On Monday, April 22, more than one billion people in 193 countries will participate in events celebrating the environmental movement and renewing their commitment to restoring the health of our planet. At SparkCognition, one of the ways we’re marking Earth Day 2024 is with the official opening of our Bay Area office in Pleasanton, California. Many of our renewable energy team members live along the West Coast, and the new office will serve as their hub for collaborating with wind, solar, storage, and hybrid systems customers on our shared goal: accelerating the world’s transition to a carbon-free future.
“Show me the incentives, and I’ll show you the outcome.”
Charlie Munger famously said: “Perhaps the most important rule in management is ‘get the incentives right.’” As the world confronts the daunting challenge of slowing and stopping the effects of climate change, we need to understand the wisdom of Munger’s counsel.
Until we get the incentives right in all the right places to substitute carbon-based energy on the grid with renewable energy and related adaptations that will make a difference—an enormous societal, commercial, political, and technological turnaround orchestrated both urgently and thoroughly at the same time—the rate of change will be too slow.
We’re gaining on it every day. For example, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is tracking a huge solar power surge underway right now, driven mainly by Texas, Florida, and California operations. Solar power will likely represent 58% of all new capacity additions in the U.S. in 2024, adding as much as 62.8 GW of new power capacity on top of the 40.4 GW added last year. Solar power integrated with battery storage could net more than 80% of new U.S. energy generation capacity in 2024.
Those are huge wins, but they aren’t enough. According to the International Energy Agency, annual clean energy investment worldwide will need to reach $4 trillion by 2030 to accomplish the goal of net-zero emissions by 2050. If it were as simple as pooling money and buying our way out of this situation, would the world not just cut a check? Perhaps, if only it were a math problem. But we’re dealing with human nature and natural forces on a collision course. We might grasp what it will cost over time, but who’s the buyer, who’s the seller, and for what ROI? These fluid, open questions take us back to the incentives discipline. We need to find win-win relationships where sums equaling $4T are well-spent for solutions that address the real problems. When we manage the incentives correctly, we’ll get the outcome right.
How SparkCognition works to scale renewable intelligence for renewable energy operators
SparkCognition’s renewables team has been working on the problem of scaling renewable energy—and activating renewable intelligence to help green energy providers flourish—for decades. We’ve seen the sector grow from its nascent experimentation phase to large-scale industrialization that even today has only just gotten started. One of the fundamental challenges we recognized early on was owners and operators coming to terms with the huge amounts of data produced by renewable energy systems. For example, solar power produces 10X of the data compared to wind power, and battery storage is 10X of the amount of solar data. On top of the complexities of navigating intricate regulatory environments and exponentially increasing competition, renewable energy operators are awash in data management tasks that directly impact their bottom line.
In a recent webinar, Renewable Intelligence: Next-Gen Data Management and AI Enablement, Rob Budny, VP of Sales, Renewable Energy, and Dr. Sandeep Gupta, VP of Renewable Energy Technology and Strategy, detailed these data challenges and how SparkCognition Industrial AI Suite for Renewables helps renewable energy providers overcome them, including:
- Data quality
- Data volume
- Data integration
- Data security
- Data access and sharing
- Data visualization and interpretation
- Predictive analytics and forecasting
- Data governance and compliance
- Emerging technologies
They began their journey in the industry together over twenty years ago and bring an insider’s view on the challenges and opportunities presented by renewable energy data. In this webinar, they build a case, with clear examples and technology demonstrations, that renewable operators can overcome these challenges by adopting a holistic approach to data management and AI enablement.
In part one of their talk, they step through the data building blocks that renewable energy operators have to work with, including:
- SCADA data
- Plant configuration
- Contractual details
- Fault history
- Work orders and equipment configuration
- Market pricing
- Forecasting information
- Budgets and projections
In part two, they cite the technology building blocks to fully unlock the value of renewable energy data, allowing wind, solar, storage, and hybrid projects to scale smoothly:
- A solid data foundation
- An extensible asset management platform designed for renewable energy operations
- AI-enabled insights to extract knowledge from unstructured data and augment team efficiency
This webinar is packed with practical information for renewable energy owners and operators, explained clearly by extremely knowledgeable industry veterans, and is an excellent showcase of the wide range of proven value that Industrial AI Suite for Renewables delivers. Watching on-demand for its deep dive into scaling renewable intelligence is well worth your time.
We hope that, on another level, it illustrates how we’re approaching the question of incentives to deal with the climate change crisis. With this suite of tools, SparkCognition is equipping renewable energy providers with a reliable competitive advantage that doubles as a problem solver. Our solution makes running a renewable energy operation more profitable by reducing maintenance costs, maximizing energy production, and optimizing efficiency.
When SparkCognition Industrial AI Suite for Renewables makes a site manager’s job easier, and they can complete a pivotal, data-driven optimization in seconds instead of hours, they become more productive and collaborative with their team to maximize performance. As each plant reduces cost and increases performance, the executives in charge of growth can rely on that signal to accelerate phases two, three, etc, for the larger company. When the enterprise can scale faster, the investors and policymakers will flow toward them to fund and authorize more ambitious projects. With more solar, wind, and storage capacity on the grid, consumers can get reliable energy that costs less and is more convenient to use, expressing to the financial market that demand will support still further investment. And with clean energy driving sustainable economic growth in a virtuous cycle, we’ll continue to innovate to preserve the environment. We can steadily close the distance to reach net zero with the right incentives.
Happy Earth Day, today and every day, from all of us at SparkCognition.
