April Anderson is President of Twinify Technologies.
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In the dynamic realm of energy production, sustainability, efficiency and reliability are key to profitability. Operational insights play a crucial role in the management of energy-producing assets.
Digital transformation tools like digital twins help businesses improve performance and energy production by running physical production models in a safe virtual environment. The emerging technology provides an effective way to help drive growth, sharpen operations and maximize your competitive edge. If you’re looking into a digital transformation of your energy-producing fleet, here are five must-have traits your digital twin tool should be able to deliver.
1. Detailed Performance Data
Having accurate, transparent data available allows you to perform in-depth analyses of your facility’s operation and maximize the value of your energy-producing assets. By continually tracking operating data and performing historical and peer analyses, you get real-time performance benchmarks accounting for variabilities like weather or demand. These detailed insights into energy production, efficiency and technology help you identify areas for improvement and implement best practices that can improve your competitiveness.
2. The Ability To Monitor
The age-old idea that what you don’t know can hurt you is more relevant than ever: Simply put, not having access to—and appropriate insight into—your data can cost time and money. Having the ability to monitor and apply machine learning gives you an early warning system that something is likely to fail. With full visibility into the performance and condition of assets, issues can be diagnosed early and addressed quickly. The result is more reliable infrastructure that meets reliability goals.
3. Strategy
With a precise digital representation established, energy companies should consider leveraging any digital twin tool to simulate and compare various maintenance, operational and upgrade scenarios on their assets. By evaluating contingencies and long-term plans in a risk-free virtual environment, you can determine a path that balances sustainability, reliability and cost. Accurate information on the value of assets—and the resources needed to execute plans—allows digital twins to help get more mileage out of current assets and facilitate fast adaptation to change.
4. Risk
Managing risk means gaining insights so that you're aware of potential incidents before they happen and can act accordingly, assessing acceptable risk exposure and prioritizing maintenance activities based on remaining life projections and uncertainties in externalities like forward demand. Asset risk management prioritizes investments and addresses challenges like asset aging, maximizing the overall wealth and health of the organization.
5. Business Management
Plan versus actual analysis is mission-critical for aiming business management in the right direction and is well within the ability of a digital twin that incorporates the above components. It’s one thing to have a plan in place, but how do the results compare to the plan? Did a capital improvement deliver on its promise? Is operations veering off design? A model that builds on performance calculations and forward simulations can define your historical and future financial picture. Your KPI (key performance indicator) reporting will improve, and the people responsible for the figures will thank you for making this a priority. More accurate forecasting begets better planning and results in happier investors.
Alongside these traits, any system your company evaluates should integrate seamlessly into your existing software system. Otherwise, you risk losing access to one of your most valuable assets: your existing data. On the subject of data, data transparency, data cleansing and data integrity are key—the cleaner, more accurate and more visible the data a digital twin uses, the more accurate its predictions and better its ability to provide insights that allow effective risk management.
These are the five insights I consider mission-critical. Companies that harness these insights can navigate the complex, competitive landscape more effectively, helping ensure sustainable, efficient and more profitable operations.
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