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 focussed 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, with 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 a start-up, let alone new entrant to the energy market, SIMEC Energy Australia wanted to implement a sustainable data and analytics capability to support their growth, by bringing together the sudden growth of critical datasets from core business operations, market, and external systems.
Most start-ups are focused on getting things done. In the utilities space, start-ups are focused on growing their customer base, growing their generation portfolio, striving to optimise their position while being held accountable by the marker in which they operate. And even though data is at the core of utilities, it can easily be forgotten in the pursuit of rapid growth.
Like many similar start-ups SEA are experts in their industry, but lacked the specific expertise of working with technology and data that was needed to support their rapid transition from start-up to growth. And they understood that they would soon outgrow the accessible tools they had to win, bill, hedge and settle.
Our Solution
Our mission at Ignite is to put data at the heart of improving the organisations we work in and communities we live in. So, when we were approached by SEA, a new company in the renewable energy scene whose values strongly aligned with our own, we knew this was something worth pursuing. We put skin in the game early to get SEA started on their data and analytics journey and continue to partner for future success.
From the outset the combined team has played to its strengths – SEA is focussed on being the partner of choice in renewables, Ignite is focused on being the partner of choice in data and analytics. This gave SEA flexible access to a multi-skilled team of architects, data scientists, data engineers, BI developers and delivery leadership.
In combination the combined team has leveraged the best of agile delivery which can be essential for a start-up where you need to react and adapt quickly to changing business drivers. However, with sustainability in mind, we’ve kept a constant focus on long term quality whilst meeting immediate needs.
“For a small electricity retailer, just a one percent improvement in load forecast accuracy, with subsequent better hedging, can reduce portfolio hedging costs by many hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
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
Results
By combining the utility expertise of SEA with the domain expertise of Ignite, together we have been able to establish a sustainable data and analytics solution leveraging Microsoft Azure, Databricks and PowerBI.
The platform was also built to handle growing and new data sources, the ability to handle new data types, the ability to empower a growing team – all in a scalable and secure manner.
Ignite went from vendor selection, to blueprint, to production within two and a half months to deliver a platform that enabled the immediate needs of SEA and has continued to grow as the priorities have changed, enabling capability such as:
- Streamlining retail operations: The SEA retail team have taken a data driven approach to operations. Starting by handling robust and timely meter data along with the associated tariffs to correctly bill customers, they have gone on to ensure the integrity of billing and retail processes, and ultimately reducing unbilled customers by 98%.
- Having a finger on the pulse: The earnings report brings together data from across the business to provide executive visibility on a daily basis.
- Sharpening a view of the future: SEA analysts have combined the available Databricks and PowerBI capability with weather and meter data to improve load forecasting scenarios and thereby informing risk profiles to enable efficient and effective financial risk hedging.
- Real time visibility of position: An extremely powerful capability to monitor position at 30-minute intervals. Unlocking key insights to help make decisions – in particular during peak summer periods.
The platform was designed with scalability and ease of use in mind and will continue to grow and evolve to fit the ever-changing needs of SEA. By removing the complexity behind the numerous different data sources the platform allows the SEA team to focus on competitive insights and process improvements rather than worrying about how to collect, transform and store the data.
Where to next?
Rapidly growing start-ups should take stock of whether their data systems and processes can scale. For many it will be the bridge between start-up and sustained growth. In particular, utilities can learn valuable lessons from the foresight shown by SEA – you can get on top of the data inputs from across the value chain both quickly and iteratively, without sacrificing longer term goals.
Technologies
- Microsoft Azure
- Power BI
Related Client Stories
We believe the best results come when data enables people.
Build data products to realise repeatable and sustainable business value from data.
Ignite implement an integrated data platform that enables the core building blocks for your use cases. Our Data Platform Build Service delivers:
- Implementation of your systems, components, and environments design
- Integration with your other core applications
- Security design including role design and AD integration
- Data modelling, and development, standards and guidelines
- Core ingestion and data transformation services
- Code and release management
- Test strategy, test scripts and documentation
- Deployed interfaces and base data models for critical datasets
- As-built solution documentation and component configuration
- Ongoing operations guide and operations team upskilling
- People change management plan