Solution

Brief
IBM IOT for
Energy and Utilities
Contents

3 Industry trends influence operational 12 A platform for energy and utility analytics
and investment planning decisions 12 Platform: Data integration for a comprehensive view
4 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities of asset and network performance
5 Applications to meet needs of a changing industry 13 Platform: Data lake supports big data and analytic
5 Application: Asset performance management needs of the industry
6 Application: Asset risk calculates potential impact of 14 Platform: Descriptive, predictive, prescriptive and
equipment performance on the grid cognitive analytics
7 Application: Asset investment scenarios 15 Platform: Weather data to optimize asset
8 Application: Situational awareness— performance and maintenance scheduling
from individual asset to fleet view 16 Open and extensible
9 Application: Connectivity model reduces 17 Designed for line of business
verification costs 18 Leadership in energy and utilities
10 Application: Wind360 to optimize wind farm 18 Data, analytics and open platform support
operations and performance fact-based decisions

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Page 2 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
Industry trends influence operational Regulatory pressures on utilities to do more with existing
and investment planning decisions assets and resources and to open markets to new competitors
Energy and utility providers face fundamental disruptions and participants also threaten the utilities’ financial positions
to their business models, revenue streams and regulatory and demand new approaches. The old model of a monopoly
relationships which are unparalleled in their history and energy provider, with regulatory financial incentives to invest in
demand uncharacteristic agility on the part of the utilities and expand the network, no longer reflects the reality in many
to survive and thrive through the current transition period. regions where the networks are fully built out and expansion
Several converging factors force disruption: potential is limited. The prospect of declining revenues to
support a fixed asset base portends higher rates for remaining
– Decreasing cost of renewable generation and gas-fueled customers—driving further substitution with competitive
generation to customers, challenging utility monopolies sources and the prospect of an ever increasing rate spiral.
with the threat of substitution In 10 states and other regions worldwide regulators are re-
– Entrance of third party aggregators into the thinking traditional ratemaking formulae that deliver a fixed rate
distribution market of return on the asset base toward performance-based rates
– Regulators moving toward outcome-based ratemaking, that incentivize total cost reduction. These include measures
away from traditional ratemaking formulae providing a moving away from fixed asset depreciation schedules, creating
fixed rate of return on the asset base to investors new incentives to extend asset useful IBM® IoT for Energy
and Utilities times and defer replacement. The transition from
As a result of improving technologies and emerging traditional ratemaking formulas requires new approaches and
regulatory models, industry financials are changing thinking to maximize existing assets and resources.
dramatically with broad implications across operations, While the traditional demands for safety and reliability
asset management, regulatory, customer and supply persist, industry disruptions underway mean that business
chain processes. as usual is no longer good enough. Utilities must deliver new
While utilities must contend with an aging asset base efficiencies to keep costs low and achieve new business agility
and workforce, the interconnection of intermittent renewable to participate in new retail-oriented interactions with customers
sources to the grid creates new stresses on assets designed and third parties.
for one-way power flows. Engineers must contend with Utilities intuitively recognize they must find opportunities
changing load and flow patterns as customers seek to sell for operational improvements using their existing data. However,
excess generation to their neighbors or back to the utility while utilities collect huge volumes of data, most of that data
and ensure power quality within agreed ranges and efficient is used within a narrow context, often providing only a portion
delivery of energy. Operations must be equipped to understand of the required information to decision makers throughout the
and react to reverse power flows. Asset management must enterprise. The true potential of data in helping utilities to cope
understand the fleet health and address continued reliable with industry forces is rarely realized. At a time when utilities
delivery of power on the aging and increasingly stressed increasingly rely on accurate forecasts to operate efficiently,
distribution grid. From an overall financial perspective, the underlying assumptions are all changing. Thus, fact-based
the utility must contend with changing capital expenditure decisions built from the bottom-up based on all of the available
(CAPEX) and operating expenditure (OPEX) needs for information are critical to transform—for investment planning,
asset replacement and maintenance as a result of these operations, maintenance and supply chain processes among
new power flows. others—in order to maintain reliability, safety and efficiency as
the underlying business model changes.
So with all these protean forces, how can utilities
avoid an asset replacement financial wall, best prepare for
performance-based rates, and overall achieve greater agility
and efficiency?

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Page 3 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities With this breadth and depth of capabilities IBM IoT for Energy
To successfully contend with industry disruptions, utilities and Utilities can help utilities optimize asset utilization and
realize that they need analytics. Unfortunately, most have investment planning, for instance:
multiple existing analytic point solutions within each domain,
including grid operations, maintenance, planning, finance and – Unlike point solutions, IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
supply chain. They need an integrated approach that provides integrates and uses all relevant available data to assess
a single source of the truth across domains and systems to and forecast asset health across the asset portfolio,
simplify generation of business insights. And they need both applying both statistical and physical models (derived
out-of-the-box models to accelerate time to value and an from known IEEE approaches as an example) to a range
open platform to extend solution capabilities to meet individual of asset classes.
provider needs. – Combines health assessment with consequence
of failure impact, including innovative use of connectivity
To address these needs IBM has developed IBM IoT for Energy to understand downstream impacts, to calculate
and Utilities. It is an open analytics solution for energy and risk on each asset as a metric to help prioritize
utility companies that includes a wide range of capabilities investments and achieve maximum value and benefit
to meet current and future needs of providers. IBM IoT for from the asset portfolio.
Energy and Utilities is built on a foundation of data integration – Using risk-scored plans, IBM IoT for Energy and
to capture and aggregate all relevant sources of information Utilities supports annual capital replacement planning
required, including connectivity to the IBM Watson™ IoT and regulatory filing– from bottom up asset health and
Platform, to run the most advanced analytics across a wide risk assessments.
variety of use cases. Key capabilities offered in IBM IoT for – Maintenance optimization—asset health and risk scores
Energy and Utilities are: support short term maintenance task prioritization and
scheduling and statistical methods support long term
– Out-of-the-box utility industry applications that apply evaluation of asset policy revisions.
a wide range of analytical capabilities to: assess asset
health and risk—historically and in real-time, cost
effectively verify connectivity models, optimize wind farm
performance, provide situational awareness—from the
equipment level to the grid level and employ predictive
maintenance to proactively address impending asset
degradation or failure.
– A platform with cognitive, descriptive, predictive and
prescriptive analytic tools, combined with visualization,
internet-of-things data integration and data lake
capabilities to effectively handle the big data needs
of the industry and provide a comprehensive view
of asset performance across the asset portfolio.
– An open approach for extensibility, customizability,
integration of exist­ing utility models and leverage of
open source analytic tools to comple­ment and extend
a provider’s existent information sources and skills.

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Page 4 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
Applications to meet needs of a changing industry An asset health score, expressed as a percentage (0
IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities’s out of the box utility industry to 100), signifies how well a specific asset will perform in the
applications apply a wide range of analytical capabilities to future. The asset health score can be calculated by summing
meet the needs of a rapidly changing industry in the areas of: weighted condition factors (and any sub-condition factors)
asset health and risk assessment, situational awareness of such as maintenance practices, utilization, environmental,
portfolio assets, predictive maintenance, connectivity model external stress and manufacturer. This permits ranking of
verification and wind farm performance optimization. individual assets, classes of assets or assets in a system
These applications are complemented by a broader based upon health scores.
application portfolio developed on the IBM IoT for Energy and The core of this analysis is a set of pre-built models
Utilities platform by the IBM ecosystem. Partner applications covering a wide range of critical transmission and distribution
address renewable energy forecasting, smart meter data assets. They include poles, cables, transformers and a growing
analytics, asset analytics, renewable integration analytics and list of other asset classes. For example, transformer health
asset investment optimization. models use load power, dissolved gas analysis (DGA) readings,
oil temperature and other performance data to calculate health
Application: Asset performance management scores. As part of IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities’s open
Understanding asset performance—past, present and approach, models can be customized to address unique needs
future—is a requisite for obtaining maximum asset value. of a provider or providers can incorporate models developed
Asset performance analytics provide historical and real-time by third parties. The models are open and published, allowing
assessment of critical assets. Aggregating relevant data the provider or its analytics partners to customize them
sources—structured and unstructured (SCADA, historians, according to unique requirements. See Figure 1.
MQTT, OPC, OSI, EAM, GIS, inspection and operation logs,
weather)—associated with asset performance and applying
pre-built asset models based upon industry standards
provides real-time assessment of asset performance.

Figure 1:
Easily assess health and performance
of individual assets via color coding

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Page 5 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
 Current and historic asset health scores are easily The failure calculation indicates the probability that a
accessed through dashboards that incorporate maps, lists, a single asset or a network will fail, as well as the consequential
risk matrix, filtered searches and reports. Asset performance criticality of the failure, for example, safety, environmental
analytics provides metrics that enable operations, maintenance impact, regulatory scrutiny, customer satisfaction, damage,
and even finance personnel to make well-informed decisions replacement cost or other consequences of the provider’s
regarding asset operations and investments, for example., choosing. Underlying criticality factors can also be weighted.
modify maintenance schedules, reevaluate spares inventory Risk analysis provides an additional metric for classifying
and locations, place an asset on their watch list, allocate and prioritizing assets in support of maintenance, upgrade,
funds for equipment replacement or upgrades or make replacement or other planning exercises.
revisions to network topology to accommodate changing IBM employs grid-aware linear analytics that use utility
workload demands. connectivity and conductivity records from GIS to traverse
the network from a given asset to evaluate the cascading
Application: Asset risk calculates potential impact effect of all upstream and downstream assets in the network.
of equipment performance on the grid Modeling of risk analysis and outage impact can be based
In addition to asset health, risk exposure analytics provide on factors such as customer criticality, revenue at risk, health,
information in context of grid operations by aggregating and environment, safety, regulatory requirements or impact to
analyzing asset performance data to calculate the probability corporate reputation. The calculations also include time
of asset failure and its potential impact (consequences) to series failure probability, cascading risk and contingency
the grid. Risk is defined as the probability of failure/outage analyses. Network risk can be one of multiple factors that are
multiplied by the consequence of the failure. then combined into a total consequence of failure score. Risk
information is immediately available by selecting an individual
asset on a map. See Figure 2 for more information.

Figure 2:
Oil Circuit Breakers: Risk calculation
provides a critical metric for determining
impact of asset operations on the grid.

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Page 6 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
 Asset risk analytics facilitate understanding and objectives and constraints. Various investment plans can
collaborative planningamong departments having direct or then be exported to Asset Investment Planning solutions for
indirect responsibility for risk mitigation. By reviewing accurate, network wide asset investment analysis guided by corporate
current asset risk information operations, maintenance, level investment constraints.
finance and regulatory personnel can prioritize projects and
investments based upon risk assessment in context of overall The investment plan allows operations personnel to use
grid operations. either risk-level (maintain a specified level of risk) or budget-
level (conform to a specified budget target) as the criterion for
Application: Asset investment scenarios developing the scenario. Thresholds for asset replacements can
IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities provides the means for be set, based upon failure probability. Number of years in the
providers to use asset performance and risk analyses in scenario are specified by the user. Multiple what-if scenarios
planning future asset replacements and investments. Through can be developed to investigate benefits and drawbacks of
various what-if scenarios operations personnel can determine each scenario. Refer to Figure 3.
the best investment plan possible according to the provider’s

Figure 3:
Easily develop asset investment
scenarios specific to the provider’s
objectives and constraints.

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Page 7 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
Application: Situational awareness— above. The reports also show detailed health trends; include
from individual asset to fleet view descriptive information such as asset ID, name, manufacturer,
IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities provides additional context installation date, location and age; provide maintenance
for understanding performance of an individual asset as history, as well as recommendations or prescriptions for
well as the network. Through aggregation and analysis of all asset work based upon asset performance calculations.
relevant asset and operational information IBM IoT for Energy Additional detailed equipment data includes the weighted
and Utilities is able to provide multiple views and details of underlying factors (root cause analysis) affecting asset health
assets within context of the operating environment. This and risk scores. In the event equipment is trending toward
situational awareness function enables personnel with direct failure an alert can be issued, accompanied by standard
responsibilities for asset operations and maintenance to operating procedures (workflows) to recommend appropriate
quickly assess conditions. Standard reports summarize asset standardized remedial action. FIG4
health, risk and consequence (of failure) scores as mentioned

Figure 4:
Oil Circuit Breakers: Asset details provide a
complete context—historical and current—
for understanding asset performance.

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Page 8 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
 Figure 5:
Assess overall network performance as
well as drill-down to investigate individual
asset performance.

Personnel can also assess a specific asset class or all percent—that utilizes AMI/smart meter data to identify which
asset classes in a geographic region or a combination of meters are connected to which electric phase and provide
asset class and region to advise maintenance or investment recommendations to help fix connectivity records without the
decisions. Multi-asset summary reports show average health, time and expense of sending crews into the field. IBM IoT for
risk and consequence scores for classes of assets. Users Energy and Utilities’s connectivity model analysis provides
may also use filters to view details of a specific location, class, reports on: connectivity overview and phase connectivity
type or individual asset to gain a more detailed and accurate errors of each asset (substations, laterals, transformers
understanding of overall asset performance and the underlying and meters); voltage and load errors between substation,
factors that influence performance. See Figure 5. transformers and meters; and meter connectivity, voltage
and load errors between transformers and meters. Corrected
Application: Connectivity model reduces verification costs meter to phase mapping records can then be exported
Maintaining accuracy of connectivity models can be costly if for synchronization with operational systems such as GIS.
done through manual (truck roll) verification methods. IBM IoT Additionally, work orders can be generated in enterprise
for Energy and Utilities employs a patented linear analytics asset management systems for additional verification tasks or
algorithm—with an accuracy greater than 90 additions to specific assets requiring further investigation. See
Figure 6.

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Page 9 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
 Figure 6:
Connectivity model employs analytics
to understand which customers are
connected to which electrical phase.

With the estimated expense of US$3,000 or more

Wind360 provides role based access to historical, current
per truck roll (in North America) for manual inspection and
and predictive insights for wind turbines and wind farms.
verification, the automated connectivity model verification
It provides situational awareness of wind farm assets using
method could result in considerable cost savings. Automated
historical and real-time data obtained from relevant operational
verification can also help: improve fault location, isolation
systems associated with wind farms. It can optionally
and service restoration, facilitate accurate analysis following
incorporate weather data through the IBM Weather Company®
system trouble, avoid redundant field operations and provide
to help optimize wind farm performance and assess turbine
customers greater detail regarding outage extent and
health and risk.
resolution. Correct models can also help accurately assess
Wind360 easily generates reports that provide overall and
loading and supporting new loads on existing infrastructure,
detailed analysis of wind farm performance based upon KPIs.
assess risk across the network, effectively balance loads,
The overall operation index of the wind farm is based on: power
confidently plan and execute outage responses and efficiently
production, turbine availability, wind power conversion rate and
deliver services over existing infrastructure.
turbine health. Power generation monitors power production
in MW, loss due to down time in MW and the total lost time
Application: Wind360 to optimize wind farm compared over a three week period. Monthly maintenance
operations and performance costs per turbine can be compared year over year. Utilization
The wind industry has grown exponentially over the last 10 hours show the power generated, loss time and utilization
years to become a very strong player in the global energy mix. hours during for a selected time period.
While past growth was based on affirmative climate change Wind360 monitors turbine performance metrics in real
actions supported by government subsidiaries globally, time including wind speed, blade angle, vibration, yaw speed,
high uncertainty in oil prices and strong community driven power AT, wind direction and other sensor data from SCADA,
initiatives, economics and not subsidies will decide its growth condition monitoring systems and field instrumentations. Pre-
as the industry matures. To be economically competitive, the build analytic models provide performance reports on: power
wind industry needs to embrace digital technologies. generation, utilization hours, turbine overall operating index,
turbine power curve and other vital key performance indicators.
To meet the unique requirements of an operator Wind 360
provides development tool sets to create new analytics and
optimization models along with extensions of the pre-defined
models in the system.

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Page 10 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
 Individual turbine information is also available with Constraint-based optimization of maintenance
Wind360. Turbine details—type, identification number, recommendations based on lowest production cost, resource
installation date and location are easily accessed. The overall work balance or a stable production strategy is available
turbine operation index is developed from four dimensions: in Wind360. What-if analysis capabilities can calculate
power production, turbine availability, wind power convention estimated production loss and help determine the maintenance
rate and turbine health. The power curve calculation compares schedules and procedures that have the least impact on
actual power to the potential power curve. Significant curve production. Based upon these recommendations maintenance
differences indicate suboptimal operation. Turbine utilization personnel can then generate work orders. Constraint-based
hours are also reported. Turbine health is calculated on health optimization can help providers invested in renewables to
and failure risk and asset details for the major components: readily gain an understanding of windfarm efficiency and
blades, generator and transformer. Real-time turbine data utilize operational data for continual performance improvement.
includes active power and operational status. Real-time See Figure 8.
performance monitoring includes wind speed, blade angles,
turbine speed, vibration-x, vibration-y, wind direction, yaw
speed and yaw wind direction. See Figure 7.

Figure 7:
Monitor health, risk and real-time
performance of individual wind turbines.

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Page 11 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
 Figure 8:
Use production and resource constraints
to optimize maintenance schedules.

A platform for energy and utility analytics Platform: Data integration for a comprehensive
IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities is built on a foundation of: view of asset and network performance
data integration to capture and aggregate all relevant sources IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities is designed to capture,
of information required to run the most advanced analytics aggregate, analyze and manage a wide range of data pertinent
across a wide variety of use cases; data lake capabilities to energy and utility operations. IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
to effectively handle the big data and analytic needs of the supports a broad range of integration protocols, data formats
industry; strong analytical capabilities providing cognitive, and incorporates data routing, transformation, filtering and
descriptive, predictive and prescriptive analytic tools to help enriching. IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities has interfaces into
optimize asset utilization and inform investment planning; and PI servers and Open Platform Communication (OPC) servers
visualization to present information in a meaningful way to lines and the IBM Watson IoT Platform and also supports the
of business responsible for asset operations, maintenance, MQTT connectivity protocol for the Internet of Things. These
reliability and investments to provide a comprehensive view combined capabilities enable a provider to effectively gather
of performance across the asset portfolio. and manage ALL relevant information associated with assets
and provide a comprehensive view of asset performance
across the portfolio.

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Page 12 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities is also integrated with Platform: Data lake supports big data
IBM’s Maximo enterprise asset management solution and and analytic needs of the industry
it can integrate the same way with many other enterprise Data lakes are increasingly being implemented by utilities to
asset management systems. Maximo provides historic and help reduce costs, increase flexibility in terms of both usage
current asset conditions, costs and repair and replacement and storage mechanisms, integrate data and govern data
data as inputs to predictive maintenance, heath assessment generated by assets. A data lake can compile a variety of
and planning optimization analysis. Maximo also provides data forms from various sources and deliver clean, curated
maintenance planning schedules (including assets, work and managed data refined from raw sources to the deployed
crews, inventory and costs) to IBM IoT for Energy and analytics. IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities data lake elements
Utilities for situational awareness, impact analysis, planning include open source technologies like Apache Hadoop,
and forecasting analysis. In return IBM IoT for Energy and providing customers the flexibility to tailor the data lake to their
Utilities provides failure prediction probabilities to Maximo own requirements, including capture of raw data with Apache
for maintenance planning and can initiate work orders with Hadoop and user-defined structured data stores using IBM
detailed recommended remedial actions based upon the DB2®. These work with a wide range of integration tools, from
asset health and risk analysis done by IBM IoT for Energy IBM and third party data management tools. They also work
and Utilities. See Figure 9. with industry data models such as IBM Data Model for E&U
(DMEU) to govern the analytic data feed, provide a warehouse
schema for interactive query applications and enable a singular
view of enterprise data.

Substation Transformer: ST_38614 Work Order History

Work Order # Description Completion Date Job Job Plan Description
Plan #
1358 Transfomer maintenance and inspection 07/19/02 SUB001 Corrective for Substation
1366 Transfomer maintenance and inspection 07/22/07 SUB001 Corrective for Substation
1367 Transformer inspection due to alarm 01/19/16 SUB002 Corrective for Substation
1368 Planned maintenance and inspection 05/16/16 SUB001 Corrective for Substation
1369 Inspect for oil condition 07/21/16 SUB001 Corrective for Substation

Figure 9:
Access to work orders provides useful
information for understanding maintenance
history and insights into asset condition.

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Page 13 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
Platform: Descriptive, predictive, prescriptive – Predict potential asset degradation or failure using
and cognitive analytics industry models developed specifically for critical assets.
The utility industry is one of the more advanced in terms Carefully evaluate equipment performance to calculate
of asset instrumen­tation and connectivity and as a result asset health and risk scores as well as predicted time to
significant volumes of detailed operational data can be failure if there is evidence of performance degradation. See
captured, aggregated and analyzed. Analytics are core Figure 10.
capabilities of IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities and are – Prescribe the appropriate maintenance procedures
embedded throughout the offering to provide accurate, and determine optimum maintenance schedules for
relevant and detailed information in context to support and individual or classes of assets. Identify components or
advise critical decisions of operations, maintenance, regulatory, parts most likely to fail based upon based upon current
field service, planning, reliability and investments. In IBM IoT for asset health, maintenance records contained in enterprise
Energy and Utilities analytics are used to: asset management systems such as IBM Maximo® and
– Describe past and current asset performance, as operational factors influencing asset performance. See
mentioned above in the examples of displaying historical Figure 11.
asset performance trends, identify underlying factors, such – Cognitive to analyze volumes of unstructured historical,
as sensor data or list recent inspections or procedures operational and technical information associated with
performed on a specific asset or class of assets. utility infrastructure, discover insights hidden within these
massive archives and apply them to improve human and
machine expertise that enables better decision-making
and improves operational performance.

Figure 10:
End of Life Degradation Curve for
an Oil Circuit Breaker

Treatment Options

Time Scenarios Programs SL Extension (years) SL Improvement (%) Cost

Deteriorate Transformer inspect & maintain 0 0 4,000

2017
Improve Transformer replace 50 100 800,000
Maintain Transformer overhaul 7 65 100,000

Figure 11:
Analysis of historic and current data yields
appropriate recommendations and options
for maintaining assets.

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Page 14 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
Platform: Weather data to optimize asset performance
and maintenance scheduling
Weather plays an important factor in utility operations.
The addition of detailed weather data can further help utilities
optimize asset performance, maintenance schedules and
investments. Through IBM’s acquisition of The Weather
Company a provider can utilize historical weather data to
understand long-term weather trends that may influence asset
performance depending upon the type of asset, location
and variations in weather conditions it is subjected to. Short-
term (10 day) forecasts can be used to schedule optimum
maintenance windows, improve the accuracy of predicted
outages and their impact and prepare or stage resources in
anticipation of outages.
Figure 12:
Current condition weather data includes the highest Ten day forecasts and
resolution weather observation network that is available in the historical weather data
field. Government issued weather sensors (METAR and SYNOP) provide an added analytic
dimension to help plan
are augmented by 125,000+ proprietary neighborhood weather
operations, maintenance
stations. This granularity provides operations personnel added and response to possible
context for understanding individual asset performance or outages.
responding to immediate maintenance requests.
Historical weather data can be analyzed to assess short
and long-term trends, type, severity and frequency of events
characteristic of specific geographies and their potential
impact on operations and investment planning. See Figure 12.

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Page 15 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
Open and extensible IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities capabilities can be further
IBM has a long been involved in the Open Source Software extended through applications from IBM partners and IBM
community. Highly capable Open Source Software addresses Global Business Services, thereby increasing the value of
a broad range of needs in many industries. IBM IoT for Energy investment in IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities. Complementary
and Utilities includes a number of Open Source Software products and solutions from partners and IBM address
components: Apache Hadoop to enable data lake functionality needs such as: asset investment planning, outage prediction
required for large data volumes, Apache Spark for advanced and response optimization, power quality management, grid
analytics, OpenLayers for geographic information systems monitoring, load forecasting, transmission and feeder sizing,
integration and programming support for common JavaScript™ power quality, energy storage and aerial imaging.
frameworks such as Dojo, Angularis, Data Driven Documents
(D3), JQuery and ECharts, R, Scala and Python.
With the focus on the energy and utilities industry IBM
IoT for Energy and Utilities also supports the IEC Common
Information Model (CIM) standards such as IEC 61970,
IEC 61968 which are supported in the IBM Data Model for
Energy and Utilities (DMEU). DMEU provides pre-defined
data structures designed to address the definition of both
traditional data warehouses, dimensional data marts, as well
as support for common unstructured data like social media
and communications. Data structures and types include: asset
outage history, asset monitoring data, asset maintenance
records, asset financial optimization for CAPEX/OPEX, outage
analytics, weather related analytics, work management budget
and forecasting, distributed generation and net metering.
With DMEU as the foundation IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
provides fundamental capabilities for modelling the information
and asset relationships and allows for development of new
models based on a utility’s own data.

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Page 16 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
Designed for line of business Schedulers and planners gain the ability to optimize
IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities provides an environment scheduling of planned outages, equipment upgrades and
that allows multiple lines of business to access, analyze and supporting resources through analysis and prioritization of
collaborate on information to enable fact-based decisions repair criticality, estimated costs and even identification of
built from the bottom-up based on all the available information best window(s) of opportunity based upon analysis of historic
relevant to the asset portfolio and its operations. IBM IoT for weather patterns and near-term forecasts.
Energy and Utilities provides an auditable, repeatable Through analysis and identification of factors—
and demonstrable methodology for analysis of detailed endogenous or exogenous—that contribute to equipment
historical operational data obtained from a wide range of degradation or failure, reliability engineers can develop
relevant resources to help providers successfully contend with strategies, policies and procedures that ameliorate those
industry disruptions engendered by supply substitutions, third problems to promote better asset utilization as they contend
party aggregators, regulatory constraints and aging assets. with changing load and flow patterns. Dashboards and
IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities can offer guidance for reports provide overall as well as highly detailed equipment
better management of critical assets and also provide accurate, performance assessments—historical and real-time—of grid,
detailed, substantive information that can be used to justify regional, connected and individual assets to help determine
recommendations in support of CAPEX/OPEX investment where and when resources should be deployed to ensure power
prioritizations, rate case submissions and regulatory reporting. quality within agreed ranges and efficient energy delivery.
Because data is easily accessed and the analytics processes Through remote asset/device monitoring and IBM IoT for
are repeatable and auditable, providers can develop reports Energy and Utilities-cycle management for field assets and
with defensible details that offer a rationale for specific smart devices, as well as integration with grid operations and
investments to replace, upgrade or expand equipment or enterprise asset management systems operations can gain an
infrastructure and provide quantitative evidence as part of immediate understanding of overall network/grid performance,
a rate case submission or respond to increasing regulatory health and risks be equipped to anticipate and react to reverse
reporting requirements. power flows. IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities enables a user
Asset health and risk calculations, predictive capabilities to drill down to assess regional health, individual asset health
and integration with enterprise asset management systems like and connectivity—upstream and downstream—and use this
IBM Maximo help maintenance/field service, who must reliably real-time information to help automate outage processes from
deliver power on an aging and increasingly stressed distribution detection through resolution, enabling information access for
grid, proactively respond to impending equipment degradation improved business and operations intelligence.
or failure with a detailed and accurate understanding of
maintenance history, reasons for the current problem,
recommended actions to remedy the problem and the ability
to prioritize maintenance schedules and resources based upon
risk, failure probability and consequence of failure calculations.

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Page 17 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
Leadership in energy and utilities Data, analytics and open platform support
IBM has extensive experience in the energy and utilities
fact-based decisions
IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities is unique in its ability to support
industry. IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities’s underlying
bottom-up fact-based decision making that utilities need to
data integration and analytics capabilities are built upon
successfully contend with disruptions to business models,
IBM’s recognized industry leadership, exemplified by the
revenue streams and regulatory relationships. Its uniqueness
development of the IBM Data Model for Energy and Utilities.
is rooted in three key capabilities—integration, open approach
From an asset management perspective, IBM utility clients who
and data roll-up—each underscored by IBM experience gained
use Maximo hold a biannual working group conference, hosted
over the course of decades in providing solutions for energy
by North American providers and regularly attracting more
and utility providers.
than 400 participants, including international providers. IBM
IBM’s expertise and experience in data management—
IoT for Energy and Utilities can also be integrated with other
including acquisition, quality, modelling, integration, storage,
leading enterprise asset management systems.
governance and security—are applied to enable IBM IoT for
IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities is ranked as a leader in the
Energy and Utilities to integrate data from all relevant sources,
Navigant Research Leaderboard Report: Asset Performance
including enterprise and external data sources. Decisions
Management. Navigant defines asset performance
made with incomplete or inaccurate data will
management (APM) as an emerging field of technologies
always be suboptimal. Integration of all relevant data provides
and strategies that aims to improve and optimize asset
as complete a context as possible to allow lines of business to
management by centralizing asset information in a way that
access, analyze and act in regard to operational, financial or
it can be usefully analyzed. The report surveys 10 vendors of
regulatory decisions.
asset performance management solutions for utilities.
IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities’s open approach further
IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities exploits this industry
extends the use and applicability of the solution to meet the
experience, innovative research and continued collaboration
changing industry needs and support a wide range of data
with clients to deliver a core set of capabilities and building
models relevant to the industry. Providers are not limited to the
blocks for new analytics applications, available from the cloud
out-of-the-box data models. Building on IBM’s long-standing
or on-premise to help improve asset utilization, optimize
involvement in open source software, the extensibility of
network availability and decrease loss of service.
its data models enables support for all equipment classes
by allowing development of new or revised models and
incorporating third-party models and utility-owned models.

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Page 18 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities provides a holistic and
as well as granular understanding of assets by rolling up data
across sources to support financial and regulatory processes
spanning multiple lines of business. Incorporating as much
relevant asset data (historical and current) as possible—
maintenance records, operational performance, environmental,
financial and regulatory—allows lines of business to access
and analyze assets in context of their unique business
responsibilities and collaborate across departments to
effectively respond to market disruptions and regulatory
demands and contend with financial constraints.
Operations gain insight into individual and aggregate
performance with the goal of improving reliability and
availability. Utilities can now more efficiently prioritize repair
and replacement schedules to minimize impact on downtime
and extend asset IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities. Operational
and maintenance needs drive near- and long-term asset and
supplier selection coordinated by procurement and finance.
None of these groups works independently. Accessibility and
sharing of asset data across the organization enables
the lines of business to coordinate analysis, planning and
execution in context of financial goals and regulatory
constraints to continually improve overall performance.

ibm.com/us-en/marketplace/energy-analytics

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Page 19 IBM IoT for Energy and Utilities
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