Overview

According to research carried out by Gartner in 2022, energy and utility companies are facing increasing challenges to their short-term and long-term asset capital planning due to market volatility, geopolitical risks, regulatory scrutiny and an increasing frequency of unprecedented weather/climate events. Gartner found that many of these energy and utility organisations do not have modern, data-driven asset investment planning (AIP) methodologies or solutions to mitigate and respond to these factors so as to optimise their capital spending.

Impacts

Gartner found that:

• Legacy processes relying on historical practices, 'rules of thumb' and spreadsheet-based analysis are ineffective, error prone, subject to confirmation bias and often over complicated;
• These manual processes support a decision making process which is not repeatable and is not easily auditable;
• Shortcomings in AIP methodologies could have a significantly negative impact in an environment of continued growth in demand for fossils fuels and renewables;  and
• According to the Economist Intelligence Unit energy outlook 2024, by 2025, 40% of energy and utility companies will face a 50% increase in capital demands triggered by resource scarcity and soaring demands.

Our solution

Data

Recognising that energy and utility companies need to implement integrated AIP solutions that enable legacy data sources and processes to interoperate with newer more automated solutions, there is a clear role for the Insight Terra platform to help these organisations extract good, high quality, trustworthy and meaningful data to support their critical capital expenditure decisions. Typical categories of data that an advanced AIP solution might collect for analysis include asset conditions and performance, failure forecasts, maintenance costs, reliability of key components and systems, and monitoring of GHG gases.

The Insight Terra platform is capable of ingesting, validating, analysing, enriching, integrating and transforming a wide range of asset monitoring data in real-time, in a consistent, repeatable and reliable way, curating this data set for inclusion in the broader workflow of an automated AIP solution. In essence, the Insight Platform creates analysis, insights and intelligence that are immediately actionable and usable in other contexts.

Communications

For many energy and utility companies their infrastructure assets and operations are spread over very wide geographical areas and located in remote regions, on land and offshore, where terrestrial communications is either unreliable or non-existent. Insight Terra's investor and partner, Viasat, has a dedicated energy services division that provides a global managed services network of secure end-to-end communications solutions for oil & gas and other energy customers that includes digital transformation. The Insight Terra cloud-based data platform is optimised for capturing asset monitoring and performance data from remote sites that require satellite communications links with greater latency, creating an optimum end-to-end solution in concert with Viasat for energy and utility companies.