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LEVERAGING BIG DATA TO ENABLE AN INTELLIGENT GRID In February 2018, researchers from the University of Queensland (UQ) School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering announced the development of a world-first data platform that would harness information from potentially millions of households to enable deep, real-time analysis and control of household energy. The big data collected would not only empower consumers to take control over their household power generation, storage and consumption, but would also enable monitoring of entire systems and could be used by energy retailers to ensure safer and more secure networks.
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ccording to Professor Neil Horrocks, Director, Centre for Energy Data Innovation at UQ, the platform and associated data use cases are still under development and at varying stages of completion, but the entire platform should be fully operational by 2021. “The data platform itself is now in its second iteration, having been built and tested, and is now accepting data. It continues to evolve as new improvement opportunities are identified,” Mr Horrocks said. “Data is being received into the platform every minute in near real time from sensors across the Energy Queensland network. Currently, we are receiving about four million sets of data values a week and this is growing by the month. The associated use cases that leverage the platform data are at varying stages of development.” The university is working closely with four collaborators on the project: • Energy Queensland Limited and specifically, its networks, Energex and Ergon Energy. The utility is overseeing the development and iteration of the use cases, installation of the IoT sensors and is providing additional existing network data flows
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UTILITY • FEBRUARY 2020
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