Energy Industry: Oil, Gas, Power, Utilities
A data rich industry that demands cost-effective, high-performance storage.
The energy industry is one of the largest users of the Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Instruments and sensors help monitor and control everything from drilling platforms to smart meters at customer homes. It’s all creating a tsunami of data that ultimately has to be stored somewhere but easily accessed when needed.
Wasabi hot cloud storage provides a solution that’s inexpensive, fast, secure, and scalable, enabling energy companies to store all the data they have, then access what they need, when they need it.
Introduction
Companies in the energy sector use data to drive efficiencies and profitability. Oil and gas companies need data to help with everything from geology and geophysics to simulations and process optimization. Utilities collect data from advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), or “smart” meters, to understand trends and find opportunities for savings. Power-generation companies use it to help maintain their grids and get more power out of renewable sources, to name just a few examples.
All of these devices and sensors collect data – constantly. A single smart meter reporting data at 15-minute intervals will generate 400 MB of data a year. That means a utility with a million AMI customers will generate 400 TB of data a year. As of the end of 2017, the installed base of smart meters in the U.S. alone stood at nearly 79 million.
Storing all this valuable data using traditional on-premises or cloud offerings can quickly get costly. Wasabi provides a hot cloud storage alternative that eliminates the need for storage tiers and provides secure, infinitely scalable storage at prices 80% less than AWS S3. It also offers performance faster than the competition and eleven nines (99.999999999%) of object durability. Translation: you won’t lose any data.
Energy Industry Companies Use a Range of Data-related Technologies
Internet of Things
Nearly every company in the energy sector uses IoT technology and have been since before the term was coined. It’s at the heart of AMI as well as the smart thermostats that utility companies are increasingly encouraging customers to install. IoT is also crucial to monitoring capabilities for everything from the utility grid to wind farms and solar installations. Oil and gas companies depend on it for monitoring devices for drilling operations, while numerous sensors aid in oil and gas exploration, as well as pipeline monitoring.
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Artificial intelligence/machine learning
IoT technology is often used to gather data that feeds into artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) applications. Predictive maintenance for power generation equipment, bringing efficiency and stability to the grid, natural resource exploration, and monitoring energy consumption are just a few of the ways energy companies are applying AI/ML technology.
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Surveillance
Energy companies have lots of valuable—and potentially dangerous—assets to protect. Many of them are outdoors, surrounded only by chain link fencing; think transformers, substations, and solar arrays. Nuclear power plants are obviously highly sensitive, while oil platforms are inherently dangerous. A single unauthorized intrusion could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, while introducing safety risks and business disruptions. That’s why energy firms routinely protect their assets with surveillance systems that are constantly on the lookout for intruders and generate large quantities of data, particularly video, in the process.
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Wasabi in Action in the Energy Industry
Renewable energy forecasting
Wind and solar energy are becoming increasingly important energy sources as the world seeks to reduce use of fossil fuels. In 2008 renewable energy accounted for 18.5% of the world's total electricity, mostly from hydroelectric power. A decade later that figure was about 25%, mostly the result of new wind and solar installations – 399 gigawatts of wind and 375 gigawatts of solar.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that both wind and solar are weather-dependent, which makes it difficult to know exactly how much power you’ll get from a given installation over a period of time. But using a combination of weather data collection, IoT and artificial intelligence, energy companies are getting far better at predicting energy output from renewable sources—and adjusting production from other sources accordingly for maximum efficiency.
Wasabi provides maximum efficiency and cost-effectiveness in terms of storing all the data that drive these energy applications. At a cost 80% less expensive than AWS S3, and with speeds faster than the competition, Wasabi is a high-performance, affordable alternative to both premises-based storage and first-generation cloud providers. And Wasabi’s eleven nines (99.999999999%) of object durability ensures none of the valuable data will be lost—in the wind or otherwise.
Oil and gas exploration and production
In a survey of oil and gas industry executives, 81% considered Big Data to be among their top three priorities for 2018, mainly to improve oil and gas exploration and production efficiency. That’s quite a leap from 2012, when a survey by IDC Energy showed 70% of respondents from oil and gas companies weren’t even familiar with Big Data and how it applied to their industry.
Use of Big Data and analytics enables oil and gas companies to improve production by 6% to 8%. Perhaps more important, technologies including data visualizations help with the search for oil. As “Towards Data Science” blogger Deena Zaidi notes, “With drilling a deep-water oil well often costing over $100 million, no one wants to be looking in the wrong place.”
With that kind of money at stake, oil and gas companies can’t afford to toss away data that may prove to be valuable. With Wasabi, they can store as much as they want at prices 80% less than AWS S3, yet enjoy performance that is faster than the competition. That’s important when you need access to lots of data fast, such as to drive visualization applications.
Operational efficiencies
Any energy industry company has plenty of infrastructure to maintain, much of it in remote areas, making even routine maintenance costly. Increasingly, that infrastructure is instrumented with sensors that monitor its performance, enabling companies to collect and store the data and analyze it to detect variations in performance. Such advanced analytics capabilities enable them to identify when a given piece of equipment is showing signs of performance problems that warrant repair.
This kind of predictive maintenance can save energy companies huge sums as compared to routine, scheduled maintenance, simply because machines are repaired only when they need it. But it does require the storage of vast amounts of historical data in order to make those predictions accurate.
Wasabi enables companies to store an infinite amount of data in hot storage, meaning it’s always readily available. At a cost 80% less than AWS S3, energy companies will get a rapid return on their hot cloud storage investments.
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