Swiss Energy Providers - The challenges and the role of innovative data management technologies

Abstract

The whole Swiss energy industry is in a big transformation period at the moment. The energy market is changing drastically due to several influences. Those influences lead to diverse challenges for energy providers and other companies operating in the energy market. New challenges like the market opening in 2018, emerging alternative energy sources, the upcoming nuclear exit and an emerging amount of data bring different problems for Swiss energy providers. Energy data management (EDM) is the keyword in this area to enable the management of all types of energy data. Data need to be collected, integrated, analysed and exchanged. Furthermore, new products could be established based on those data. An EDM system manages this process and became the system with the highest relevance in the market. Because of various constantly growing data types like meter data, market data and data for analysis and predictions, the data amount is growing drastically and new requirements to handle such a data amount are arising. Mainly for data processing, evaluation and predictions is it also extremely important to have very fast processing times for queries. Several innovative technologies are presented in this master thesis to analyse their possible benefit for Swiss energy providers. Among this subject, a survey in the form of a questionnaire was held with Swiss energy companies to analyse and determine the important subjects in this area. The provider’s main challenges, impact of the emerging data amount, economically viability of modern systems, their usage of innovative technologies, the relevance of data analytics and what they think the future brings, are all subjects that had been discussed intensively with Swiss energy market participants. Those data were analysed by quantitative and qualitative study results....