ENGIE brings AI to renewable energy platform, helps decarbonize energy production with Azure

Making a positive impact on the world—one kilowatt at a time

ENGIE delivers energy and provides energy-related services to millions of consumers in more than 50 countries, and it’s striving to do more than that. As a multibillion-Euro provider of renewable energy, the company is forging new paths to a sustainable energy future. ENGIE generates more than 80 terawatt-hours of renewable energy every year, and it uses technology innovations to help decarbonize energy production. The company relies on its digital innovation arm, ENGIE Digital, to design, build, and run unique solutions that help other ENGIE business units by supporting their development and operations.

Renewable energy will help reduce the environmental and economic impacts from climate change but generating and optimizing its production requires balancing a complex set of variables such as asset data, weather, market demand, and even grid availability. It takes data, and lots of it. To sustain operation and asset efficiency, ENGIE uses its operational performance platform, Darwin, to collect and process millions of Internet of Things (IoT) signals every second from thousands of wind, solar, biogas, and hydroelectric energy assets around the globe—often in real time.

Historically, ENGIE Digital gathered and analyzed all that data with an aging supervisory control and data acquisition system that no longer offered the scale or flexibility that its Darwin platform needed to cost-effectively monitor and control ENGIE’s fast-growing renewable capacity. The company needed a new system that could automatically scale, be robust, lower the total cost of ownership, and ultimately achieve its decarbonization ambitions. With Microsoft Azure Time Series Insights and Azure IoT Edge, ENGIE Digital modernized the Darwin infrastructure, delivering a robust data and AI-driven analytics platform that supports ENGIE teams across hundreds of renewable energy sites worldwide.

The power to perform

To keep pace with the scale of the company’s data growth and its global expansion, ENGIE Digital recognized that it could use services in Azure IoT Hub to manage its IoT tags more effectively and draw more value from the data across all of ENGIE’s markets. “We looked at a range of providers before we moved to the cloud,” says Sebastien Gauthier, Head of Darwin Delivery at ENGIE Digital. “But we chose Azure because of its Time Series Insights capability—it really swung the decision for us.”

To deliver real-time IoT data dashboarding and advanced analytics, ENGIE Digital uses IoT Edge to augment its IoT devices with AI and other cloud workloads. It uses Time Series Insights to process and retrieve billions of IoT data points—giving operational teams access to rich visualizations and deep-dive analytics and enabling the Darwin software to react faster and more reliably.

With the Time Series Insights Explorer web app, teams can compare different time series to visually detect anomalies that indicate underperformance or problems with the organization’s assets. For example, Time Series Insights provides ENGIE Digital’s machine learning algorithms with historical production data from solar farms, which in turn improves the system’s weather predictions and production forecasts. The team is also developing a way to use Time Series Insights APIs to integrate other data sources into Darwin, contextualizing its analysis.

“Azure Time Series Insights is a foolproof solution,” says Gauthier. “Its scalability, resilience, performance, and cost-effectiveness mean we always have the latest data at hand.”

For analytics workloads that require long storage but not the ultra-low latency needed for real-time edge processing, ENGIE Digital uses flexible storage options in Azure. It uses a warm analytics model to access high-value data without paying a premium for low-latency hot storage or longer-term cold storage. “We now have a very cost-effective data storage model based on access frequency,” says Gauthier.

Data-driven insights that benefit the planet

ENGIE’s operational teams can now make insight-driven decisions based on real-time, historical, and AI-modeled data to improve its overall energy production efficiency. For example, by transforming how Darwin processes real-time data and uses situational information such as asset data and weather, ENGIE can now reduce unexpected disruptions to plant operation. This helps produce more energy, boost revenue, and reduce the world’s reliance on carbon-heavy electricity.

“Without Azure, we wouldn’t have been able to deploy Darwin on the scale we see today,” says Gauthier. “Access to warm analytics also means that we’ve been able to maximize data storage capacity while lowering costs.”

From real-time supervision to reporting and analytics, Darwin now features a wide range of solutions for operators, field technicians, dispatchers, asset managers, and analysts. Through Azure, the platform has a standardized data structure, which enables global collaboration—if a team in Europe builds a useful data science algorithm, it can easily be shared at a global scale.

With its modernized, cloud-powered Darwin platform, ENGIE will sustain its success in the renewable energy field. And in gaining the ability to process and analyze data on a huge scale, ENGIE is achieving its overall business mission to increase renewable energy production and reduce carbon emissions across the globe. “Darwin is a major component in our transition to renewable, low-carbon energy sources,” says Gauthier, “and Azure is key to providing the infrastructure and insight we need to support it.”

Find out more about ENGIE on LinkedIn.