New Databricks offering provides pre-built accelerators, marketplace solutions, and an ecosystem of partner capabilities tailored to organisations across the energy industry including customers like AEMO and Alinta Energy
SYDNEY– April 15 2024 – Databricks, the Data and AI company, today announced the Data Intelligence Platform for Energy, a unified platform bringing the power of AI to data and people across the energy sector. Built on an open lakehouse architecture, Databricks’ Data Intelligence Platform for Energy enables enterprises to harness vast streams of energy data and develop generative AI applications without sacrificing data privacy or their confidential IP. Energy leaders gain a holistic view into their operations in real-time to preemptively address maintenance needs, reduce unplanned downtime, accurately forecast energy generation, and take action for a more efficient, sustainable future.
“Australia has a rich ecosystem of energy players, all standing at a pivotal moment as the country transitions toward diversified energy sources,” said Adam Beavis, VP and ANZ Country Manager at Databricks. “The new Data Intelligence Platform has been purpose-built for the unique needs of the energy industry, enabling ANZ players to not only tackle regional challenges to effective energy management but also contribute to the global effort in driving data-driven innovation in the industry.”
With the Data Intelligence Platform for Energy, customers can democratise data access to their entire organisation by delivering the full value of asset, operations, environmental, and customer data to optimise energy infrastructure and mitigate volatility. Databricks has been adopted by industry-leading organisations such as the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), Alinta Energy, Chevron Phillips Chemical, Cosmo Energy, Octopus Energy, Shell, TotalEnergies, Wood Mackenzie, and more.
“As one of the country’s leading power generators and retailers, meeting the energy needs of more than 1 million Australians, Alinta Energy understands the importance of quality data to support decision-making and operations. The Alinta Data Hub, powered by Databricks, is a strategic pillar for Alinta’s operations, providing a single source of information for the company, our customers, and regulators. Its access to accurate, up-to-the-minute data, allows Alinta to understand our position in the market, the needs of our customers and also provides regulators with clarity about the efficient and fair operation of the sector. Looking ahead, we’re excited to begin the journey to leverage GenAI responsibly and at scale. This will be greatly accelerated by our mature investment in the secure and governed lakehouse architecture and the extensive AI capabilities now available in Databricks Data Intelligence Platform,” said Brad Walker, General Manager for Data and AI, Alinta Energy.
“Databricks is the backbone of our petabytes-scale enterprise data platform. In our experience, Databricks has demonstrated remarkable agility in its product iteration to address the latest challenges in the data and AI domain. The customer service has been consistently supportive, which played a crucial role in our Enterprise data services improvement process. Furthermore, Unity Catalog has been instrumental in facilitating a data centre of excellence model within our organisation. Databricks is pivotal in our organisation’s strategic data roadmap,” said Christopher Tao, Manager, Data Management, Enterprise Data Services, AEMO.
“Embracing Databricks has been transformative for our organisation’s digital transformation—it’s the engine that powers our data-driven innovation for asset operations,” said Dan Jeavons, Vice President of Digital Innovation at Shell. “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.”
Databricks delivers an open, flexible data and AI platform. With powerful tools and partners, Databricks’ Data Intelligence Platform for Energy enables customers across the energy sector to tackle critical challenges in the industry, including:
- Real-time asset performance management and maintenance: Organisations can gather, analyse, and visualise vast amounts of sensor data from every physical asset — wind turbines, grids, pipelines, and machinery — to monitor and optimise performance in real-time, reduce downtime, and enhance overall operational efficiency.
- Accurate, efficient renewable energy forecasting: Customers can minimise forecasting uncertainty and the unpredictable nature of wind, solar and hydropower sources with sophisticated predictive capabilities powered by machine learning (ML). By integrating weather forecasts, performance data, pricing trends and demand projections on a unified platform, the energy sector can more accurately manage demand and enhance resource allocation to maximise profitability in a volatile market.
- A proactive, predictive approach to grid optimisation: With the deployment of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), utilities can leverage advanced analytics and predictive modelling to gain real-time visibility into grid conditions. The Data Intelligence Platform for Energy enables companies to better forecast load, predict outages and balance supply and demand, reducing transmission losses, and improving overall grid reliability and resilience.
“Successful energy companies will set themselves apart by leveraging data, analytics and AI in novel ways to simultaneously minimise the risk of their strategies and tap new opportunities enabled by the energy transition,” said Shiv Trisal, Global Industry Leader for Energy and Manufacturing at Databricks. “This requires a different approach towards data intelligence that puts the power of AI in the hands of every user regardless of technical ability, allowing them to unlock unique insights from the company’s full knowledge base and data to power new innovations and shape a smarter, reliable and sustainable energy system for all.”
Pre-built data and AI solutions customised to tackle high-value customer use cases
The Data Intelligence Platform for Energy offers packaged use case accelerators that are designed to jumpstart the analytics process and offer a blueprint to help organisations tackle critical, high-value industry challenges. Popular data solutions for customers across the energy sector include:
- LLMs for Knowledge Base Q&A Agents: Easily build an LLM-powered chatbot with Databricks that is pretrained with industry context and a customer’s knowledge base to offer an elevated, personalised experience to their end users.
- IoT Predictive Maintenance: Ingest real-time Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) data from field devices and perform complex time-series processing to maximise uptime and minimise 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: Analyse wind farm productivity and predict faulty wind turbines through a mix of AI/ML and domain-specific models.
- Grid-Edge Analytics: Optimise energy grid performance and prevent outages by unifying data from various IoT devices and training a fault detection model to easily spot and address anomalies.
- Real Time Data Ingestion Platform (RTDIP): Enables optimisation, surveillance, forecasting, predictive analytics, and digital twins with a cloud-native open source framework focused on data standardisation and interoperability.
Databricks partners deliver an ecosystem of purpose-built solutions for energy
Additionally, industry-leading Databricks partners including AVEVA, BKO, Capgemini, Celebal Technologies, CKDelta, Deloitte, Neudesic, and Seeq are driving the Data Intelligence Platform vision by delivering pre-built analytics solutions on the lakehouse architecture that are tailor-made for the energy industry. Featured partner offerings include:
- BKO: BKO’s Common Model combines market and trading data with plant maintenance, inventory and operational data to produce a level of optimisation far beyond simple plant maintenance and inventory management, all stored and managed by Databricks’ Unity Catalog.
- Celebal Technologies: Leveraging its Power and Utility Forecasting Framework (PUFF), Celebal Tech provides an innovative renewable energy forecasting solution that delivers granular and holistic forecasts encompassing diverse categories like load, generation, price and weather. PUFF seamlessly integrates external factors like weather patterns and pricing to deliver accurate forecasting that empowers energy stakeholders to optimise resource allocation and planning.
- CKDelta: CKDelta ∆Power is an AI intelligent application that utilises 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 maximises 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 analysing AMI (advanced metering infrastructure) data. This scalable solution orchestrates billions of daily data points with near-real-time analytical capabilities, empowering grid operators to utilise AI for understanding grid health, load demands, forecasts, and customer usage patterns.
“The energy transition is moving at an exponential rate, forcing organisations 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,” said Bry Dillon, SVP, Partners and Commercial Strategy at AVEVA.
“At Capgemini, our IDEA framework has been leveraged by many including some of the largest Energy, Utilities and Chemical companies in the world to modernise 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 centre of this architecture will ensure that the solution is open, secure, scalable, and optimised 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,” said Michael Doyle, Executive Vice President and Energy and Utilities Industry Leader at Capgemini.
“As we navigate through the era of digital transformation, the convergence of AI and data is revolutionising the Energy, Natural Resources, and Industrial sectors. At Deloitte, we’re not only optimising 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,” said Ram Iyer, AI & Data Leader, Energy and Chemicals at Deloitte Consulting.
About Databricks
Databricks is the Data and AI company. More than 10,000 organisations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, Grammarly, and over 60% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to unify and democratise data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe, and was founded by the original creators of Lakehouse, Apache Spark™, Delta Lake, and MLflow. To learn more, follow Databricks on LinkedIn, X and Facebook.
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