How an IoT platform is helping Eneco lead the energy transition

“When we started building our platform, all we wanted was to provide district heating in a more efficient and sustainable way. But what we’ve learned since then is that the possibilities the platform opens are limitless. We really have just started to scratch the surface of what we can do with it.”

Paolo Herde is describing how IoT technology is helping his company drive sustainability in the energy sector. As the Manager of Smart Grid and Innovation at Dutch energy producer and supplier Eneco, Herde is right on the frontline of the global energy transition towards sustainable sources. 

“Our goal is to become a carbon-neutral company by 2035, and at the same time to use the latest technology to accelerate the shift towards zero-carbon energy solutions in the Netherlands and abroad,” he says. 

Over the past three years, Eneco has developed an IoT platform that helps to manage the energy production, distribution and consumption of its Dutch customers. 

“The energy transition is moving fast, and the demand that it generates moves equally fast,” he continues. “And our IoT platform is essential to really understand what is happening around us and adapt to the market we're working in.” 

A company seeking greater control of its data

With 2,800 employees spread across the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and the UK, Eneco is an established leader in the transition towards more sustainable forms of energy. 

As part of their decades-long mission to provide sustainable energy for all, the company has been investing in wind farms, biomass plants and heat and solar parks to increase its supply of renewable energy sources. They have also developed a wide range of products and services that allow their customers to control how to generate, store, use or share energy.

Faced with an increasing demand for energy and an overall desire to provide more efficient and sustainable services to their clients, Eneco wanted to gain greater control of its assets, which in turn would allow it to manage resources and oversee the state of its heating systems. 

“We really wanted to make our resource management as efficient as possible,” he says, “so serving only the right amount of heat that the customer needs and at the right time, while being able to measure these things on a minute-by-minute basis.” 

“That’s why we decided to provide our clients with smart meters and build an IoT platform that would communicate with these assets, providing us with detailed data about their usage and allow us to manage resources much more accurately.”

Driving environmental benefits through the IoT platform

In 2018, Eneco and Microsoft IT partner Conclusion began building the IoT platform using Azure IoT components including Azure IoT hub, Azure IoT edge, Azure Device Provisioning Service and Azure Event Grid.  

The finished product is a smart grid solution that communicates with the energy meters located at households and industrial units through a wide array of sensors and gateways. The platform is capable of capturing this data, which Eneco analyzes to gain insights on performance, consumption and more. 

As Paolo Herde explains, this gives the company unprecedented understanding of how their systems are performing. “Previously, a field engineer would check the status of a household’s smart meters  only once a year. This gave us limited possibilities, as our services were based on a small amount of data,” he says. “Now  we have this data on a 15-minute basis. This allows us to add more intelligent features, like customizing energy usage for individual customers.”

As Robbrecht van Amerongen, Head of IoT and API integration at Conclusion explains, this new access to data opens up endless new avenues for Eneco. “The platform allows Eneco to constantly monitor the state and health of its units, which means that we can predict when they will need repair, rather than waiting for our annual scheduled visits.

“And it’s not just a case of extrapolating data from these locations,” he adds. “It’s also about sending instructions to the local devices. This way Eneco can balance supply and demand more accurately.”

The data also plays a crucial role in driving environmental benefits. “By combining the data coming from the meters with weather and consumption forecasts, we've been able to gradually reduce the temperature that we would normally have in our grids, and therefore reduce our heating losses,” Paolo Herde says.

The results include a 10-degree reduction in the temperature in Eneco’s total heat distribution network, as well as lower CO2 emissions.

“This is where our decision to implement this technology is truly paying off,” says Herde. “Because by having a two-way communication, as opposed to just getting the data in, we can make a real impact on the environment.”

A flexible, agile and security-compliant solution

From its initial focus on localized city heat distribution, home and industrial boilers, Eneco has realized that the potential of the IoT platform should not be limited to heating. And with more and more customers switching to smart grids, the company is now expanding use of its IoT platform to wind, solar panels and traditional energy plants. In the first phase of the project, the company was able to connect 10,000 devices sharing about 6 million messages a day – with scope to rapidly increase this number as time goes by.  

Being able to exchange information with a wide range of device types, Eneco is able to carry out a number of new activities – for example remotely monitoring the performance of domestic gas heaters for predictive maintenance. This is helping to increase reliability and reduce the number of unplanned site visits. 

In addition, Eneco is using the IoT platform for the reading of solar and wind energy parks, and reduce the inflow of new energy in case of overcapacity. This is helping to provide a maximum supply of sustainable electricity without overloading the energy grid, while also connecting more wind and solar farms to the grid and ultimately, increase the percentage of sustainable energy supplied.

All of this is made possible by the Azure Platform as a Service components (PaaS) that the platform relies on, and which allow it to be flexible, as well as easily scalable. “When we started the project, we were under a lot of pressure to deliver the smart meters for district heating within a very short period of time,” says Robbrecht van Amerongen.

“And using these PaaS components gave us more capacity in our engineering team to focus on realizing business value instead of installing a database application server. It also helped us to standardize the data we receive and scale the system to cope with the pressure on timelines.”

Eneco also needed to ensure compliance with the data protection and security requirements that came with the IoT platform – and chose the Azure Security Center to help them do it. This allowed Eneco to continuously monitor its security standards, as well as increase customers’ trust towards the platform. 

“The product that Eneco sells can be optimized and personalized based on data from individual household,” he continues. “So we’re talking about very personal data. Whenever we work with this kind of information, our key priority is ensuring that it’s secured to the highest of standards to protect customers’ data and privacy.”

A sea of opportunities lined up ahead

With the platform now up and running, Eneco can start to plan the next steps of its use, including trialing it in other energy divisions, adding new capabilities and contributing further to the energy transition. 

“Almost immediately after building the platform, we realized that we had many, many use cases that could benefit from it,” says Paolo Herde. “The possibilities feel limitless. So, we’re now looking at things like predictive maintenance, remote self-healing of the assets, but also the ability to shift peak demands and provide customers with insights on improving usage.”

But the real challenge will be identifying where Eneco and its IoT platform can make the biggest impact. “Our role is to make the energy transition happen as quickly as possible, and speed it up to make it an energy transition for everyone,” he concludes. 

“And we have infinite ways of making it happen for a greener planet.”