Case Study: Logius

The Challenge

TenneT, a leading European electricity Transmission System Operator (TSO), manages around 21,000 kilometers of high-voltage lines connecting 41 million end-users across the Netherlands and Germany. Their primary responsibility—ensuring reliable and uninterrupted power delivery—requires continuous grid monitoring and balancing.

While TenneT's assets collected vast amounts of data from sensors and systems across their high-voltage network, their batch-driven setup prevented real-time responses to grid changes. This limitation hindered their ability to maintain optimal grid stability, perform advanced analytics, monitor power quality, and detect potential issues for real-time decision support.

TenneT recognized that meeting future energy challenges required building real-time situational awareness and advanced analytics capabilities supported by AI. They envisioned Data Platforms and Digitalization as foundational pillars, with event streaming architecture capable of handling large volumes of high-speed data processed continuously and acted upon in real-time.

The Solution

In 2021, TenneT initiated a European Tender process to acquire a streaming platform that would support their comprehensive enterprise architecture goals:

Strategic Objectives:

• Data as a Product: Make data easily accessible and reusable across multiple enterprise systems
• Advanced Analytics: Shift from batch processing to AI-enabled real-time decision support
• Event Processing Architecture: Build loosely coupled, scalable, extensible systems centered on business events
• Cloud Transformation: Transition from monolithic to modern cloud-native architectures
• DevOps Transformation: Enable independent cross-functional teams with platform automation
• High Availability: Ensure business continuity with active-active deployment across data centers
• Open-Source Strategy: Consume and contribute to open-source innovation

Axual emerged as the Economical Most Beneficial Proposal (EMVI), offering:

• Out-of-the-box Kafka solution combining Strimzi's open-source capabilities with enterprise features
• User-centric interface enabling large organizations to utilize Apache Kafka without complexity
• Enterprise features including access control, data governance, and visual data flow management
• Expert implementation support with TenneT's own engineers designing and installing the platform

The Results

The Axual Platform implementation delivered transformational capabilities for TenneT's grid operations:

Operational Excellence:

• Real-time grid monitoring with continuous data processing and analysis
• Scalable architecture that grows with TenneT's expanding network needs
• Simplified bottleneck identification through visual data flow management
• Cost-effective development and maintenance with reduced technical complexity

Business Impact:

• Enhanced grid controllability through real-time situational awareness
• Accelerated team adoption via comprehensive training and implementation support
• Organization-wide scaling from proof of concept to enterprise deployment
• Focus on core business while platform complexity is managed by Axual

Technical Achievements:

• Seamless data integration from grid monitoring systems to decision-making teams
• Role-based access control ensuring secure data governance
• Visual data flow management providing clear oversight of information streams
• Infrastructure automation supporting DevOps and continuous delivery processes

What's Next

The successful implementation has resulted in an ongoing collaboration between TenneT and Axual. TenneT has scaled their initial proof of concept to organization-wide adoption of the Axual platform, establishing a foundation for:

• Expanded AI capabilities for predictive grid management
• Enhanced real-time decision support across all network operations
• Continued cloud transformation with modern application architectures
• Innovation acceleration through open-source collaboration and development

The platform enables TenneT to focus on building innovative grid management solutions while Axual handles the complexity of maintaining Apache Kafka infrastructure, ensuring reliable power delivery to millions of European consumers.

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