers seek more control over their energy consumption and costs. Providing consumers personalized insight into energy usage patterns and offering recommendations in terms of the next best action consumers can take to reduce energy consumption and even positioning better offers and pricing based on specific customer usage patterns (e.g. EV household vs. non-EV household, manufacturing company vs. warehouse etc).

The Databricks Advantage: The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform is the ideal solution for implementing Personalization in the energy sector, an industry where tailored experiences are increasingly crucial for customer satisfaction. Databricks enables energy providers to deliver highly personalized insights into consumer energy usage, empowering customers to take control of their consumption and costs. By analyzing individual usage patterns, the platform facilitates the delivery of targeted recommendations and actions for energy reduction. It also allows for the customization of offers and pricing that resonate with specific customer profiles, such as electric vehicle owners versus traditional households, or manufacturing companies versus warehouses. Databricks' advanced data processing and machine learning capabilities ensure that personalization goes beyond a mere marketing buzzword, transforming it into a strategic tool that enhances customer engagement and energy efficiency.

"At the core of our mission lies transforming the way we power our planet. Our clients in the energy realm require not just data but profound insights and strategic guidance to navigate their transformative journey. The Databricks Data Intelligence Platform for Energy offers us unparalleled speed, scalability, technology, and collaboration to satisfy the increasing demand for data-driven intelligence to empower our clients to make informed decisions, optimize their operations, and pioneer a sustainable energy future."

— Yanyan Wu, VP Head of Unconventionals Data, Wood Mackenzie

Go from idea to proof-of-concept in weeks with pre-built solution accelerators

Built on top of our Data Intelligence Platform, Databricks and our ecosystem of partners offer packaged solution accelerators to help organizations tackle the most common and high-value use cases in the industry including:

• LLMs for Knowledge Base Q&A Agents: Elevating customer satisfaction with LLM-powered chatbots
• IoT Predictive Maintenance: Ingest real-time IIoT data from field devices and perform complex time-series processing to maximize uptime and minimize maintenance costs
• Digital Twins: Process real-world data in real-time, compute insights at scale and deliver to multiple downstream applications for data-driven decisions
• Wind Turbine Predictive Maintenance: Analyze wind farm productivity and predict faulty wind turbines through a mix of AI/ML and domain-specific models.
• Grid-Edge Analytics: Optimize energy grid performance and prevent outages
• Real Time Data Ingestion Platform (RTDIP): RTDIP is a cloud-native open source framework focuses on time series data standardization and interoperability across, enabling data science, statistical, ML & AI capabilities such as optimization, surveillance, forecasting, predictive analytics & digital Twins, all essential to accelerating the Energy Transition.

A growing partner ecosystem

Databricks is working with industry-leading cloud, consulting, and technology partners to enable best-in-class solutions. We have a long-standing relationship with Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Google Cloud, helping customers across the energy industry ecosystem achieve their goals and run their operations at scale.

Databricks works with industry technology partners such as AVEVA, Litmus, Seeq, and S&P Global Commodity Insights. Technology solutions include:

• AVEVA
  "The energy transition is moving at an exponential rate, forcing organizations to be more efficient and robust with digital investments. Traditional methods of ETL are not enough. The combination of CONNECT with Databricks through Delta Sharing holds the promise to truly deliver on energy transformation at speed and scale."
  Bry Dillon, SVP Partners and Commercial Strategy, AVEVA
• Litmus Native bidirectional integration with Litmus Edge & Databricks Delta Lake fuels seamless exchange of data, enabling ML and AI models. The future of energy is intelligent and self-optimizing, powered by real time data. Litmus Edge unlocks the hidden potential of your OT data by capturing data directly from industrial assets and adding contextualization and data modeling at the edge. This partnership enables customers to achieve closed-loop control and paves the path for a more resilient, efficient, and sustainable operating environment enterprise wide.
• Seeq, an industrial analytics and AI platform, is integrated with the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform for Energy to improve data accessibility and enhance machine learning workflows. This bi-directional integration enables energy industry leaders to leverage Seeq's extensive connectivity to time series data to power a range of analytical and monitoring use cases and further scale data science and machine learning efforts across the enterprise. Insights in Databricks can be operationalized in Seeq, enabling process experts and data teams to deliver solutions that increase industrial productivity, accelerate progress toward sustainability goals, and more. This partnership bridges the communications gap between operations technology and information technology personnel, lowering the barrier to data-driven innovation for energy companies.
• From S&P Global Commodity Insights: S&P Global Commodity Insights is proud to leverage Databricks to deliver industry-leading data solutions seamlessly to our clients. Through the innovative Delta Share integration, we have streamlined data dissemination, reducing our customers' ETL overhead and database management burdens. This integration empowers clients to harness Databricks' advanced data science and analytics capabilities more effectively. It ensures that S&P Global Commodity Insights remains at the forefront of technological advancement in delivering crucial data to our clients. With Delta Share, we are accelerating our clients' digital transformation journeys while maintaining our commitment to delivering unparalleled insights and intelligence in the commodities market.

"We are thrilled to embark on this collaborative journey with Databricks Marketplace, tapping into S&P Global's rich legacy of expertise in Energy and Commodities to serve Databricks' vibrant community of data engineers, scientists, analysts, and cloud computing enthusiasts. Our partnership underscores our dedication to empowering our customers in their digital journey."

— Joerg Gerth, VP, Global Head of Channel Partners & Data Distribution, S&P Global Commodity Insights

Top consulting companies such as BKO, Capgemini, Celebal Technologies, CK Delta, Deloitte, EPAM, Neudesic, and CK Delta have built market-leading solutions on top of Databricks technology to address high-value use cases across the energy industry. Partner solutions include:

• BKO: BKO's Common Model combines market and trading data with plant maintenance, inventory and operational data to produce a level of optimization far beyond simple plant maintenance and inventory management. The vast amounts of operational and financial data that can be stored in Databricks and managed by Unity Catalog and BKO AI's Common Model, enables the synchronized exchange of the situational information required for enterprise-wide optimization.
• Celebal Technologies: Leveraging their cutting-edge Industrial Intelligence Brickbuilder Solution, powered by Power and Utility Forecasting Framework (PUFF), Celebal Tech expands their data and AI expertise into the realm of renewable energy prediction. This solution delivers granular and holistic forecasts, encompassing diverse categories like load, generation, price, and weather. PUFF sets itself apart by seamlessly integrating external factors like weather patterns and pricing, propelling forecasting accuracy to unprecedented levels. This empowers energy stakeholders to optimize resource allocation and planning, paving the way for a resilient and agile energy landscape. Read their blog to learn more.
• CKDelta: CKDelta ∆Power is an AI intelligent application that utilizes extensive data analysis, including information on people movement, location attributes, and nearby factors, to identify the most strategic and high-demand locations for the installation of public charging stations for electric vehicles. It maximizes future revenue potential, calculates carbon offset and ensures reliable performance, all with a focus on a seamless user experience.
• Neudesic: Smart Meter Analytics by Neudesic provides utility companies with a robust framework accelerator for ingesting, storing, and analyzing AMI (advanced metering infrastructure) data. This scalable solution orchestrates billions of daily data points with near-real-time analytical capabilities, empowering grid operators to utilize AI for understanding grid health, load demands, forecasts, and customer usage patterns. Simultaneously, it enhances revenue recognition through precise billing automation and theft detection functionalities.

"At Capgemini, our IDEA framework has been leveraged by many including some of the largest Energy, Utilities and Chemical companies in the world to modernize their data estates using various Databricks products. This accelerates their digital transformation journey leveraging Data and AI to improve their operations. The ability to position the Data Intelligence Platform at the center of this architecture will ensure that the solution is open, secure, scalable, and optimized for total cost of ownership. RAISE, our new GenAI framework, will facilitate further improvement. This blueprint and capacity to deliver the platform as code is accelerating the time to business outcomes by up to 40%."

— Michael Doyle, Executive Vice President and Energy and Utilities Industry Leader, Capgemini

"As we navigate through the era of digital transformation, the convergence of AI and data is revolutionizing the Energy, Natural Resources, and Industrial sectors. At Deloitte, we're not only optimizing operations but also unlocking new avenues of growth and sustainability with the power of the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Together with Databricks, we look forward to empowering our clients on their data and AI journey."

— Ram Iyer, AI & Data Leader, Energy and Chemicals, Deloitte Consulting

"EPAM partners with and serves many leading energy operators and technology providers to help them to unlock the value Generative AI-driven business insights. We have seen many of the leading energy companies accelerate their innovation within AI using Databricks as a key enabling platform. Databricks Data Intelligence Platform for Energy represents a major step change, enabling a synergy between industry standards such as the OSDU data platform, a comprehensive data analytics solution, which seamlessly integrates large quantities, and enables AI/ML capabilities, delivering fairly unprecedented value to customers."

— John Chu, VP, Energy Vertical

Want to learn more about the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform for Energy? Click here for our solutions page. We're thrilled to continue to invest in the Energy industry, empowering leaders to put data and AI at the very center of their organization.

Join us at our Manufacturing, Transportation, and Energy Forum on April 17th in Houston and at Data and AI Summit June 10-13 in San Francisco.