North American Executive Issue 101 2024 | Page 18

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The green initiative remains front of mind
Sustainability is a main concern for energy organizations . As it stands , emissions from the power sector alone must fall 57 percent this decade and a further 89 percent by 2040 to stay on course for reaching net-zero . The sector is under significant pressure to make greener choices and an unrelenting focus will fall on network visibility , reporting , performance and an ambitious environmental , social and governance ( ESG ) criteria . Encouragingly , recent studies have shown that by 2040 , 80 percent of electric , gas and water companies will have implemented sustainable business models by accelerating digital transformations and rearchitecting the core business .
Now , the spotlight is on renewable generation , particularly solar , wind and hydrogen to form a greener energy mix . Technology can help make the renewable transition possible - but as local generation and demand for sustainable power rises , so do complexities around distributed energy resources and the need to manage a fragmented and diverse grid .
Excellent customer service is not enough – managing TCO is essential to success
EUR organizations have to keep the Total Cost of Ownership ( TCO ) to a minimum and Return on Investment at a high to remain competitive . As EUR businesses revolve around assets , projects , maintenance and service , flexibility will be key . Cloud platforms can provide versatile , native enterprise asset management ( EAM ), field service management ( FSM ), mobile workforce management ( MWM ) and enterprise resource planning ( ERP ) solutions , which will all contribute to ensuring TCO is kept to a minimum , while delivering on great moments of service . The same IFS research found over a third of energy organizations consider asset management strategies to be among the digital transformation outcomes that will have the largest impact on the company 27 percent want to improve asset reliability and a further 24 percent are keen to improve resource utilization . For energy organizations , a full and complete understanding of their asset position helps check for condition updates and expose harmful trends such as performance degradation .
For over half of EUR companies data analytics is an important or very important emerging technology for future digital transformation strategies . For example , automated monitoring and reporting can analyze smaller outages and frequent microevents to indicate early warning signals of major weather issues . Areas deemed high risk , such as locations with extreme heat , can leave ground powerlines prone to wildfires , so may benefit from financial modeling - software can estimate the TCO based on maintaining existing infrastructure or replacing with buried linear assets .
Always-on essential for EUR companies
Cloud-based solutions can also be scaled and flexed rapidly to meet changing business needs and increasingly energy organizations are using technology to realize internal greater efficiencies . According to an IDC report , organizations can see an increase in productivity by at least 18 percent by adopting modern infrastructure to manage assets , field service activities , and resource planning .
Reliability and performance must be kept at the heart of energy operations to provide firstclass customer experiences - asset downtime won ’ t fare well with today ’ s increasingly demanding consumer base . Monitor IoT and predictive asset maintenance can help EUR organizations track anomalies and potential asset faults before they become an issue . To achieve a truly customer-focussed service , organizations will need to harness the benefits
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