Overview
SIMEC Energy Australia (SEA) is a member of the GFG Alliance, an international group of industrial, mining and energy businesses working together to create a sustainable future for industry and society. SEA’s purpose is to build a renewable energy focused business, delivering low-cost energy, at the lowest emissions and within a sustainable risk framework for the GFG Alliance in Australia.
With a sound renewable energy development and contracting pipeline and a dedicated team of specialists, SEA delivers value across the energy spectrum for the GFG Alliance’s assets that meets today’s needs and GFG’s vision for GREENSTEEL and carbon neutrality by 2030.
The Challenge
As strategic energy managers of the GFG Alliance’s energy needs, SEA manages a complex energy portfolio servicing diverse demands from different assets across Australia. These include steel manufacturing facilities, coal, and iron ore mining.
SEA is a direct wholesale market customer within the National Electricity Market. Their load is north of 2.5 TWh/annum of electricity and 8.5 PJ/annum of gas, similar to an energy retailer.
Through becoming a data-centric business, SEA could transition from a static to a dynamic load management model, adding significant value to their business.
Our Solution
Ignite worked with the SEA team to develop a solution and provide a virtual data analytics team to support the focused SEA’s Energy team. Through accessing and co-ordinating complex data sets from AEMO and SEA’s client assets, Ignite provides SEA with a close to real-time understanding of their energy position.
Through user friendly data visualisation tools (built in Power BI), the Ignite team are working with the SEA team to enable operators across GFG assets to understand their energy load and inform energy management decisions.
Let us manage and scale your platform, ensuring its reliability, its adoption by end users, and enabling you to grow your business. Ignite’s Platform Manage and Grow Service delivers
- Data monitoring
- Incident management
- Quality management
- Ongoing continuous improvement
- Backlog management
- Usage and adoption tracking
- Platform health reporting
- Platform cost reporting
- New asset build
- Backup specialists on demand
The Results
- Speed to implementation – Using a Microsoft Azure platform, that was established in 8 weeks, has enabled the most remote site to access data in an easy-to-use interface.
- The initial platform build paid for itself in just 1.5 months. Almost immediately, the SIMEC team had already identified $200k of erroneous charges through the system.
- Improved efficiencies – through outsourcing data analytics capabilities, SIMEC Energy can optimise outputs and access Ignite’s expert advice and support without the cost of creating these skills in house.
- Improved insight – SEA will be able to communicate, in near real time, to their sites, to inform energy usage optimisation and understanding of energy market interactions.
- Improved prediction – SEA’s Strategic Energy Management team can inform the business in near real time of their financial position and enable informed business decisions.
Where to next?
Ignite are currently collaborating with SEA analysts to customise dashboards in an ongoing cycle of development, constantly adding value and capability to the existing solution.
Together with Ignite, The SEA team is now working on bringing gas data into their database, so that they can manage their gas portfolio in a similar manner, making similar gains. This will be the first solution of its type in Australia. Watch this space…
Technologies
- Microsoft Azure
- Power BI
