Special
Issue of the IBM Journal of Research and
Development
Large
amounts of data are transforming industries, and this has a particularly
important and significant effect in the energy domain. Energy stands at the
nexus of areas relating to the environment, economic development, and national
security. This crucial industry is also positioned at the tipping point of
multiple disruptive trends.
As
noted by our guest editors IBM Fellow Chandu Visweswariah, director of the IBM Smarter Energy
Research Institute, and Brad Gammons, Jr.,
general manager of IBM’s Global Energy and Utilities Industry, we also face
an unprecedented amount of uncertainty in planning, managing, and orchestrating
energy systems. For example, consider weather uncertainty, uncertainty in
supply and demand, intermittency due to renewable energy adoption, an uncertain
regulatory environment, and uncertainty in energy prices.
At the same time, we
are drowning in data from SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition)
instrumentation, PMUs (Phasor Measurement Units), and smart meters—along with exogenous
data like weather characteristics, energy usage, customer needs, vegetation
characteristics, soil data, and so on. When curated and mined with the
appropriate analytics, this data will help the industry to transition to clean
energy, increase customer awareness and participation, and improve the
resilience and efficiency of our energy systems.
This issue is devoted to the innovative application of cutting-edge analytics in the
energy domain. A collection of 11 papers represent state-of-the-art tools that
are delivering significant value in utilities around the world. This body of
work demonstrates the importance of such topics to IBM as well the importance of
analytics in the energy sector. IBM Research, in all its global labs, has
embraced deep domain knowledge and industry eminence in the energy space,
leading to innovations that are not just useful in the “back office,” but that
will prove essential to the day-to-day operations of energy companies.
Editor-in-Chief
IBM
Journal of Research and Development
Labels: Cliff Pickover, energy, IBM Journal of R&D, SERI