Energy as a value added service and Industry cloud technology

In my previous article published on Energy central (https://energycentral.com/c/iu/cx-layer-energy-transition-and-industry-c...), I had touched upon some of the strategic directions required to Navigate into the area of energy digitalization paving the path for effective, feasible and software driven energy transition. While the digitalization will bring its own benefits, there are bigger imperatives that will drive the type of business models emerging on account of increased energy decentralization.

In telecom parlance, there is a concept of softswitch which is kind of software overlay over the core telco hardware, and we know software can do a lot driving extreme automation and flexibilities when the market is fierce with competition for a noble cause. Energy as a service and Charging as a service are already driving new market models. As per IEA (iea.org) - "...annual investments in clean energy increase to around USD 4 trillion by 2030 and close to 70% of that is borne by the private sector – consumers and investors, who will be reacting to price signals and government policies...". Centralized energy system is accountable for increase in GHG/Air pollution, and this has continuously led to the global warming and climatic change phenomenon and hence there is growing need of distributed energy resources management systems backed by software and information management. This will drive the growth for energy decentralization by means of DERs, Storage, Microgrids and many more in the making.

Given the magnitude of the investments and focus on clean energy, traditional business models may be laggard to energy transition and hence there is a need to revisit and envisage the new business models. RSG - Renewable, Storage, Grid are commanding bigger investment and new sources of renewables such as Hydrogen are stated to play even bigger role in achieving the Net Zero. There are ambitious and innovative plan to leverage water bodies serving dual purposes such as fish farming and green energy production through solar panel establishment e.g., in Darbhanga, India they have identified huge potential in this area due to abundance of water bodies stated to reduce several tones of CO2 over next few years. Recently, a leading India based power major inaugurated power generation in Kayamkulum, India using the floating solar power project having 100+ MWp capacity.

In order to facilitate the Carbon offsetting (kind of 'trade' characterized by tons of emissions reductions) it is important to promote campaign, loyalty program, promotion model and introduce software overlay on core infrastructure e.g. Salesforce Industry cloud (erstwhile Vlocity) CPQ features can be evaluated for dynamic rule configuration and catalog driven supply orders. Customers can make choices and select the best offers that suit their need. Grid / Microgrid load optimization is an important aspect and can be better balanced by changing the customer behavior. If wind turbine-based energy is economical at specified day and time as compared to solar panel, load can be diverted towards wind power and margin/benefits can be calculated to demonstrate energy economy and the carbon footprint reduction. Prediction technologies can be leveraged (AI) to drive supply and demand balance.

There are several ways to minimize the CO2 emissions and earn carbon credit and customers will have choices to select the low carbon service. Further, with the massive DER deployments, interconnection of resources to the systems becomes important and this is where guided interaction journey using Salesforce platform can provide value benefits. Contract Life-cycle Management (another rich feature in SaaS product such as Salesforce) can generate contracts and using blockchain technology, energy trading can be promoted to transmit these contracts further and check any excess supply in the line to earn carbon credit. For projects related to Carbon credit, energy consultants are required to register, validate, issue, trade carbon credits from Solar panels and Industry cloud software can easily do that by using digital interaction platform.

With all this, we see a new chapter of business model unfolding i.e. Value Added Services which will add software based intelligence and AI driven insights that will drive energy decentralization. There will be lot of focus on managing the information retrieved from various system mainly real time (giving rise to real time CRM system in future), smart communications technologies and omnichannel platform to provide consulting and advisory services during successful energy transition.