PALO ALTO, CALIF. -- Denodo, a leader in data management, announced that the company is expanding its efforts to provide energy and utility companies with the necessary data management capabilities to gain advanced capabilities and meet new renewable energy requirements, all while remaining in compliance with increasingly stringent regulatory demands.

Facing numerous challenges, including generating, managing, and consuming new, decarbonized and increasingly digitized sources of energy; maintaining resilience and sustainability in a time of change; developing new technologies such as virtual power plants (VPPs) based on intelligent operations; all while managing a rising number of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and sustainability initiatives; energy and utility companies need to be able to manage data so that it helps to overcome these challenges, rather than adding to them.

The Denodo Platform facilitates this by providing real-time access to data across myriad distributed energy resources, while enabling the establishment of a unified semantic layer over all data sources, to deliver data when it is needed, in the language required by each data consumer. This provides energy and utility companies with the foundation to overcome myriad known and unknown challenges. The Denodo Platform enables such capabilities as continuous monitoring and control, and makes it possible for VPP operators to make fast, informed decisions in response to changes in energy demand, pricing, and environmental conditions. By enabling such capabilities, the Denodo Platform provides energy and utility companies with a reliable foundation for innovation.

Denodo has a strong heritage in providing impactful data management solutions to energy and utility companies, such as VTTI, a Netherlands-based energy storage and developer of critical energy infrastructure; BHP, a global resources company headquartered in Melbourne, Australia; Engie Mexico, an energy company that is committed to bringing energy to the people of Mexico; and Suez, a French multinational corporation with operations in water, electricity, natural gas supply, and waste management.

Hans Geurts, chief information officer for VTTI, says, “As a rapidly growing organization in an uncertain geopolitical environment, laying a strong data foundation was critical for us to become data-driven. The Denodo Platform has helped us in simplifying and standardizing our data infrastructure, while boosting our business resilience.” The Denodo Platform acts as VTTI’s single source of truth for enterprise resource planning (ERP) data. The company leverages it to synthesize, combine, and analyze operational insights to improve ways of working and address inefficiencies in the operational micro-steps at the company’s terminals. It also helps VTTI to visualize and understand product trade flows through the terminals and various modes of transport, helping VTTI’s commercial teams to better serve customers.

Joshua Fletcher, superintendent HSE, Reporting at BHP, made similar statements about the effect that the Denodo Platform had on the company’s business. “The Denodo Platform helps us to reduce the overall size of the data sets that need to be moved over the network. It helped us to create a logical data fabric that makes our data assets reusable and can be consumed by users spread across the globe.”

Luis Guadarrama, senior manager, Data Analytics and Innovation at Engie Mexico, says, “The Denodo Platform delivers data quickly and easily, which helps us to deliver value to the business and democratize data access. Our business users might not understand the technical part, but they do understand that there’s something called ‘the Denodo Platform’ that helps them to connect to data in an easier way, to make better decisions.” Engie Mexico leveraged the Denodo Platform to enable a variety of strategic initiatives, including web services that help hundreds of thousands of customers to balance their use of natural gas, chatbots that assist in problem resolution, and machine learning (ML) algorithms that analyze the behavior patterns of business-to-consumer gas customers.

Denodo believes that VPPs are the power plants of the future. VPPs can run energy in the cloud, and they can supply renewable energy on-demand, through innovative web-based interfaces that can remotely link and manage homes with solar and battery storage. Additionally, VPPs can feed power back to the grid during peak times, to relieve the load and keep the network stable.

Denodo also believes that data-driven, intelligent operations is a critical capability that can greatly assist utility CIOs in designing fit-for-the-future assets that bridge physical and digital phenomena. The Denodo Platform facilitates the development of intelligent operations and VPPs through diverse capabilities, including distributed energy resource management, predictive analytics for maintenance, and optimization of energy assets.

“Advanced data management technology will be essential in enabling new capabilities that oil and gas companies need to thrive, both now and beyond the energy transition,” said Paul Moxon, SVP Data Architecture and Chief Evangelist at Denodo. “Power plants of the future will operate in an eco-centric, distributed manner, enabling the data-driven, intelligent VPPs of the future. The Denodo Platform, with its ability to provide real-time data access to increasingly diverse data sources, will underpin success by providing energy and utility business users with access to data at the speed of business.”