IBM has launched Insights Foundation for Energy, a cloud-based energy analytics, data management and visualization software platform for energy and utility companies. The platform can be used to get a 360-degree view from the individual transformer level to the entire grid.
Securely delivered via the SoftLayer infrastructure from IBM, the Insights Foundation for Energy couples software for data integration and visualization with advanced analytics to enable better decision-making about maintenance and repairs. It also enables renewable forecasting and integration to the network and supports custom analytics development.
Built-in asset analytics enables predictive maintenance, asset health measurement and real-time risk assessments. It can display all information about an asset in one place including data history, maintenance records and operating condition data to improve planning, construction, operations and maintenance using both open source and proprietary data. The new platform can be used to help utilities shift from traditional scheduled asset management to a need-based maintenance approach.
National Grid worked with IBM to improve decision making around asset health and maintenance policies and has since shifted to condition-based preventive maintenance without having to replace its existing enterprise asset management system. Analytics-based asset management has also helped National Grid reduce operating expenditure while maintaining grid reliability and availability. This project is representative of challenges most utilities face and was a key driver for making Insights Foundation for Energy available to utilities worldwide.
By using analytics and visualization to improve situational awareness, utilities can better understand factors affecting asset performance and more accurately project how much useful life remains or what other points in the grid could be affected by an outage.