Can utility service providers plug their leaks with Big Data?

By: Sunil Jose, Managing Director, Teradata India

In my recent interactions with some of power utilities I realized that there is mounting pressure on them from regulators, consumers and stakeholders to reduce the impact of outages, improve customer service, lower the cost of operations, and to be gentler on the environment. Most of the Utility service providers were insulated from prompt redressal of customer issues by virtue of being government owned monoliths; however they are now realizing that customer responsiveness in the age of social media and privatization is key to long-term survival.

Consumers have now got accustomed to receiving high levels of customer service from service providers such as telephone & broadband services, DTH & cable service providers etc. and expect their gas, electric and water utility service providers to be no different. With every billing query, connection issue or other dispute, customers expect a timely, tailored and a proactive response that is focused on problem solution.

From a utility’s viewpoint, while client engagement is an important issue, a timely solution can be linked to analysis of various sources of customer data (both structured and unstructured) going back many years. However, in India there are also added issues of

• inadequate and often incorrect metering,

• theft,

• address and identity problems,

• political largesse and

other legacy issues that compound problems which, in normal circumstances, could perhaps have been addressed promptly. This poses a problem as a timely solution can be a challenge without tools to detect significant trends and analyze them.

Adoption of effective analytics by Power utility companies in a country like India where wastage and ineffective usage are more of a standard than exception is of critical need today. A key problem with regards to the power sector has been the health of the state electricity boards. The problem is not as much at the generating side as it is with distribution and realization of revenue. The agricultural sector receives unmetered supplies; therefore the amount of electricity it receives is not known. This allows for large scale manipulation of figures as an enormous segment of electricity pilferage is put at the doorstep of the poor farmer.

Smart metering and big-data analysis would show the discrepancies between what is supplied to agriculture and non-agri sectors. Over time it would point out flaws and even highlight malpractices in the system enabling them to detect when, where and how much of power theft and transmission loss is taking place allowing them to take appropriate action in a timely manner. However in order for this to be done effectively, a free flow of data would be required to be generated and analyzed. This can be done only if the distribution companies wake up to the magnitude of the problem and decide to plug the leaks to reduce wastage of a public resource.

Manage Downtime Better to Prevent revenue Loss

In India, adopting more effective approaches to manage downtime is the other big area of improvement that can be enabled through more effective data management. Big data along with other digital tools empowers power companies with new intelligence to manage the grid and presents a complete and operations-centric view where proactive and predictive maintenance opportunities prevent costly failures and reduce downtime.

A power company can optimize performance, prevent outages, restore outages faster and allow consumers to manage energy usage right down to the individual networked appliance. That’s power management literally from power plant to the plug. This will help prevent unplanned downtime which is a major revenue loss and a serious concern and issue for power utilities.

Also, not just legacy operators, even renewable energy providers are turning to data monitoring aided by smart sensors and other digital tools to optimize uptime by managing issues better. For instance they can leverage big data analytics to create variable cost plans such as factories may receive power at lower rates on weekends or at night when there is access to surplus power encouraging factory owners to run high power jobs then.

Energy Efficiency and Response to Demand

Quite a few utility companies across the world are leveraging data analytics to fully put to use their meter to bill generation process,

• restructuring their billing exception queues to reduce false positive exceptions,

• identifying new irregularities formerly missed,

• decreasing the time taken to fix break-downs and

• Finally implementing a high degree of automation to speed up processes.

Adoption of data analytics in the utilities sector can only scale upward as organizations and municipal departments adapt to changing consumer needs with each passing day. In India, with the focus on the development of 100 smart cities planned, the option to choose smart data monitoring will no longer be an option – it will become a sacrosanct requirement. The challenge will only be of choosing and understating the right model to adopt that can deliver ROI.

While it is early days for analytics in Indian power utilities it is inevitable that they embrace analytics to extract value from their operations, their investments and their manpower resources in order to improve efficiency, stay competitive and ensure growing shareholder value.

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