picture about energía 4.0
VR/AR

Energía 4.0: Innovation, Resilience, and Intelligence

Digitization of the power grid to modernize it, ensure its safety, strengthen its governance, and drive decarbonization

Concern about global warming continues. Faced with the threat of climate emergency, how we consume energy is vital to slowing the wear and tear on our environment.

The ENERGÍA 4.0 project seeks to digitize and secure the power grid through the most disruptive technologies. This makes the entire energy value chain safer and more accurate and responds to the new challenges of consumption and decarbonization.

According to a report published by the consulting firm Deloitte in 2019, in Spain alone, the energy transition will mean investments in networks of between 46,000 and 55,000 million euros until 2030. Among the types of projects is the increase in substation capacity or the replacement of equipment (such as lines and transformers) before their useful life.

This is happening simultaneously with the proliferation of local power stations, such as those supplying electricity for electric cars. Thus, while citizens are trying to curb the disaster, energy companies must also update their infrastructures to do so when these nearby power stations are proliferating.

Improving energy production, supply, or consumption contributes to curbing the climate emergency.

Digitizing the power grid serves to care for the environment, make process management more efficient and ‘smart,’ and improve the value chain’s security with cloud and data technologies.

  • Full project title: Innovation, Resilience, and Intelligence at the Service of Energy 4.0.
  • Project file code: AEI-010500-2022b-110
  • Project funding agencies: Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Tourism of the Government of Spain, AEI Cluster, Next Generation Program of the European Union, and Recovery, Transformation, and Resilience Plan

Initiative financed by the Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Tourism within the program of support to the AEI to contribute to the improvement of the competitiveness of the Spanish industry, and with the support of the European Union through the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan

logo de proyecto financiado por la unión europea
logo del plan de recuperación transformación y resiliencia
CLIENT
Industrial Research
Sector
Research
Services
AI / Augmented reality / Big data
Technology
Evergine
ENERGIA 4.0 is driven by a consortium of which Plain Concepts is a member, together with Cuerva, Soincon, and Orolia. We bring our expertise in 3D representations, thanks to the Evergine industrial graphics engine and process automation, which will help traceability and safety of electrical installations.
picture about energía 4.0 and power grid
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The Challenge

The consortium seeks to digitize electrical substations and transformation centers that need to replace analog and power technologies. How? With software that drives Industry 4.0.
Thus, one of the objectives is to represent critical infrastructures through augmented reality. Also, create tools to be inserted into a traffic and event monitoring and management scheme. For this purpose, APIs or standard and interoperable interfaces are used, which help to use advanced big data tools.
With these contributions, the objective is to have beneficial information on the development of operations and possible failures, which will be used to check the status of the network and, after managing them in a central computer, to act as necessary.
picture about energía 4.0, power grid and augmented reality
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Results

The main result of this project is that the power grid becomes more reliable, robust, and monitorable while being digitized.
In addition to reports on results, a predictive algorithm on anomalies is also created based on the data history.
By representing energy infrastructures in 3D augmented reality, there is no need for an operator to travel to the site: they can remotely give instructions on improvements or changes for other employees to execute.
In addition, the project includes the study of metrics using monitoring tools. These tools export data from a sensor network to analysis tools. In this way, the status of the network is analyzed life and as little energy as possible is wasted.
picture about energía 4.0, power grid and evergine
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Highlights

The evolution of Evergine, through new releases published for more than a decade, has provided the tool with sufficient utilities to represent infrastructures quickly and accurately in 3D format.

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