While companies are transforming the energy sector, they are consumers of this ever-changing market.
Digital transformation is already spreading across several segments of the economy, causing intense innovation in business, forms of consumption, and the availability of services. Thinking about an era with millions of everyday devices connected to each other is increasingly palpable with new digitalization technologies. This concept represents a new reality that is already present in the energy sector.
Technological innovation in this segment is heading towards solving numerous challenges in energy distribution, generation, and transmission. This will provide a gain in energy efficiency and organizations in the sector will also start to incorporate and offer a portfolio of digital solutions, such as protection, automation, and digitalization; self-read measurement; big data; analytics; cybersecurity, and software for simulating and managing the energy system.
This entire initiative may also impact the final consumer, as with a more efficient electricity sector, the customer becomes an increasingly aware protagonist of their role. Today, it can generate its own energy and even exchange it for credits. All of this enables operational intelligence, real-time analysis, integration of various technologies into electrical networks that result in greater efficiency and operational gain.
In this sense, there is a proliferation of digital technologies, which allow energy to be produced, transmitted and consumed in a more intelligent way. However, disruptive changes, in addition to providing greater operational efficiency, also increase competitiveness in the sector. Therefore, the energy company that does not invest in digital solutions will certainly face problems. Check out the most adopted initiatives by the sector:
Solution aimed at automating invoices, with energy consumption forecast
for the consumer
Every company that seeks energy efficiency and operational cost reduction will at some point turn its attention to how it controls and manages its invoice data. Controlling energy bills is part of the energy management process and is certainly a sensitive point. In addition to the losses that can occur due to unnoticed deviations or fines resulting from missed payments, invoices still represent a huge source of data that support strategic decisions aimed at energy efficiency in an organization.
Self-reading service for metering clocks with image auditing and API
integration via WhatsApp.
Companies need to ride this wave to have more efficient management and increase the quality of service. In the past, there was a notebook in which the meter readings were recorded monthly, also known as the 'Tala or Reading Book'. This term still remains, however, over time, companies started to use data collectors, personal digital assistants (PDAs), smartphones, and, currently, telemetering processes. These solutions make it possible to eliminate the entire manual reading process, and also allow the addition of other services, such as remote disconnection and reconnection, analysis, and alarm through voltage and current sensors, among others.
100% digital services and data analysis
Increasingly, we will see growing investment in artificial intelligence and cloud solutions to revolutionize the electrical system and the relationship with the consumer. Another trend will be the applications in technologies for governance and data protection that help to automate security and collect information to promote the improvement of service delivery and the consumer experience. With this, we will observe the creation of innovative business models in the electricity sector based on the availability of data and information.
Consumption Management
We will reach the day when we will experience a consumer increasingly protagonist in the electric sector, starting to have greater decision-making power over the generation and commercialization of energy. In this context, consumption management becomes a strong trend. As a result, consumers have greater freedom to choose the energy service they want to contract, in a transparent and easy way, through innovative solutions that promote greater autonomy to citizens. An example of this is the free energy market.
Free energy market
The initiative consists of being a competitive environment for electric energy negotiation in which Members can choose the contracted energy according to price, contracted energy quantity, supplier, supply period, payment, among others. In this environment, the user negotiates the price of energy directly with the generating agents and traders, that is, the customer is free and can choose who will be his energy supplier.
The free energy market corresponds to 28% of national consumption and has been growing at a fast pace, but it is still small compared to other countries. In the United States, 65% of consumers are free. The production of electricity in the European Union presents different scenarios. In France, for example, it leads nuclear energy, in Estonia and Poland, the highlight is coal sources. While in Denmark renewable sources predominate.
The main advantage for the consumer is competition. If you only have one company providing energy, you are obligated to use it. In the competitive market, the consumer will be able to change company and, thus, whoever does not want to lose the customer will have to improve the service.
E-commerce platform
With an eye on the advancement of the free market, the development of e-commerce platforms aimed at smaller end consumers is already on the market. With this complete solution, companies will be able to offer their products and services aimed at the energy sector in a 100% digital way.
Given this scenario, the question is: is your organization prepared? Getting ahead of your competitors in search of sustainability can make a lot of difference, and there are still numerous possible initiatives: investment in solar plants, which can make great savings possible, if an intelligent control system is used, as this makes it possible to accumulate energy at cheaper times and save at peak times, for example.
It is important to reinforce that digital transformation goes beyond transforming something physical into digital. The concept optimizes processes and resources, reduces costs, enables real-time monitoring of information, and reinvents the customer relationship model, in addition to opening new business opportunities.