Exabeat. Energy balance module

ENEL São Paulo, serving 8 million customers, needed advanced technology to efficiently manage its electricity distribution network. This led to the development of an energy balance model for Exabeat, the core system supporting the group’s metering management suite. The solution needed to handle the network’s demands in São Paulo, including forecasting and meeting energy demand, while also managing the vast amount of data generated daily by its millions of customers.

To meet these requirements, the module needed to offer exceptional parallel processing power and storage capacity. A team drawn from staff in Ayesa, Enel, and other stakeholders was formed to develop the solution. However, this collaboration presented challenges due to differing views on IT project management, software development, and service measurement, along with language barriers (Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and English), varying expertise in metering and energy balance management, and differing regional and corporate cultures.

The tight project deadline required extra effort and creative solutions to improve resource usage. Despite the complexity, the team focused on efficiency to minimize costs, particularly since the project’s expertise came from outside Brazil, which could have potentially resulted in an extremely costly project.

The solution developed for the client is based on two core components:

• A chain consisting of a series of cyclical processes that allows (in this order):
  • readings and usage data to be received from meters;
  • these readings to be checked against data held by the company (resulting in them being accepted or rejected);
  • gaps in data due to readings not being received and/or rejected to be checked. This involves algorithms estimating values not available, based on a set of rules and past data;
  • past data from customers to be stored; and
  • the consolidated position of the distributor, and its energy balance for various levels, to be obtained.
• A web application, designed to support this all stages of this process. This allows more than 400 energy balance KPIs to be tracked, prompting the group to take corrective action where necessary.

This solution has been developed using a range of big data technology designed specifically to collect, analyse and manage large volumes of data. These allow a range of reliable, high-value data to accessed quickly and viewed in a user-friendly manner.

The two cornerstones of the project were distributed and parallel data processing involving clusters of servers, and NoSQL databases.

The energy balance module for Exabeat has brought with it a number of advantages for the client, including:

• no longer having to spend vast amounts of time manually calculating its energy balance;
• the fact that it can be used to configure the process for checking readings and calculating usage; and
• providing a robust and reliable tool for checking its energy balance at various levels, based on a wide range of KPIs.

As a result of the project, Ayesa has strengthened its relation with the client, providing it with new capabilities at a local and global level. It has also led to negotiations for it to implement the same solution at two other energy distributors in Brazil (Rio and Ceará).