Energy is the global challenge of the 21st century. TIBCO is helping more than 300 energy and utility companies around the world meet the challenge to save energy, tap alternative resources, cut costs, and boost grid reliability.

TIBCO is running an event in London UK on “Smart Utilities” next month - and have persuaded Lyndon Wilkin of EnergyAustralia (exploiting CEP down-under) to present.

EnergyAustralia will share first-hand how they are:

* Managing the data deluge: Collecting, analyzing, and acting on massive amounts of data to anticipate and react to problems, outages, or spikes in energy demand.
* Maximizing IT and grid investments: Optimizing existing assets to ensure efficient generation, transmission, distribution, and consumption of energy.
* Alleviating risk: Satisfying regulatory requirements and protecting the integrity of the power grid from operational and physical damage.
* Improving the Customer Experience through proactive and real-time use of data to manage service reliability and SLA’s.

Registation form here.

Just noticed another CEP-related press release: this one announcing details of Energy Australia’s “Meter Data Management” - not to be confused with MDM. Relevant quotes are:

The use of TIBCO products as the foundation platform has allowed Energy Australia to realize significant efficiencies in data entry and integrity, which has led to significant improvements in customer service and improved turnaround times. This also has provided Energy Australia with a real-time view of the customer and facilitated the scalability and robustness for a 4000 times increase in data volumes from the new Smart Meters …

Central to its integration architecture to manage interactions with energy markets, Energy Australia … Intelligently analyzed large volumes of data in real time for enhanced decision-making capabilities using TIBCO BusinessEvents^TM.

CEP driving the Smarter Planet, indeed…

Randy Huston of Xcel Energy in Minneapolis spoke about “Smart Grid City”. He introduced Xcel Energy as a “traditionally regulated” utility, and one of the largest worldwide users of renewable energy in the world. They set up a consortium in 2008, including Accenture and its partner TIBCO, to create a SmartGrid iniative.

The 3 big issues for utilities dealing with smart grids are:

1. manage increasing data
2. leverage existing systems
3. extract additional value from this data

An example of this is that newer smartmeters (such as domestic electricity meters) are measuring 8 variables and uploading the information every 15 minutes - compared with traditional meters where one parameters is read manually every 3 months!

Smart Grid City have developed 2 complex event processing applications for:

• Outage Intelligence: use CEP to analyse transformer and meter events (outages, restorations, and communication losses), using the grid state connectivity to correlate events and update the existing Outage Management System. This updates the model where they deduce the problem location from all the complaint calls received - now replaced by the outage events received - and thence determine the “highest level problem” that needs fixing. Using CEP to save 15 minutes for every problem detection.
• Fault Intelligence: putting intelligence - CEP - into the substations themselves to allow them to do things like adjust loads automatically…

So some great, smart grid, CEP use cases here!

Not really too CEP-related, except that events and event processing can take place anywhere: TIBCO’s Cloud Computing initiative is an announced agenda item for next week’s TIBCO NOW global webevent. I haven’t seen the content, but clearly the main area of interest is likely to be Corporate Cloud Computing (i.e. your distributed-managed data center), and there is an obvious connection to virtual service management (i.e. TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix product set).

TIBCO NOW also includes some EP/CEP content under the Enterprise Optimization thread:

• • Supporting Dynamic Change Management with CEP

  • Philippe Goujard, Senior Manager, Accenture
  • For a major micro-electronics manufacturer any change request is a long and complex process: it impacts machinery, production, logistics, training, and documentation. By introducing a complex event processing solution based on TIBCO BusinessEvents the client optimized monitoring of a complete “change request” project, improved time to market, and reduced risks associated with conflicting projects.

• • Keeping the Lights On while Managing the Complexities of Compliance

  • Lyndon Wilkin, Solution Manager, EnergyAustralia
  • EnergyAustralia (EA) has over 100 years of experience providing broad-based energy solutions to over 1.6 million homes and businesses. Hear how EA is using TIBCO software to gain real-time visibility into customer service levels, to detect and respond to events that could affect compliance, market obligations, and providing a foundation technology for enabling the intelligent grid.

• • The Future of Enterprise Optimization

  • Alan Lundberg, Senior Product Marketing Manager, TIBCO Software
  • Visibility into every facet of your business is key to improving quality, customer service, and cost control. TIBCO provides the ability to harness the power of existing data and in-flight information across your many customer touch points in real time. Managing your business at the speed of events is essential to be a leader in today’s market. This session will discuss the event processing technology that SouthWest, QWEST and CitiGroup use to drive competitive advantage and that analyst firm IDC ranked number one in the market.

Registration is, by the way, free.