Databricks, a leading Data and AI company, has unveiled its latest innovation, the Data Intelligence Platform for Energy. This revolutionary platform is designed to empower enterprises in the energy sector with AI capabilities, leveraging a unified platform and open lakehouse architecture. By harnessing vast streams of energy data, organizations can develop generative AI applications without compromising data privacy or intellectual property.
The Data Intelligence Platform for Energy provides energy leaders with a comprehensive view of their operations in real time, enabling them to proactively address maintenance needs, minimize unplanned downtime, accurately forecast energy generation, and drive efficiency and sustainability. The global energy sector is undergoing a significant transformation towards a smarter, cleaner, and more reliable energy system, with renewables now accounting for nearly 30 percent of global power.
With the Data Intelligence Platform for Energy, customers can democratize data access across their organization, unlocking the full value of asset, operations, environmental, and customer data to optimize energy infrastructure and manage volatility. Databricks’ platform has already been embraced by industry leaders such as the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), Chevron Phillips Chemical, Cosmo Energy, Octopus Energy, Shell, TotalEnergies, Wood Mackenzie, and more.
Shell’s Vice President of Digital Innovation, Dan Jeavons, praised Databricks for its transformative impact on their digital transformation journey, stating that it has accelerated their data analytics and AI capabilities. According to Jeavons, Databricks has enabled Shell to unlock real-time insights that drive strategic decisions, leading to process improvements, cost reductions, and production increases across their business.
Similarly, David Sykes, Head of Data at Octopus Energy, highlighted the role of Databricks’ Data Intelligence Platform for Energy in transforming energy systems through technology. Sykes noted that by processing and analyzing large datasets generated by smart meters, Octopus Energy can gain deeper insights into customer behavior and energy consumption. This allows them to create innovations and services that their customers love, ultimately driving the global green energy revolution.
Databricks has introduced an innovative Data Intelligence Platform for Energy, designed to address key challenges within the energy sector. This platform offers a flexible, open environment that empowers customers to tackle critical industry issues with ease. One of the platform’s key features is its ability to support real-time asset performance management and maintenance. Users can efficiently gather, analyze, and visualize large volumes of sensor data from various physical assets, such as wind turbines, grids, pipelines, and machinery.
This capability enables organizations to monitor and optimize performance in real-time, reducing downtime and enhancing overall operational efficiency. Additionally, the platform provides accurate and efficient renewable energy forecasting. By leveraging sophisticated predictive capabilities powered by machine learning (ML), customers can minimize forecasting uncertainty associated with wind, solar, and hydropower sources.
Integration of weather forecasts, performance data, pricing trends, and demand projections on a unified platform allows for better demand management and resource allocation, maximizing profitability in a volatile market. The platform also supports a proactive, predictive approach to grid optimization. Through the deployment of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), utilities can gain real-time visibility into grid conditions, enabling them to forecast load, predict outages, and balance supply and demand more effectively.
This reduces transmission losses and improves overall grid reliability and resilience. Shiv Trisal, the Global Industry Leader for Energy and Manufacturing at Databricks, emphasized the importance of leveraging data, analytics, and AI to minimize risk and tap into new opportunities enabled by the energy transition. He highlighted the need for a data intelligence approach that empowers users of all technical abilities to unlock unique insights from their company’s full knowledge base and data.
This, in turn, can drive new innovations and contribute to the development of a smarter, more reliable, and sustainable energy system for all. The Energy Data Intelligence Platform offers a range of pre-packaged solutions to accelerate the analytics process for organizations in the energy sector, providing a roadmap to address key industry challenges. These solutions include LLMs for Knowledge Base Q&A Agents, which enable the creation of chatbots pre-trained with industry-specific knowledge.
Another offering is IoT Predictive Maintenance, which helps maximize uptime and reduce maintenance costs by analyzing real-time IIoT data. Digital Twins technology processes real-world data to provide insights for data-driven decision-making, while Wind Turbine Predictive Maintenance uses AI and domain-specific models to predict faulty turbines. Grid-Edge Analytics optimizes energy grid performance by integrating data from IoT devices and training fault detection models.
Additionally, the Real-Time Data Ingestion Platform (RTDIP) facilitates optimization, surveillance, forecasting, and predictive analytics through a cloud-native open-source framework focused on data standardization and interoperability. In a significant development for the energy industry, renowned Databricks partners, including AVEVA, BKO, Capgemini, Celebal Technologies, CKDelta, Deloitte, Neudesic, and Seeq, are actively advancing the Data Intelligence Platform vision.
These partners are instrumental in offering pre-built analytics solutions on the innovative lakehouse architecture, specifically tailored for the energy sector. Among the featured partner offerings, BKO introduces its Common Model, which integrates market and trading data with plant maintenance, inventory, and operational data, enabling a high level of optimization beyond conventional plant management practices. Celebal Technologies, on the other hand, brings its Power and Utility Forecasting Framework (PUFF), delivering a groundbreaking renewable energy forecasting solution.
This solution provides comprehensive forecasts encompassing load, generation, price, and weather, seamlessly integrating external factors for accurate forecasting and enhanced resource allocation and planning. CKDelta presents CKDelta ∆Power, an AI-powered application that analyzes extensive data, including people movement, location attributes, and other factors, to identify strategic locations for installing public electric vehicle charging stations.
Neudesic’s Smart Meter Analytics offers utility companies a robust framework accelerator for processing and analyzing AMI data. This scalable solution enables grid operators to utilize AI for understanding grid health, load demands, forecasts, and customer usage patterns, empowering them with near-real-time analytical capabilities. Bry Dillon, SVP, Partners, and Commercial Strategy at AVEVA, emphasized the importance of digital investments in the face of the rapidly evolving energy transition, stating that traditional ETL methods are insufficient.
The integration of CONNECT with Databricks through Delta Sharing is poised to revolutionize energy transformation, offering speed and scalability to organizations in this dynamic industry. Capgemini’s IDEA framework has been widely adopted, with many of the world’s largest Energy, Utilities, and Chemical companies utilizing various Databricks products to modernize their data estates. This initiative aims to accelerate their digital transformation journey by harnessing the power of Data and AI to enhance operational efficiency.
The strategic placement of the Data Intelligence Platform at the core of this architecture ensures a solution that is not only open and secure but also scalable and cost-effective. Capgemini’s new GenAI framework, RAISE, is poised to drive further enhancements in this regard. This approach, which includes delivering the platform as code, is significantly reducing the time to achieve business outcomes.
Michael Doyle, Executive Vice President and Energy and Utilities Industry Leader at Capgemini, emphasized, “The convergence of AI and data is revolutionizing the Energy, Natural Resources, and Industrial sectors as we navigate the era of digital transformation.” He added, “At Deloitte, we are not only optimizing operations but also unlocking new avenues for growth and sustainability through the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform.”
Ram Iyer, AI & Data Leader, Energy and Chemicals at Deloitte Consulting, expressed enthusiasm about the collaboration with Databricks, stating, “Together, we look forward to empowering our clients on their data and AI journey.” In the realm of Data and AI, Databricks stands as a pioneering force. With a global reach, the company’s Data Intelligence Platform serves as the backbone for over 10,000 organizations worldwide.
Renowned names such as Comcast, Condé Nast, and Grammarly, along with over 60% of the Fortune 500, rely on Databricks to unify and democratize their data, analytics, and AI. Headquartered in San Francisco, Databricks has established a global presence with offices spanning across different regions. Founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark™, Delta Lake, and MLflow, Databricks continues to lead the way in revolutionizing data management and AI technologies.
