Helping cities meet demand

Utilities must be ready for the energy demands of the megacities of the future – and adopt the right technologies to help.

The utilities sector is dominated by discussions of smart cities and their future needs. Cities devour close to two-thirds of the world’s energy. With an estimated 68 per cent of the globe’s population expected to live in cities by 2050, the needs of our planet’s megacities will increase exponentially over the next few decades.

The time has come for energy infrastructure in cities to react quickly to the new demands being placed on them. From empowering employees with better project management, minimising risk during dreaded outage events, and managing decommissioning projects, technology will sit at the heart of any positive change.

Project management is often lamented as one of the biggest inhibitors to energy site efficiency. Technology that can provide full visibility of project data, regardless of location, is critical to working more productively.

This also gives energy site operators visibility and control across all grid and pipeline assets on a single platform – workers can deliver quality project schedules, maximise resource capacity and minimise project risks.

Across the energy industry, STO events are often not optimally managed, making them a needlessly high contributor to a site’s non-availability, risk level and cost. A typical item list, which runs at about 3,000 items, can quickly escalate into 150,000 individual jobs, or tasks – each with its own stakeholders, compliance requirements, and third-party suppliers. Technology is critical to effectively support outage management, tracking fundamental activities and deadlines during each phase of the outage via monitoring systems.

A holistic approach to data management is another way to execute STO events more effectively. A centralised platform for project management means teams from across the organisation can track their work in a more collaborative way. Most crucially, these integrated tools can be applied quickly, with minimal disruption, and start delivering almost immediate gains.

Extraordinarily, only about 23 per cent of utility companies have a plan in place for decommissioning their assets, so it is critical that managers possess visibility into the resource workload across all projects to establish effective procedures. Again, centralised data repositories are key – essentially an extremely sophisticated knowledge management tool, capturing and storing the information needed for decommissioning.

As our cities become smarter, energy demand will only increase. Utilities that don’t start adopting the right technologies will risk suffering in the near future.