Efficiently managing the real-time flow of solar energy across an entire country is no small feat. With over 35 years of energy management experience as well as being Israel’s leading power generation contractor, Electra set out to do just this by combining an in-house solution with manufacturer created APIs. After installing their first two solar energy subsystems and connecting the manufacturer APIs to the in-house system, Electra was operational.
However, soon after the system went live problems quickly began to arise such as latency issues causing malfunction alerts to arrive very late, servers sporadically crashing under the weight of too much data, and reliability concerns when transferring data. Operations workers were also having a hard time visualizing all of the different systems without one uniform display for the data.
This all led to operators having to manually perform the monitoring and analysis of data in order to not miss any faults or alerts (defeating the entire purpose of building a system to do all of this). Electra knew they needed an alternative solution.
When this project was forecasted to be developed in a traditional fashion (not real time and without Vantiq) it was estimated to take over one year of development time. When Vantiq and partner CodeOasis were put to the task, a real-time solution was implemented in less than six weeks.
Now that Electra has a working real-time application (including an easily navigable user interface) for energy management, previously unknown revenue streams are opening up. Electra has plans to sell their energy management application and associated dashboard as a subscription service to other energy companies in the region.
Gone are the days of malfunction alerts never being delivered or operators having to manually correlate data points to ensure system accuracy. Electra is now able to do effective human-machine collaboration through real-time dashboards and notifications sent directly to operators when a problem is detected.