Like practically every other industry, organizations in the energy sector face the constant need to keep tightening up their operations. It’s always imperative to improve and enhance services, increase efficiency and cost-effectiveness, and gain a better understanding of customers and their needs. And the sector has always been an enthusiastic adopter of any new technology that allows it to do this – which is why there’s been a recent boom of interest in Microsoft Power BI energy consumption dashboard possibilities.
Given this flurry of interest, we decided to look at how Microsoft’s flagship business intelligence platform can provide the perfect data analytics tools for energy sector businesses. Let’s get started.
Perfect for energy business intelligence
With the industry now gaining access to datasets of unprecedented size and value, companies now need a way to harness them – as swiftly and easily as possible. Microsoft Power BI provides a powerful and versatile collection of services, applications, and connectors to do just that.
Power BI offers new capabilities for harnessing data that can help businesses to:
- Analyze electricity consumption and usage
- Predict and plan customer demand
- Boost efficiency and reduce environmental impact
We’ll start with the first item in that list, and the one arguably generating the most interest right now.
What can a Power BI energy consumption dashboard do?
When provided with real-time or historical data, Power BI can produce valuable insights on energy usage. Because the platform works well with “unstructured” or “semi-structured” data that may not have been entirely pre-processed for analysis, it’s ideal for the industry – because not all the data generated comes in structured form.
When it’s fed into the platform, this data can then be easily visualized via a Power BI energy consumption dashboard. That means energy companies can see trends in consumption which can be used to shape and target services.
What’s more, Power BI also offers powerful predictive data analytics tools for energy sector businesses. Let’s look at that next.
Predicting customers’ ongoing energy needs
Extrapolating from existing data, Power BI can offer predictions of customers’ energy requirements based on factors like location, season, and demographic details. Once again, this allows organizations to fine-tune their offerings even more. They can go even further than insights from current usage data and now make better-informed long-term plans.
Because Power BI is designed for ease of use (like the rest of Microsoft’s Power Platform), it’s more accessible for non-data-specialists than other solutions. So, everyone in an energy company who needs to access the data and the insights will easily be able to do so, via clean, professional, and easy-to-read reports.
Increasing efficiency and decreasing impact on the planet
With the right datasets at your disposal, it’s possible to gain insights into when equipment is likely to fail or get an idea of maintenance needs. Patterns in power outages can be analyzed to find ways to prevent or mitigate future incidents. Or organizations can get an overview of how their entire systems for generating and delivering energy are working and performing, to see how innovations can be made.
These insights can be used to optimize operations, significantly boost efficiency, and even help to enable more sustainable decision-making and reduce environmental impact. And by utilizing the datasets that are now available, energy companies can make a real difference to how they operate from a global to a hyper-local level. The possibilities are vast – and they’re all down to your data and how you use it. And, of course, choosing the right data analytics tools for energy sector usage.
The possibilities can only grow in future
I’ve only described a relatively small amount of the possible uses for business intelligence in the industry. Microsoft explores the potential – and current use cases – in greater detail here, including how Power BI can assist with the transition to renewable energy sources, help to empower energy industry workers, and more.
As energy sector organizations gain even greater and easier access to operations and consumption data, their uses for platforms like Power BI will become more varied and more valuable. At the Bauen Group, we’re excited to see what tomorrow holds for the industry, and how we can help to make even better, more data-led, and more sustainable decisions in the future. We look forward to exploring this fascinating – and important – topic with you further.
If you’d like to know more about the benefits of creating a Power BI energy consumption dashboard, or any other aspect of using data analytics tools for energy sector insights, let’s talk. Get in touch with us today and we’ll see how we can help your organization.
