The land grab for clean ener­gy is in full swing across the U.S. Clean ener­gy is a pri­or­i­ty for every U.S. util­i­ty. The sup­ply and pace of clean ener­gy assets are severe­ly con­strained while the demand will be unlim­it­ed for the fore­see­able future. This sit­u­a­tion will cre­ate win­ners and losers in the clean ener­gy mar­ket. What will dif­fer­en­ti­ate the win­ners from the losers? 

First, it’s most impor­tant to be effi­cient and effec­tive in man­ag­ing razor-thin mar­gins on assets that are prob­a­bly over­priced in the ear­ly years of their oper­a­tion. Util­i­ties that can effi­cient­ly onboard con­struct­ed and/​or pur­chased assets, effec­tive­ly main­tain such assets, and understand/​predict their per­for­mance will be the ulti­mate win­ners. Across the clean ener­gy mar­ket, we see many of the same mis­takes being made in com­par­i­son to old­er gen­er­a­tion assets — name­ly nuclear, fos­sil, and gas. The cost of lega­cy gen­er­a­tion assets was always more than planned; those assets sel­dom per­formed as pre­dict­ed. Many fac­tors con­tributed to the chal­lenges of lega­cy gen­er­a­tion asset per­for­mance, but sev­er­al root caus­es stemmed from mis­takes relat­ed to miss­ing as-design and as-built infor­ma­tion about the asset — and then need­ing to pay to recre­ate that data. Also, few invest­ed in ana­lyz­ing what’s tru­ly crit­i­cal about the asset. As a result, busi­ness­es couldn’t cre­ate accu­rate risk-based asset pre­dic­tive mod­els across a fleet of assets. 

We’re mod­el­ing the entire clean ener­gy asset life cycle, defin­ing data-cen­tric end-to-end process­es for each phase of clean ener­gy asset life cycle. We’re using core S4 ERP that’s inte­grat­ed with key prod­ucts such as SAP APM, AIN, FSM, and Mobile to pre­dict clean ener­gy asset reli­a­bil­i­ty and per­for­mance. These prod­ucts also assist in mod­el­ing TCO in new ways, as well as in devel­op­ing risk-informed insights to bal­ance ESG effects with ener­gy sales revenue. 

Key Take­aways

Under­stand the clean ener­gy data mod­el, tech­nol­o­gy, and process­es across all phas­es of the life cycle.