How event-driven architecture and the internet of things are transforming the energy market

Over the last couple of years, the industry has been moving away from batch data and has tried to implement the architecture necessary for an event-driven approach. Because event-driven architecture enables real-time data processing, new ways of interacting with this data are discovered every day. One industry that is benefiting from this, is the energy industry. From network operators like TenneT or ENEXIS to energy producers such as Eneco, the possibilities to enhance operational efficiency with event-driven architecture combined with what we call the internet of things (IoT) seem endless.

In this blog you will read about the following:

• What is event-driven architecture?
• What is the internet of things?
• How can the internet of things benefits from real-time data
• TenneT – use case

What is event-driven architecture?

We already said it a couple of times. But what is event-driven architecture (EDA)? EDA is an architecture paradigm within software development. This paradigm promotes the production, detection, consumption of and the reaction to events. These events are defined as a “change in state”. For example, when a person graduates from university, the person’s state changes from “Student” to “Graduate”. A university’s IT system might treat this change as an event whose occurrence can be made known to other parts of the IT system. Formally, everything that is produced, published, propagated, detected or consumed is a message called an event notification. This is not the event itself, which is the state change that triggered the message.

The event-driven architectural pattern might be applied when designing and implementing systems that transmit events among loosely coupled software components. Systems that have applied the event-driven pattern typically consist of event producers, event consumers and event channels. Producers detect, gather and transfer events. With event-driven systems, the producer is decoupled from the consumers. A producer does not know who consumes the events and has nothing to do with what consumers do with the events. Consumers are responsible for applying a reaction as soon as they receive an event. Event channels are the channels through which events are transmitted. Examples of these channels are Apache Kafka, Apache Pulsar or RabbitMQ. At Axual we build enterprise features such as data governance, security and a self-service UI on top of open source Apache Kafka.

What is the internet of things?

When we talk about the Internet of Things, we are talking about physical objects that contain sensors, processing power or software. The main focus of these things is to connect and exchange data with other devices and systems. The communication between these devices happens over the internet or via private networks.

Over the past few years the internet of things has gained traction due to a number of reasons. Embedded systems are increasingly powerful, sensors have become cheaper and machine learning became reality due to increased computing power. Within the consumer market, IoT technology has been most pervasive in the “smart home” industry. Lighting, home security systems, thermostats and other home appliances are connected through apps making the home “smart”. If we talk about the business market, applications are most common within supply chain management, factories and smart grids.  

Regardless of the benefits that the internet of things provides, there are concerns about risk with IoT technologies and products. Especially when we talk about privacy and security. To address these concerns, standards, guidelines and frameworks are already being thought out by governments and industry.

How can the energy market benefit from real-time data and IoT?

Data is essential to decision-making. Because it is essential, ideally you want real-time data to get the latest insights. Especially within the energy market, the benefits of using real-time data are clear. To understand these benefits, we have to make a distinction between the energy supply chain and the energy production process. We will first talk about the supply chain.

When integrating your real-time data from grid IoT sensor with a data analytics platform, you will be able to get insights into energy consumption and to use this information to forecast demand. When you are able to have awareness about these things, you are more likely to improve your operational efficiency by knowing when (and when not) to increase energy production. If you are able to stay ahead of where the market is moving towards, the slightest increase in efficiency will result in bigger profits and less strain on the environment.

Now that we have talked about the benefits within the energy supply chain, we should talk about the energy production process.

This process can benefit massively from event-driven architecture and IoT: factories where energy is produced use a lot of sensors to determine if the production process is going as planned. Within the IoT paradigm, these smart sensors stay connected to each other. Event-driven architecture facilitates the connection between all these devices. Especially if you use a tool like Apache Kafka as the backbone of event-driven architecture, you will be able to hook up as many sensors (producers) to your platform without worrying about adding development time to it. Additionally, you can hook up as many consumers as you’d like to the platform.

Event streaming use case – TenneT

TenneT is a major grid operator active within the Netherlands and parts of Germany. As a grid operator, TenneT is responsible for the high voltage network in the regions they are active. The organization has a couple of things it wants to achieve:

• TenneT wants to make data easily available within the organization
• Enable advanced analytics and real-time decision support
• An event-driven architecture centred around the concept of business events to build systems that are loosely coupled, scalable, extensible, observable and resilient
• A self-service deployment model.

All these things are enabled by implementing event-driven architecture. Because TenneT needed “enterprise” features on top of Apache Kafka, the organization chose Axual. Our platform comes with built-in data governance, self-service and security protocols. This way, TenneT can focus on bringing their use cases to production instead of building their own event streaming platform.

What did we learn?

In conclusion, event-driven architecture enables the internet of things and thus will have a lot of impact on the energy industry. From being the backbone of smart grids and predicting energy demand to automating energy production within factories – this software paradigm will facilitate operational efficiency, in turn minimizing strain on the environment and increasing profits.

Do you want to know more about how you can implement event-driven architecture? Get in touch with our experts and see what Axual can do for you.

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