InfoSphere Streams for Smarter Utilities

The energy production and delivery industry is rapidly moving towards placing many more smart sensors, and meters, along the production, transmission and distribution systems to get granular real time data about the current state of faults and load. Overall this is known as the Smart Grid. Additionally, there is a growing trend towards "digital plants" with numerous sensors instrumenting them and making real time decisions. Powerful analytics on this data, when combined with other sources such as Outage and Distribution Management Systems (OMS/DMS), weather data, 3rd-party event monitoring systems, Meter Data Management Systems (MDMS) can help utilities take necessary actions to avoid electric grid failures that could cause outages, to improve security and to optimize capacity and redundancy These investments also can help empower their consumers by providing them with near real-time information about their energy usage patterns and engage in demand-response and other conservation measures, as well as time-of-use and real-time pricing. A smarter grid is also more amenable to integrated renewable energy sources.

There are a number of Streams use cases emerging within the area of Intelligent Grid / Smart Grid:

Outage Detection and Prediction: Streams can be highly effective in monitoring grid/plant elements and networks that produce massive amounts of sensor data. Streams based analytics can rapidly predict and analyze data to help detect grid/plant outages.
Load Shedding: Streams can help monitor and run powerful real time analytics on continuous deluge of data from smart meters and sensors. This data in conjunction with historic performance and right kind of algorithms can not only help with load forecasting anomalies but also prescribe relevant demand-response actions.
Condition Based Maintenance: Based on analytics on continuous streams of sensor data, Info Sphere Streams can operationalize Condition Based Maintenance (CBM) by identifying assets that are likely to fail in the near term, or require maintenance or operational changes to keep assets from failure. Action can then be taken to preemptively control or repair the equipment.
Smarter Analytics: Info Sphere Streams enables utility companies to run extremely powerful analytics that take both structured real time data from smart meters and well as unstructured data like satellite imagery feeds, weather forecasts, PMUs for a variety of uses such as price fluctuation forecasting, energy trading insights etc.