Overview
Energy Queensland is the group of electricity distribution, retail, and energy services businesses owned by the state of Queensland. They deliver electricity across Queensland through their ‘poles and wires’ businesses Energex and Ergon Energy Network. Their retailer, Ergon Energy Retail, sells this electricity to customers throughout regional Queensland.
These essential service activities are also supported by a range of innovative products and services delivered through their Yurika brand.
Energy Queensland Limited is a 100% Government Owned Corporation, reporting to the Queensland Government. Their shareholding Ministers are the Treasurer and Minister for Investment and the Minister for Energy, Renewables and Hydrogen and Minister for Public Works and Procurement on behalf of the Queensland community.
The Challenge
Energy Queensland is implementing a strategic new data science strategy and has the enviable opportunity to build and design the platform from scratch. Their Corporate Business Plan outlines a goal to embed a ‘Big Data’ capability to address immediate needs in forecasting, enterprise analytics and pricing and grow into an organic enterprise platform that transforms the way that Energy Queensland uses data in their business.
The Proof of Value phase was the first phase, providing a learning experience for ingesting and processing large volumes of mixed granularity 15- and 30-minute interval reading data with forethought to the future planned introduction of 5-minute intervals. Essentially proving the value of adopting a big data capability for meter data analytics.
The Solution
The Proof of Value met three specific success criteria to be successful:
- Prove that the proposed solution was able to aggregate 9 years’ worth of historical meter data and could scale for future, and more granular, meter data.
- Prove the ability to solve critical business challenges including strategic forecasting, structured reporting, and pricing capabilities.
- Prove that a Databricks solution on AWS would align to the existing intelligence strategy by enhancing the current Enterprise Intelligent Platform investment in SAP.
Prove the potential value in data science ideas.
To help build sponsor confidence in your data science use cases, Ignite’s Proof of Value delivers:
- The data science opportunity defined in commercial term
- Data profiling and assessment
- All Data Science models created
- Prototypes to bring the idea to life for users
- Product delivery plan
- Business case ready for sharing with sponsors
“Most important was finding a partner that aligned to our approach and mindset of the problem. We didn’t want to just get someone to put something together for us.”
The Results
Ignite’s engagement model and the way that they worked with the Energy Queensland team was paramount. There was a real spirit of partnership, from the get-go. An understanding that it was a journey. The results? A robust plan for a Databricks on AWS platform that would deliver all the key requirements of the project. The proof of value phase demonstrated that all the requirements could be met.
4 Streams of work | 38 different stakeholders engaged | 4.5 Weeks to deliver live platform
In 4.5 weeks the team:
- Loaded 9 years of meter data
- Made available 36 billion interval reads for query
- Processed 36 thousand NEM 12 files
- Mapped 380 thousand NMIs to standing data
Resulting in 3 successful use cases for:
- Strategic Forecasting
- Structured Reporting
- Network Pricing
Where to Next?
Implementation.
Technologies
- python
- aws
- databricks
