As fossil fuels such as petroleum and coal are depleting, there is an urgent need for sustainable alternative energy resources like wind, solar, and wave power.
Some power companies are already making the move. According to the International Energy Agency forecast, renewable electricity capacity is expected to increase by 43% throughout the time period of 2017 – 2022.
However, merely harvesting energy from sustainable sources is not enough. Energy providers will face immediate challenges related to maintaining the new installations. Moreover, there is a need to seamlessly integrate the power generated by renewable sources with more stable conventional energy to guarantee an uninterrupted supply.
This is where IoT comes into the picture. Modern IoT solutions in the energy sector will not only resolve the challenges mentioned above, they will improve customer experience, help forecast demand, enable smart grid construction, and assist engineers in remote tear detection. It is not surprising that the global IoT in energy market is expected to grow from $20.2 billion in 2020 to $35.2 billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 11.8%.
Benefits IoT Brings to Renewable Energy Initiatives
The Internet of Things in the energy sector acts as an enabler of efficient renewable energy generation and distribution. It saves time and human labor on asset monitoring, and helps avoid hazards by detecting structural damage before the situation escalates. Additionally, it improves customer experience by providing an overview of their energy consumption.
Remote Asset Monitoring
Operations and maintenance costs are among the main factors hindering renewable energy production. For example, the average wind turbine operation costs are usually between $42,000 and $48,000/MW during the first ten years of operation. And costs increase as the turbines age.
To cut down on expenses, providers can attach IoT sensors to energy generation, transmission, and distribution equipment to monitor it remotely. These devices can measure attributes, such as temperature, vibration, and equipment wear factors, which helps to schedule proactive maintenance, increase reliability, and reduce downtime.
Additionally, IoT contributes to optimizing load management. Sensors can monitor transmission and distribution lines for congestions. Data coming from these devices can deliver useful insights and aid in business decisions regarding infrastructure upgrades and downgrades.
General Electric Power’s Monitoring and Diagnostics Center is using IoT together with Predix-based Asset Performance Management software to monitor generators and turbines. The software analyzes a vast amount of data coming in from the IoT sensors. This setup has helped GE reduce unplanned downtime by 5%, cut maintenance costs by up to 25%, and reduce false alarms by 75%.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)
Energy generation equipment can be damaged at any point of time, and energy providers should be able to detect the damage as soon as possible. Depending solely on infrequent human inspection can be risky.
UAVs, such as drones, present a solution for inspecting hard-to-reach structures like wind turbines and solar panels. For instance, these vehicles can monitor the wind turbine rotor blades, a task that is conventionally performed by a rope-climbing maintenance team. Drones can circle around the turbine collecting high-quality video and imagery, while human surveyors observe the material remotely—searching for cracks, paint peel offs, etc. This imagery also allows inspectors to spot more severe defects, like if a blade has been stricken by lightning, which can reduce the turbine’s efficiency by up to 8%. Using drones is a cheaper and safer option than human labor.
These vehicles can also save time and costs when inspecting solar panels. Drones average approximately 10 minutes per megawatt when inspecting, and save an average of $1200 per megawatt over a human inspector. According to the experience of West Coast Solar, it takes two technicians two full days to manually assess a 500-kW site, while drones can inspect a 1-MW site in just 40 minutes.
Smart Grids
A traditional energy grid transmits uniform energy from power plants to consumers and issues a bill once a month. With renewable energy sources, such as solar farms, there is no guarantee that the sun will be shining every single day, supplying the same amount of energy on a daily basis. As a result, these sources are neither consistent nor reliable, and must be supplemented by other power sources.
IoT in the energy sector enables the creation of a smart grid—a self-sufficient distribution system obtaining energy from different sources. IoT takes over the task of switching between renewable and conventional energy to offer an uninterrupted power supply.
In addition to switching among different power sources, IoT sensors can detect system failures and guide the grid through a fast regeneration process. For instance, Duke Energy has created a self-healing smart grid, which uses IoT devices to detect a failure and communicate it to the control system that, in turn, instructs switches to isolate the damaged area and restore the power supply in less than a minute.
Tear Detection
IoT sensors attached to pipelines can detect leaks and notify operators to patch them before the problem escalates. Unaddressed leaks contribute to global warming and can result in explosions.
German startup MEM Sensors manufactures IoT sensors capable of detecting tears in turbines by analyzing minute vibrations. When a turbine is compromised, its vibration pattern changes. The startup’s sensors capture ultra-low frequency ranges and apply the Fast Fourier Transformation algorithm to analyze the wind power plant’s condition and deliver timely insights on turbines and their components. Using these insights, operators can catch defects at earlier stages.
Responsible Energy Production and Consumption
One of the most significant benefits of IoT in the power sector is assisting renewable energy companies in production forecasts:
- Correlating supply with demand: incoming data from energy usage monitors, such as smart meters, enables companies to understand consumption patterns during different times either throughout the day or based on seasonality. This enables companies to match supply to the actual demand by either reducing output or using energy storage units.
Tokyo Electric Power Company cooperated with Toshiba Energy Systems & Solutions on connecting distributed renewable energy power plants with an energy storage system powered by AI and IoT. This technology helps predict when there is enough excess energy to be placed into storage units. The prediction occurs based on weather conditions, demand, and some historical data. When the demand increases, the system releases the conserved energy. This approach to power generation allowed the company to cut down on non-renewable energy usage.
- Anticipating energy shortage: historical data gathered throughout the years demonstrates how much renewable energy suppliers could generate under certain weather conditions. Such analysis shows when to anticipate an energy shortage and gives suppliers a buffer to look for alternative energy sources.
Improved Customer Experience
IoT contributes to energy management from both the manufacturer and the customer. Renewable energy companies can supply their customers with smart meters. These Internet of Things devices gather data on electricity consumption and send residents detailed reports allowing them to optimize their energy usage. This arrangement helps save money, which undoubtedly results in a positive customer experience.
The Skanska USA office, located in the Empire State Building in New York City, is benefiting from sensor technology, gathering telemetric data to keep track of energy consumption. This has enabled the company to reduce its electricity bill by 57%.
Challenges IoT Brings to the Industry
IoT has the potential to impact the renewable energy sector tremendously. However, IoT implementation comes with a number of challenges that need to be addressed adequately.
Data Maintenance and Security
IoT devices are susceptible to cyberattacks. This is especially critical as IoT devices lack the hardware required to support robust encryption methods. Moreover, these devices rely on wireless communications allowing a malicious third party to interfere. The risk is amplified by the fact that IoT systems typically contain nearly identical devices, which enables cyberattacks to spread faster. In the case of a confirmed attack, IoT devices embedded within critical infrastructures cannot be easily disabled, as doing so can cause damage.
Furthermore, IoT sensors gather vast amounts of data on consumer power usage. Energy providers use this data to understand power consumption patterns. In doing so, companies need to be careful and avoid privacy violations, which in turn will cost them consumers’ trust. To avoid this scenario, it is recommended to obtain explicit permission to use and sell customer data. Another solution is a trusted privacy management system where users have full control over their information.
Initial Investment
Renewable energy generating equipment is still costly despite the decrease in prices over the last decade. Incorporating IoT technology, data storage units, and data processing techniques will add a lot to these costs. When possible, it is worth considering an outcome-based model, which is gaining popularity with IoT projects as it enables companies to put forward a viable product without resource-draining investments. According to this model, energy providers and IoT vendors agree to exchange payment based on the performance of IoT solutions.
Energy Consumption
Some renewable energy harnessing installations contain a large number of IoT devices and a considerable amount of power is required to sustain them.
Consequently, energy companies willing to set up IoT systems need to find a suitable approach for minimizing power usage. One option would be to put IoT devices in sleep mode and let them operate at predefined times throughout the day. It is also advisable to implement an efficient communication protocol with energy conservation in mind.
IoT Standards
IoT devices from different manufacturers are not always compatible. They use diverse technologies to connect within the IoT network, and this inconsistency presents another challenge. According to IEEE, there are two sets of standards energy companies need to investigate while installing an IoT system— technology and regulatory standards. The technology standards include network and communication protocols as well as data aggregation standards. The regulatory standards constitute data privacy and security, among other issues.
Make sure that all involved stakeholders have a common understanding of the standardization system of your choice. Available IoT standards include the architectural framework developed by the IEEE P2413 group, which ensures coordination of IoT components across different sectors. Another example is the Zigbee Smart Energy standard for smart meters and smart grids.
Transferring Data from Smart Devices to the Cloud
If energy providers are planning to use IoT in their renewable energy initiatives, they need to think about ways of transferring data from these sensors to the cloud. This is especially challenging as many of the renewable energy-generating installations are positioned in isolated areas that are hard to access by human operators, and there is often no mobile internet (though there may be an opportunity to establish mobile connectivity).
Below are three feasible ways of establishing a connection to the cloud through a gateway. All three scenarios depend on only one gateway. The gateway receives data from sensors, processes it using edge computing, and sends it to the cloud for storage or further processing.
SMS-based Connections
In this case, the data gathered by IoT devices is encoded in a binary form and packaged into text messages using Base64 encoding. These messages will be sent to the cloud through a gateway. SMS messages are of a limited length, therefore it is essential to come up with an optimal way of packing as much data as possible in one SMS.
An ordinary Android smartphone can act as a gateway receiving text messages, repackaging them, and transferring them to the cloud using an internet connection.
Advantages:
- Affordability and simplicity of the gateway: there is no need to search for special-purpose equipment; a regular smartphone can do the job. Even if you decide to develop a custom device, mobile development is significantly cheaper than its embedded counterpart.
Disadvantages:
- Slow data transfer, as only one SMS can be sent at a time. Additionally, every transfer is made through a mobile operator, resulting in added transmission costs.
- Security presents a challenge. Adding security layers into an encoded message will inevitably increase the length of the package. Consequently, less data will fit into one message, which in turn will compromise efficiency.
LoRa-based Connections
LoRa is a low-power wide-area network that uses license-free wireless radio frequency for long-range data transmissions and is capable of covering a distance of over 10 km. LoRa modules are typically arranged in a mesh networking topology, where IoT sensors act as nodes and communicate to the gateway directly if they are within range, and through other sensors otherwise. Mesh topology offers several advantages:
- Recovering from failure: if one node collapses, the path is reconfigured automatically without the need for manual intervention, which makes the network more resilient.
- Adapting quickly: engineers can add and remove nodes without worrying about manual reconfiguration of the network.
- Self-optimizing: the network can discover the optimal way of transmitting data from IoT devices to the gateway.
This solution offers a reliable transmission over long distances. However, in this case, the gateway is a sophisticated device. Energy providers can still purchase such a gateway, but then they will be required to enter the LoRa Alliance and pay a fee for every participating device. In the long run, it is cheaper to develop one from scratch.
Advantages:
- Data transfer is free of charge, unlike the first option, where the provider is charged per SMS.
Disadvantages:
- Consumes more energy compared to the other options as data transmission occurs more frequently.
- Requires more sensors as some of them will serve as connecting nodes.
- Security can be a weakness—fast adaptability of the network makes it possible for a third party to insert malicious nodes without being noticed.
Dial up-based Connections
This scenario implies an independent dial up connection between every IoT device and the gateway. One option is to configure the sensors to initiate contact with the gateway when there is enough data to transfer. However, such a system will result in waiting times and busy lines as several sensors might attempt to contact the gateway simultaneously. Moreover, initiating a call requires energy, which will be wasted when the call is unsuccessful. A better alternative is programming the gateway itself to call every IoT device in a pre-established order.
In this solution, every sensor will have a dedicated modem waiting in standby mode for the gateway to initiate a dial up connection. When the gateway reaches the sensor, the authentication process takes place. Next, the gateway inquires about the amount of data in the sensor’s possession. It can opt to receive only a part of the data and move on to the next device to avoid overloading the network.
Advantages:
- Vast amounts of data can be transmitted in one session
- Low energy consumption
- Cheaper to configure and run than the other options
Disadvantage:
- Only one device can communicate with the gateway at a time
- Slower than LoRa
- Requires a custom gateway
Takeaways for Businesses
There are several beneficial IoT applications in the energy sector. These devices help optimize energy generation, remotely maintain equipment and installations, and help customers gain control over their spending. Combined with technologies like Machine Learning and Computer Vision, IoT opens even more captivating opportunities.
Despite all the merits, initiating IoT projects is challenging. According to PwC, the power sector is slow to introduce new technologies. PwC partially attributes this to the topology of energy companies. The industry’s systems were designed according to the hierarchical control and command principles aligned with the previous technology. Introducing IoT would change interrelationships within the sector, which is a slow process. Nevertheless, IoT will increase energy generation efficiency, and companies need to make this move to help satisfy the State Renewable Portfolio Standards (for US-based companies), and equivalent laws in other countries.
Simply employing IoT into your existing structure will not get you all the benefits presented above. You need to think about how to store and process the data generated by the devices. Before starting on such a project, familiarize yourself with ways of transferring data from IoT to the cloud, and how you can generate useful insights to improve your business decisions.
