Brightfield: Helping to balance the grid for a greener energy future
About Brightfield
Industrial Data Acquisition Hardware group Brightfield, part of E.ON, gives grid networks access to real-time data to predict energy usage, anticipate disruptions, and ensure stability. By digitizing transformers, it supports grid load forecasting with 90% accuracy, can bring transformers online in 20 minutes with no downtime, and helps reduce maintenance costs.
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Contact usWith Google Cloud, Brightfield is helping grid operators accurately predict and manage energy demand.
Google Cloud results
- Latency improved by 90% (from 5 minutes to 30 seconds)
- Cost reduction of 95.6%
- Production cloud sets up in two hours on customer IP addresses
Getting offline industrial assets online, fast
Renewable energy is cheap, clean, and makes good economic sense: rapidly increasing its use could save costs of up to $4.2 trillion a year worldwide. According to the International Energy Agency’s 2022 World Energy Outlook, with clean energy investment due to increase by 50% by 2030, there is a huge opportunity in making energy more sustainable.
But the variable input of renewable energy sources like wind and solar can lead to grid instability and bottlenecks in the system. That's where Brightfield, part of E.ON, comes in. By digitizing the grid in a way that enables more accurate load forecasting, it's helping grid operators to better manage demand, ultimately supporting the viability of renewable energy at scale.
"Our goal was creating a future-proof data source, a data acquisition system that produces clean data you can work with."
—Laura Antonia Faerber, Co-Founder and COO, BrightfieldPreviously, energy distributors aiming to shift the consumption patterns of large industrial customers had to rely on historical data: "You're missing a big part of new development in your prediction model on how that demand will change," says Laura Antonia Faerber, Co-Founder and COO, Brightfield.
Faerber and her co-founder Nicholas Ord worked in research and development for energy multinational E.ON, developing an industrial hardware solution for energy grids in-house before scaling it to the external market. They had observed that many of their data science colleagues were spending over 80% of their time cleaning data that often turned out to be poor quality. "Our goal was creating a future-proof data source, a data acquisition system that produces clean data AIs can work with," says Faerber.
Brightfield's hardware turns any transformer into a real-time data unit. It can be installed in under 20 minutes with no downtime, so there is no disruption to the grid. Collecting data from transformers, its technology generates 260 synchronously timestamped data points per second to provide a real-time stream of the grid's energy data. To give an example of scale, for Munich alone, this would mean 2,000 transformers producing 600-700 million data points a day. From the start, Google Cloud was brought onboard to help Brightfield manage this vast amount of data, while optimizing cloud costs.
Keeping the flow between the cloud and firmware scalable
Brightfield's hardware has on-edge processing in the unit itself, which sits in the firmware, but it also has a cloud component that's built 100% on Google Cloud infrastructure. Forty percent of the group's analytics processing takes place in the cloud, giving the company's customers a high-level overview of energy efficiency. Brightfield worked with Google Cloud to ensure the flow between the cloud and the firmware was scalable in a secure way.
"If you really want to think about sustainability and the energy economical effect, like load management and optimizing the overall grid, and you're looking at all the transformers at the same time in that grid area, that processing is mostly happening in the cloud," says Faerber.
Brightfield relies on three key products from Google Cloud: Pub/Sub, BigQuery, and Cloud Bigtable. "BigQuery is a really nice product, especially when the customer wants to work directly with the data, because it's captured every minute," says Faerber. "But Bigtable is very important, because Google Cloud really helps us to keep that triangle between maintaining low latency and utilization and cloud costs together. Bigtable makes a huge difference for us, especially when it comes to latency."
"BigQuery is a really nice product, especially when the customer wants to work directly with the data, because it's captured every minute."
—Laura Antonia Faerber, Co-Founder and COO, BrightfieldSecurely sharing operational benefits
The company also uses Google Cloud to offer a Brightfield production cloud to larger customers with in-house data engineering teams. Leveraging Terraform, Brightfield is able to set up a cloud for customers in just a couple of hours. "It's a really nice commercial model for us to enable our customers to own the data themselves," Faerber notes.
"Google Cloud really helps us to keep that triangle between maintaining low latency, utilization and cloud costs together."
—Laura Antonia Faerber, Co-Founder and COO, BrightfieldSuch customers are able to input their own analytics and also get additional support from the Google Cloud team in the form of training and professional services, so that they can manage their own cloud clone. "Working with Google Cloud and seeing how they approach people and help them understand their own landscape really gives me joy, every time I see that," says Faerber.
Because of the cybersecurity risk to critical infrastructure such as energy grids, Brightfield uses Terraform to make a copy of its own cloud, but then create a platform with secure data sources specific to each customer. It also uses three-factor authentication to ensure that data sources are transferred safely using a tamper-proof hardware chip, like you would find in a bank card, in every unit. As Google Cloud already has extremely high security standards, Brightfield felt confident in the protection they and their customers could expect.
From Germany to the world
Renewable energy is now powering 52.3% of Germany's energy needs. International Energy Agency research shows that faster deployment of renewables and efficiency improvements in the European Union is set to bring natural gas and oil demand down across Europe by 20% this decade, and coal demand by 50%.
Brightfield sees Google Cloud's commitment to sustainability as a significant advantage. "The data we have is selling an optimization model for energy for the distribution system operators. And most of them wanted to integrate renewable energy in this system," says Faerber.
Thanks to its work with Google Cloud, Brightfield has already seen 90% improvement in latency and a 95.6% reduction in cost. Now, it's looking to expand its footprint beyond Germany's borders, starting with core markets in Europe and then moving to the US.
While Brightfield takes care of hardware installation, the company is pleased to have a cloud partner expediting digitization. As soon as that hardware is installed, it's online and ready to connect to the cloud. "There's definitely a scalability aspect," says Faerber. "We really want to digitize the overall European grid extremely fast."
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About Brightfield
Industrial Data Acquisition Hardware group Brightfield, part of E.ON, gives grid networks access to real-time data to predict energy usage, anticipate disruptions, and ensure stability. By digitizing transformers, it supports grid load forecasting with 90% accuracy, can bring transformers online in 20 minutes with no downtime, and helps reduce maintenance costs.