How to Achieve a Sustainability Breakthrough
by Looking at Data Differently
Many corporations are tasked with achieving aggressive sustainability goals. However, despite an ever-growing amount of data, utilities frequently struggle to make meaningful gains toward those goals.
Traditional paradigms can create barriers to creative problem-solving, resulting in little to no progress on these goals. Viewing data differently can help companies shift limiting paradigms and achieve breakthroughs in their decarbonization efforts.
NextEra Analytics develops forecasting and optimization software solutions to enable low-cost, sustainable power systems. The company’s NextEra 360™ software, a comprehensive energy management platform, was originally developed for NextEra Energy Resources to achieve breakthrough sustainability outcomes. Today, NextEra 360 can be implemented to increase operational efficiency, reduce cost, and accelerate energy goals. With NextEra 360, businesses no longer have to undertake large-scale, do-everything IT projects to gain a higher-resolution view of their data.
PDF Download Headline
In this webinar, Rich Argentieri, president of NextEra Analytics, reveals simple data levers to reduce energy costs and carbon emissions, manage risk, and improve returns, aiding decarbonization efforts without overcomplication.
Watch Video Headline
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Morbi laoreet at dolor et blandit. Vivamus sodales urna ipsum, nec mollis lacus laoreet non. In posuere fermentum ex eget tempus. Quisque luctus mollis aliquam.
Rich Argentieri
President, NextEra Analytics, Inc.
Richard "Rich" Argentieri is president of NextEra Analytics, Inc., a leading energy research firm that develops forecasting and optimization software solutions that enable low-cost sustainable power systems. Mr. Argentieri and his team are responsible for NextEra 360™ comprehensive energy management software, originally developed for NextEra Energy Resources, LLC, the world’s largest generator of renewable energy from the wind and sun—and a world leader in battery storage. Mr. Argentieri was appointed to his role in January 2011. Previously, Mr. Argentieri was senior director of integrated supply chain at Florida Power & Light Company, NextEra Energy Resources’ regulated utility affiliate, where he led strategic sourcing initiatives for an $8 billion supply chain.
Context
Rich Argentieri will discuss the importance of high-resolution data in achieving sustainability goals and how NextEra 360 enables high-resolution data capture and analysis for utilities.
Key Takeaways
Conventional Paradigms Must Be Broken to Achieve a Sustainable Future
Takeaway Headline 1
From astronomy to neuroscience, particle physics to climate science, advancements in technology that provide increasingly higher resolutions have led to breakthroughs in understanding and application. The sustainability journey is no different. The sustainable future requires breakthroughs born of increased data resolution. NextEra Energy Inc., the parent company of NextEra Energy Resources, has set its own breakthrough goals to lead the energy transformation.
Takeaway Headline 2
Achieving ambitious goals at NextEra Energy requires breaking conventional paradigms that inform daily decisions. Despite high-resolution data—billions of points on operations, emissions, financials, weather, etc.—current paradigms create bias and cognitive dissonance, hiding results. Meeting zero carbon emissions, like other breakthroughs, demands rejecting traditional notions of sustainability's attainability. Shifting paradigms necessitates high-resolution data.
Every major breakthrough—every big innovation—has always come through that change of paradigm. This is one of the most important pieces we need to focus on and take away in our organizations.”
Rich Argentieri
President, NextEra Analytics, Inc.
A Sustainable Future Depends on Higher-Resolution Data
For decades, operations were relatively simple within the energy industry, with few sources of uncertainty. For conventional generation, the greatest uncertainty centered on equipment outages or unexpected weather-related load.
Today, however, the problem has grown much bigger. Weather impacts not only load but also renewable resources. Distributed generation and distributed resource management compound the complexity of operations and add uncertainty.
To solve for this complexity and also reach breakthrough goals, conventional advice might recommend breaking down the problem into smaller pieces and solving each in a one-by-one approach. However, this preemptively removes the step of problem formulation, where a different large-scale solution might be realized upon better understanding the problem.
NextEra Energy Analytics recommends doing the opposite: enlarge the problem to make it more solvable. With a more expansive boundary around a tough problem, there are more insights and options — offering more opportunities to solve it. For example, to make a vehicle go faster, the answer is not necessarily to work only within the confines of what already exists and simply enlarge the engine. Instead, stepping back and viewing the larger vehicle, considering the application of materials science to lighten the weight of the body panels and/or the interior, control systems around how the engine is fired, or other options to improve speed facilitates solving the same problem in an easier, more effective way.
Solving the complex challenges of utilities and developing the grid of the future requires the same approach — instead of tackling the problems of each component. A more holistic approach will yield a more impactful result.
For NextEra Energy’s subsidiaries, this holistic approach has allowed the company to achieve ambitious goals, including:
- Using computational fluid dynamics and atmospheric modeling to provide better, faster customer responses.
- Recognizing voltage patterns across nearly five million smart meters to predict failures in near real-time.
- Improving generation forecasts by incorporating real-time operational performance data.
- Analyzing 30 billion rows of operating data to identify underperforming assets every morning.
Avoiding IT pitfalls is key to effective data management.
Optimizing for decarbonization goes hand in hand with cost savings. As investors begin taking sustainability metrics into account, improved sustainability becomes a financial imperative. These larger financial incentives are often coupled with disincentives, such as local carbon tax laws — all coming together to make a strong case for decarbonization.
New challenges
However, with so many different data sources that exist today that were not available in the past, utilities face a new set of challenges in their journey to sustainability. The velocity, volume, and variety of data are changing rapidly — and expanding exponentially.
Data projects
As a result, data projects have a reputation for taking too long and being too expensive for companies to be able to meet sustainability goals.
IT projects
When utilities start IT projects with a framework rather than a problem, they often implement data lakes and infrastructure without clear, outcome-driven requirements. This typically results in a system that can do everything but accomplishes nothing.
All too often, [when] we talk to our customers . . . the price tag and the commitment for the technology is what scares them away from wanting to approach a project like this. But you don't need an enterprise data lake to make impacts today on your sustainability or carbon goals.”
Rich Argentieri, President, NextEra Analytics, Inc.
Our operating paradigm really changes our focus. The operating paradigm here at NextEra Analytics — we call it a 'Zero Distance P&L' — stays focused on very specific outcomes. By leveraging technologies we were able to help improve a number of outcomes.”
Rich Argentieri, President, NextEra Analytics, Inc.
NextEra 360 increases data resolution to change paradigms, improving financials, and sustainability.
Optimizing for decarbonization goes hand in hand with cost savings. As investors begin taking sustainability metrics into account, improved sustainability becomes a financial imperative. These larger financial incentives are often coupled with disincentives, such as local carbon tax laws — all coming together to make a strong case for decarbonization.
In addition to producing NextEra 360, the most comprehensive carbon emissions, energy management, and optimization software, NextEra Analytics uses its deep operational expertise to help utilities successfully implement high-resolution data projects in support of shifting paradigms to enable breakthroughs.
NextEra Energy Resources, the world's largest generator of renewable energy from the wind and sun, and a world leader in battery storage, uses NextEra 360 in-house to manage and optimize more than $50 billion of its own renewable assets.
Since 2020, NextEra 360 has reduced revenue/generation losses at NextEra Energy by nearly 30%.
In that same timeframe, NextEra 360 has also reduced operations and management costs by 16%.
Additional Resources
Resiliency is Top of Mind: Data is the Energy Industry’s Best Defense
Explore how improved data collection and analytics help a diverse array of energy infrastructure companies better predict and manage extreme grid conditions due to events such as wildfires and extreme weather, helping ensure better reliability for the grid and for large commercial and industrial customers.
How to Use Utility Data to Prepare for Emerging VPP Opportunities
Virtual power plants (VPPs) represent the next great frontier of flexible demand management. They have the potential to save billions in the form of offset or deferred spending, as well as create new revenue streams by bringing a new resource to wholesale power markets.
CONTACT US
Get started by scheduling a free customized 30-minute demo of NextEra 360 comprehensive energy management software with one of our technical experts.
Follow Us
