Digital market for Power Products & Services

The business environment around us is changing very fast, at a pace which until a few years ago was impossible to imagine. The digital ‘tsunami’,...

byNeeraj KAUL


The business environment around us is changing very fast, at a pace which until a few years ago was impossible to imagine. The digital ‘tsunami’, if I may use this word, has a potential to dismantle years of established business models, which, to some extent, is already happening. I love to ask my senior executive peers from the power industry (ones with the domain expertise) how they cope with the new digital world in their respective businesses. Frankly, most of them do not feel too comfortable discussing how, for example, distributed cloud computing could change the world around us all, their immediate concern being the increasing competitive pressures and, of course, ever-increasing demand for renewables – a trend that has surprised even the most ardent critics of the technology.

And what about the demand-supply imbalance in the power equipment business! Did we see it coming? Perhaps we did, but many industry strategists seem to have turned a blind eye to the bigger picture, investing in markets where demand was slowing down while building (over)capacities in the domestic markets around the time when general economic slowdown was taking place everywhere.

Conventional power industry has been left with an overhang that calls for a reset of sorts. PowerTender, led by power industry professionals with many years of experience, thus found the timing right to launch the next digital revolution in the global power equipment trade and associated services.

In the last few years, a lot of advancements have been made on the digital front. Infrastructure build-up around large scale data centers, software systems, internet reach, speed of communication and data analytics have shown remarkable potential. The cost of using these services has also come down, making it possible to use such technologies across the energy sector as a whole. Information and Communication Technology (ICT), as it has come to be known, is going to be the backbone of many innovations going forward.

Changed business model

The power industry has traditionally been very conservative, driven primarily by the reliability of providing uninterrupted power to its customers. Adoption of new technology has generally been cautious and equipment sourcing follows a set practice. Yet, power sector is credited with early adoption of digital technologies, especially around operational aspects of the interconnected systems; e.g. advanced energy management and SCADA systems.

 

 

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