Today Georg Rute is Development Manager for Digitalisation in Elering AS, but also he is Prototron alumni as Sympower team founder. In the frame of Tehnopol Entertainment Week 2017 Georg will be discussing about BigData issues @BigData film evening and we asked him to reflect his opinion about this hot topic for Prototron blog.

Millions and millions of devices

Since the past few decades power is no longer produced only in large central power plants, but also for example in homes that have PV. Where once power flowed in the system like sap in a tree – from the trunk to the leaves, from the large high voltage cables to the small wires in homes – now power flows also from homes to other homes over the grid, from leaf to leaf. All of a sudden the old ways of ensuring that the power system is stable – that everyone knows what to do when, when to throw more coal into the fire, is thrown into disarray. Whereas in the past the system operator called a few power plants to increase or decrease their fires to correct the system, it is not possible to pick up the phone and call a thousand solar panel owners to disconnect. It must happen automatically.

Connected devices can be coordinated in real time, but it is only beginning to be achieved. Coordinating the energy systems is a major challenge that is being faced in most of the world, right now, and in the next decades. How will we ensure that millions of small producers and consumers are operating together at the right time? How do we ensure that we plan and build our power grids in the best way possible, taking into account the vast complexity of controlling the system? It involves data from millions of consumers and producers – BigData.

Opportunities for clever ideas

Elering, the transmission system operator in Estonia, is taking active steps towards finding answers. The amounts of data that will be required to ensure that everyone on the system knows what to do when will be much bigger than in the past. In order to enable market players to find answers to these questions, Elering has built the Estfeed data exchange platform. Estfeed enables startups and companies access to energy data from all of the metering points in Estonia, provided that the owners of the data agree to share. This enables energy services to compete on an equal footing and is a major building block of the efficient energy markets of the future.

Change is under way in the energy sector, and change creates opportunities for informed, clever and hardworking individuals to increase the common good, and thereby their own good. There are great opportunities in the energy sector with BigData, which is why Elering is supporting Prototron. We are looking for clever ideas to make use of energy data. Do reach out to us if you have an idea and apply to Prototron until 15th of October!