The Frontier of Energy Analytics: Performance is Key
August 3, 2022
The energy industry has up until recently been judged as slow to adopt new technology and cautious to make change, but not any longer. The pace of change is now accelerating, driven by both the uncertainty created by unforeseen global events and useful technological innovation. Over the next few years, cQuant.io will be leading the effort to leverage this new technology to bound and tame these new dynamics.
With these constant market changes, the world of energy analytics is finally evolving. Cloud native deployments, modeling transition to capture modern energy dynamics, and purpose-built platforms are here now, and their power is barely tapped. Specifically, as an Energy Analytics Platform (EAP), cQuant.io has seen first-hand the changes happening and is a software constantly progressing to meet the industry needs.
In this three-part series, we will share with you what we see as the forefront of energy analytics and the role cQuant is playing in bringing these analytical capabilities to the industry.
Part One: Faster, Better, Smarter – Performance is Key
The combination of more diverse portfolios and extraordinary volatility, has led to analytics being more heavily relied upon, providing early warning of potential calamity, identifying hidden opportunity, and restoring some degree of predictability for energy organizations. The critical unspoken fact is that in most cases, analytics only help if the insight is delivered prior to the time the action needs to be taken. Said differently, energy analytics provide value when they execute at the speed of business. The days of overnight and even “run and review later” analytics no longer work. Analysts need to be able to run models, simulate options, and interpret results as they work. To get here, cQuant believes the eventual solution will include several advancements.
- Speed to Result
- Quality of Insight
- Purpose Designed Platforms
Portfolio management is a complex process: analyze, understand, optimize, report, act, and repeat. Today, with ever increasing size and diversity of energy portfolios coupled with market volatility, most traditional solutions are rendered inadequate.
The ideal solution is real time simulation results throughout the day. While the delivery of real-time simulation analytics is not here today, it is getting closer. Cloud servers that can be scaled up & down and algorithms that can be parallelized and run through many servers provides the foundation. But just more processing power is not the answer. In most cases the end result is simply more data and sifting through that data to find insight still takes too long.
New algorithms and fresh approaches will shorten the time to insight and action. Identifying potential answers possibly lost in the terabytes of data is important. We will dive in deeper to the distinction between description and prescriptive analytics in this series but for now, we believe that smart analytics offer more than oceans of data.
Additionally, expecting a single monolithic platform to perform trading, analytics and scheduling is an unrealistic reality because there isn’t one solution that can do it all exceptionally. The answer is leveraging horizontal integration combining best of breed platforms that excel in their purpose-built role. In focusing on identifying the best solution for each organizational need and then integrating these platforms (often through a data lake) leads to quicker implementations, leading edge capabilities, and more optionality as industry dynamics evolve.
In energy analytics, “faster” goes beyond the implementation timeline and support response. Both are extremely important and should be a given in the modern tech stack. Rather, the industry needs significantly faster solutions for simulations. Running a total portfolio simulation needs to happen in minutes not hours or days, which is typical of traditional solutions. Additionally, energy companies need the flexibility to simulate portfolio decisions through multiple time horizons. In the past, 5 days and 5 years were adequate (and they still are important). However, today’s energy companies need portfolio modeling and simulation to perform at the pace of business. Real time portfolio insights in addition to medium and long-term insights is a necessity and for solutions to stay relevant, they need to find a way to offer this data.
cQuant.io offers the highest performance cloud native solution in the industry and specializes in providing you with an analysis of your entire energy portfolio. Beyond analysis of your portfolio, cQuant has partnered with exceptional technologies that you can seamlessly integrate with for all your energy-specific needs.
To learn more about cQuant and our trusted partners, click here to start a conversation with us.
About cQuant.io
cQuant.io is an industry leader in analytic solutions for energy and commodity companies. Specializing in Total Portfolio Analysis, cQuant’s cloud-native platform enables physical asset, financial contract, market simulation and risk management analytics in one place. cQuant is the leader in analytics for renewable, storage and other clean energy technologies. cQuant’s customers have greater insight into their financial forecasts and the drivers of value and risk in their business.