Digital twins have revolutionized automotive and component manufacturing for nearly a decade. But their application has been limited in other industries, despite their massive potential to smash organizational silos, leverage real data, and vaporize operating cost structures. In this series, ShadowHornet Strategic Advisors explores the pioneering use of digital twins in the energy, electric power, and telecom industries and how digital twins will help revolutionize these "legacy" industries into 2030 and beyond.
What if the planet Earth, with all of its diverse geography, its land, terrain, oceans, interlocking weather systems and currents, atmospheric layers, and population centers, could be replicated in an accurate digital replica? What if you could converge trillions of historical data points from geologic time all the way through sensor-based readings happening at this moment to create a digital "avatar" that behaves with 99.99% accuracy as the Earth has? What if you energized that digital replica with the computing power to run billions of simultaneous simulations to predict, analyze, and assess what happens under different scenarios? What kind of power would that knowledge give you?
What is a Digital Twin?
The European Space Agency is already creating this capability. And nVidia is already equipping Earth2 with the most advanced computing power on this planet. Knowing that something as infinitely complex as the planet Earth makes a challenge like representing your entire capital asset and network infrastructure seem downright small and achievable!
A digital twin is a precisely accurate model of a component, system, process, or network, and all of the assets that comprise it. This twin is rendered in 3D, often using a rendering platform like Unreal Engine, and can be used to visualize complex assets at scale, with entirely accurate attributes. The result is that you can better understand how processes and systems work, the assets associated, and can represent them in a visually engaging and stimulating way. This means that data associated with those assets is no longer trapped in expensive and clunky enterprise asset lifecycle, OSS/BSS, geospatial, and CRM platforms. Your data can break free of those data prisons to become a better and lower-cost decision-making support tool with powerful capabilities like AI-based simulation and real time awareness.
The Promise of Using Digital Twins in Energy, Utilities, Electric Power
The promise of using digital twins in energy, utilities, electric power, and telecommunications is undeniable. These industries are viewed as "legacy" - slow moving, and largely based on 19th and 20th century concepts and in some cases, assets. Our electric grid was largely designed and rolled out in the United States from the 1930s - 1960s. Think about that. Assets deployed nearly 100 years ago STILL deliver or support today's electricity delivery and consumption. Our US telecom market was defined in the 1930s, and the industry market infrastructure that serves various regions in the US is still being leveraged to deliver fiberoptic cable. Many pipelines that link remote upstream energy regions to distribution hubs and refineries were built and deployed in the 1970s, and only retrofitted as the result of emergencies and critical events.
You may not believe this, but substantial parts of energy/electric/telecom infrastructure still aren't even represented digitally. They exist as paper blueprints and large-format maps. Or if they are digitized, these complex networks are locked in antiquated mapping software built in the 1990s, that make maintaining and updating data unpleasant and beyond difficult for the modern digital savvy worker.
The Problem
This legacy infrastructure, and the legacy approaches we use to manage it, are severely failing us, and as a result, our nation's security and our household safety are at risk. There are simply too many consumers, demanding more energy than our regional utilities can affordably generate and transmit, on inefficient transmission and delivery networks that lose already inadequate load capacity in the delivery process.
Additionally, the software that helped companies move out of the analog (paper map and penciled blueprints) era into the digital web era, now serves as an anchor to companies that radically need to evolve. Vital data about assets, physical plant, and service availability and performance is trapped into heavy and ineffective systems that today's workers don't want to work in, can't learn, and don't adopt.
All of this while enterprise software vendors continue to raise prices year-over-year, often armed with powerful Private Equity backers behind them, who are unafraid to resort to lawyers and strong-arm tactics to ensure that you pay more for less. You end up with diminished ROI on capital investment made years back, higher cost per user, low adoption, low impact, and increased operating costs as software companies strong arm you into SaaS subscription contracts. Digital twins are the key that can unlock businesses from the crushing weight of enterprise contracts, and the data penitentiaries in which their vital operational and customer data is serving a 10 to life term.
The Need for Digital Twins in Energy, Electric Power, and Telecom
Different needs for digital twins create the opportunity to modernize your business and strip out unnecessary operating cost. Today's Energy, Electric Power, and Telecom firms need to balance the cost of managing assets that have performed for decades and are still serviceable against the risk of failure, cost of repair, and capital and operating implications of phasing out and replacing assets. Because data is often trapped in organizational silos and poor performing software, business leaders operate in an imperfect decision environment, where information is frequently hidden, re-framed, and used to support different executives' and departmental objectives. Digital twins offer the promise of full transparency in a clean decision environment.
In Part 2 of our series, we'll delve into the practical needs and applications of digital twins in Energy, Electric Power, and Telecom.
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