Generation, distribution and captive power
Energy & utilities
Energy assets are frequently distributed, often unmanned, and usually monitored by someone driving to them. Remote visibility changes the economics of operating them — and the engineering problem is less about sensors than about reliable communication from places with poor connectivity.
What goes wrong
Typical problems in energy & utilities
If more than two of these are familiar, there is a first project here worth doing.
- 01
Distributed assets require physical visits to check status
- 02
Faults are discovered by a customer complaint or a bill, not by the system
- 03
Generation performance is compared against expectation only monthly
- 04
Data from different vendors' equipment cannot be viewed together
- 05
Sites have unreliable connectivity, so remote systems have gaps
What we build
Solutions for energy & utilities
- 01
Remote asset monitoring
Continuous status, output and fault reporting from distributed sites, with alerting and escalation.
- 02
Generation performance analysis
Actual versus expected output normalised for conditions, so underperformance is detected in days rather than at month end.
- 03
Substation and switchgear monitoring
Electrical parameters, breaker status and transformer condition, integrated across vendors.
- 04
Energy accounting
Consumption and generation reconciled by site, feeder and time of day, with cost attribution.
- 05
Resilient communications
Cellular with local buffering and store-and-forward, designed so an outage is a transmission gap and not a data gap.
Technology
What is typically involved
- IEC 61850 and Modbus for electrical equipment
- Inverter and meter integration across vendors
- Cellular gateways with buffering and remote management
- Time-series storage with long retention for seasonal analysis
- Alerting with escalation and acknowledgement tracking
- Mobile access for field teams
Outcomes
What changes
Described rather than quantified — we do not publish numbers we have not measured for you.
- Fault awareness within minutes rather than on the next visit
- Underperformance detected against expectation continuously
- One view across equipment from different manufacturers
- Site visits driven by condition rather than by schedule
- Complete data despite unreliable connectivity
Capabilities
Most relevant here
- Industrial IoTGet data off your machines — existing PLCs, new sensors, or both.
- Edge Computing & GatewaysIndustrial gateways, protocol conversion and processing at the plant.
- SCADA DevelopmentSCADA design, implementation, migration and integration.
- Industrial DashboardsReal-time plant dashboards for the floor, the office and the phone.
- Predictive MaintenanceCondition monitoring and early warning on critical assets.
Questions
Energy & Utilities — common questions
Our sites have very poor mobile coverage. Does that make this impractical?
No — it makes local buffering essential, which is a standard part of the design. The gateway stores data locally and back-fills when a connection is available, so an intermittent link produces delayed data rather than missing data. For sites with no coverage at all, scheduled collection over a physical or satellite path is possible.
Can you integrate inverters and meters from different manufacturers?
Yes. Most support Modbus, and many support a documented API. The work is in normalising them to a common model so a portfolio view is meaningful — which is precisely the problem the edge layer exists to solve.
Tell us about your energy & utilities plant
What runs on your floor, and what you cannot currently answer. We will tell you what is readable today and what a first phase would involve.