As community and business concern over global warming, sustainability, and energy security continues to rise, companies such as Bharat Light & Power (BLP) are working on answers.

Founded in 2010 and located in Bangalore and Delhi, BLP is one of the leading clean energy generation companies in India. According to Tejpreet Singh Chopra, Chief Executive Officer of BLP, the business started with the aim of delivering clean energy from renewable sources such as wind, solar, biomass, and hydro to the 300 million residents of India that did not have reliable access to power at that time.

However, BLP soon began experiencing problems ensuring availability of the wind turbines that powered utility-scale wind power generation across the country.

“While we were investing large amounts building wind farms, the failure of the smallest component could shut down an entire wind turbine and compromise our efficient operation,” says Chopra. “A $5,000 battery could fail and shut down a $2.5 million piece of equipment!”

BLP transformed its legacy thinking about man, machine, technology, and process, and implemented an AI and Internet of Things (IoT) project. The business used hundreds of tags from its wind turbines to capture and send machine behavior and performance data to a control center. This data triggered an 18-month project to create AI and machine learning algorithms that would enable engineers to predict component failures in wind turbines, improve generation, and adjust maintenance and replacement schedules accordingly.

This activity provided the foundation of a technology business—one of the three companies that comprise BLP—that delivers enterprise AI for industrial uses over a platform, branded Orion.

“We provide an end-to-end solution that enables businesses in industries such as transportation, logistics, ports, infrastructure, oil and gas, supply chain manufacturing, steel, and automotive to improve productivity,” says Chopra.

As the business expanded, it began to extend beyond its core “AI for industry” mission. It recruited an IoT team to help factory owners and operators enable the programmable logic controllers (PLC) and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems that run disparate equipment and machines—such as production line machines of different ages and countries of origin—to talk to each other and provide usable data and insights.

Agility and adaptability key

BLP’s management team realized early that the business needed to be agile and adaptable to keep pace with changes in technology.

“We knew we would have to effectively destroy and remake the business every 18–24 months to remain relevant, so we needed a service that could support our dynamic infrastructure, data, and AI needs,” says Chopra.

The business started operations on a cloud service but quickly ran into problems. “We found in the world of industry—the vast amounts of data, the variety of sources of data, and the complexity of insights required—created a very different set of challenges relative to the consumer technology environment,” says Chopra. “Our cloud provider could not provide an architecture that made sense for an industry-focused solution.”

Google Cloud to power AI and visual analytics

Within two years, BLP advanced its strategy and focused on using open source to reduce the cost of its architecture. As Orion matured and its take-up grew, the business began looking at multinational cloud services to run the forthcoming version 3.0 of the platform.

BLP found Google Cloud provided the best fit for its needs for a range of reasons, including the ease of use of Google Cloud services—likened by the BLP technology team as “the equivalent of a consumer app experience”—and its high quality database services, high availability, fast response times, and the power to run the platform’s AI and visual analytics.

BLP established as its key objective a 20% reduction in costs over its previous cloud service and availability levels exceeding 99.9%. The business completed the deployment in June 2019 following discussions and input from Google Cloud’s engineering and architecture experts prior to and during the first stage of the project.

Cloud IoT Core—a managed service that allows organizations to connect, manage, and ingest data from dispersed devices—is the cornerstone of the architecture supporting the latest latest version of the Orion platform, Orion 4.0. BLP has also created a data pipeline based on Cloud Pub/Sub event ingestion and delivery and Cloud Dataflow data processing.

Cloud Bigtable provides a high-performance NoSQL database service for the platform’s analytical workloads and BigQuery delivers a powerful analytics data warehouse. Cloud Functions enables the business’s developers to build event-driven serverless applications.

This architecture currently captures, processes, analyzes, and reports on 8 million data points in 578 turbines around the world per day and processes data from 200,000 data points in 4,000 sensors per day.

The Google Cloud architecture supports the data visualization and reporting and the AI and machine learning-powered products created by BLP. These reports and products enable users to monitor remote assets and use AI-based analytics to predict machine failures before they occur, sequence failure events, and maximize equipment uptime.

A range of benefits to customers

With Google Cloud, BLP is delivering projects with a range of benefits to customers, including increasing manufacturing productivity by at least 5% and reducing costs by about 10%.

“We’ve enabled one of the largest electrical companies in India to compare production line performance by capturing data from PLC and SCADA systems and extracting it to Google Cloud for processing, analysis, and reporting,” says Chopra. “For another customer, we’ve deployed an IoT system that has saved them about $200,000 in energy costs over six months.”

The business is also providing monitoring, reporting, and analysis to predict likely failures of gearboxes, bearings, generators, and blades in 2,000 wind turbines—that provide close over 2 GW of wind power—in countries such as France, Germany, Italy, India, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Furthermore, BLP is providing visual analytics to help one of the largest ports in the world detect when workers are not wearing helmets or safety equipment.

“We also do a lot of inventory track-and-trace work to help companies improve supply chains and help factories keep track of tooling through Bluetooth low-energy technologies,” says Chopra.

With Google Cloud, BLP is now ideally placed to execute its business strategy of helping customers improve productivity and increase growth, control and reduce costs, and enhance quality and safety.

“We are realizing this strategy by working to become the best company in the world at using AI to predict machine failure,” says Chopra. “Our underlying technology strategy entails enabling the most advanced IoT hardware used by industry to talk to software and the cloud, using the most powerful AI cloud around—which is why we chose to marry our AI algorithms with Google Cloud—and delivering insights through visualization.”

Testing Edge TPU

The business is now testing Edge TPU to run AI at the edge in high-performance, small-footprint, and low-power ASIC environments.

“We think that will be the next big revolution as TPU costs come down,” says Chopra. “It will be a considerable benefit performing AI at the edge rather than involving the full infrastructure of the cloud.”

BLP is keen to build on its existing relationship with and use of Google Cloud to further transform manufacturing worldwide.

“Manufacturers are pushing the boundaries of quality and cost through initiatives such as Lean Six Sigma, Zero Defects, poka-yoke, just in time, and other methodologies and approaches,” says Chopra.

“The next wave of manufacturing improvements are coming through industry 4.0, AI, IoT, and Google Cloud’s analytics, databases and other services. These are ideal to power this change in the industrial world.”

Azimut Group operates an international network of companies handling investment and asset management, mutual funds, hedge funds, and insurance. Founded in Milan, Italy in 1988, Azimut Group today has branches in fifteen countries, including Brazil, China, and the USA.

“We have subsidiaries and manage funds all over the world,” explains Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager at Azimut Holding S.p.a. “That means that any technology that we put in place has to cover needs from many different countries.”

“When complicated analysis has to be executed, we have to increase our table space in a couple of minutes so that the AI can drill down into the data and deliver the information we need.”

—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.

Azimut manages its funds with investment advisors who use information sourced from Bloomberg, Reuters and others. “They use a huge amount of data,” says Simone. “They work with spreadsheets, algorithms, formulae and they analyse data in minutes.” In finance, every second is crucial, which is why Azimut decided to develop a risk management dashboard that can process information even more quickly, then distribute it worldwide.

“When an advisor manages data, that data is used to make immediate decisions on funds, capital movements or whether to sell stock,” says Simone. “They have to be ready to make recommendations for any amount of data that comes to them. For our dashboard, that means that when additional information arrives or complicated analysis has to be executed, we have to increase our table space in a couple of minutes so that the AI can drill down into the data and deliver the information we need.”

Generating insights at speed

Investors and investment managers make decisions based on the most accurate, up-to-date information possible. For Azimut Group, information sourced through financial data vendors such as Bloomberg and Reuters provided only part of the data that the group required.

“We looked to collect information from a range of different providers,” explains Simone, “then analyse it to develop a predictive algorithm that could work faster than an advisor stationed at the terminal. We set ourselves the challenge to try to manipulate that data to add new insights into our matrix, so that every one of our branches across the world can see risk information about the funds in real-time.”

“We compared Google Cloud Platform’s performance with our previous cloud provider, and saw huge benefits of switching to Google. For me, the key performance issue is scaling. With Google Cloud Platform I know that I can increase and decrease my infrastructure quickly, when I need it.

—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.

The first cloud provider Azimut used to build its system struggled to scale quickly to meet different kinds of data challenges. “If we wanted to add more cores, that was fine,” says Simone. “But the previous cloud provider made it complicated to raise the amount of space in a database infrastructure and scale up to demand. Scaling up for more in-depth analysis would take a day, and our need was immediate.”

That’s why Azimut switched one year ago to Google Cloud Platform to run the 150 VMs on its risk analysis platform. “We compared Google Cloud Platform’s performance with our previous cloud provider, and saw huge benefits of switching to Google. For me, the key performance issue is scaling,” says Simone. “With Google Cloud Platform I know that I can increase and decrease my infrastructure quickly, when I need it. Instead of waiting a day to scale up infrastructure, we can request and add space to our database in a couple of minutes.”

The infrastructure of Azimut’s solution handles around 800TB of data per month, and Google’s global network of servers and high-speed connections ensure that it gets to where it’s most needed by the most direct route. Impressed by the speed, security and availability of Google Cloud Platform, Azimut has moved its intranet on to Google Cloud Platform, too, eliminating the need for staff to login with VPNs.

“Instead of waiting a day to scale up infrastructure, we can request and add space to our database in a couple of minutes.”

—Simone Bertolotti, IT Manager, Azimut Holding S.p.a.

Driving ahead with Noovle

For Azimut, migrating the risk management dashboard is the latest of many Google product collaborations with cloud consultancy Noovle. “Everything started five years ago,” says Simone, “when Noovle assisted us in migrating to Gmail from our on-premise email solution. From G Suite to Google Cloud Platform, we’ve had a great relationship. Noovle provides consultancy services, support for mobility, and external advisors who work on our premises, such as when they trained us how to broadcast our meetings on Google Hangouts. As an independent company, we know we can trust them for transparent advice. All they care about is the best way to get a job done and to help us reach our goals.”

New app, new customers

In a business case comparison, Google Cloud Platform cost Azimut 35% less to run than the previous cloud provider. Now the group is building a major new mobile application on Google App Engine to be released in 2018.

“The new mobile application will allow customers to trade directly, without human advisors, by proposing different investment solutions depending on targets the customers set,” says Simone. “So if a customer aims to make money with investments, they enter their relevant personal information and we carry out the necessary regulatory checks and suggest what they could buy. The entire project will be based on Google Cloud Platform, so customers can control their investments through the app while we manage the fund, using Google Cloud Spanner on the backend.”

When Google announced our plan to go beyond purchasing renewable power for 100% of our energy usage and operate on 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030, we noted that achieving this goal will require new transaction structures, advancements in clean energy policy, and innovative new technologies. Today, we’re pleased to announce that one of these new technologies—a first-of-its-kind, next-generation geothermal project—will soon begin adding carbon-free energy to the electric grid that serves our data centers and infrastructure throughout Nevada, including our Cloud region in Las Vegas.  

Google and clean-energy startup Fervo have just signed the world’s first corporate agreement to develop a next-generation geothermal power project, which will provide an “always-on” carbon-free resource that can reduce our hourly reliance on fossil fuels. In 2022, Fervo will begin adding “firm” geothermal energy to the state’s electric grid system, where Google’s commitments already include one of the world’s largest corporate solar-plus-storage power purchase agreements. 

Importantly, this collaboration also sets the stage for next-generation geothermal to play a role as a firm and flexible carbon-free energy source that can increasingly replace carbon-emitting fossil fuels—especially when aided by policies that expand and improve electricity markets; incentivize deployment of innovative technologies; and increase investments in clean energy research, development, and demonstration (RD&D). 

Next-generation geothermal technology

Traditional geothermal already provides carbon-free baseload energy to a number of power grids. But because of cost and location constraints, it accounts for a very small percentage of global clean energy production. 

That’s one reason this new approach is so exciting; by using advanced drilling, fiber-optic sensing, and analytics techniques, next-generation geothermal can unlock an entirely new class of resource. And the US Department of Energy has found that with advancements in policy, technology, and procurement, geothermal energy could provide up to 120 GW of firm, flexible generation capacity in the US by 2050. 

As part of our agreement, Google is partnering with Fervo to develop AI and machine learning that could boost the productivity of next-generation geothermal and make it more effective at responding to demand, while also filling in the gaps left by variable renewable energy sources. Although this project is still in the early stages, it shows promise.

Using fiber-optic cables inside wells, Fervo can gather real-time data on flow, temperature, and performance of the geothermal resource. This data allows Fervo to identify precisely where the best resources exist, making it possible to control flow at various depths. Coupled with the AI and machine learning development outlined above, these capabilities can increase productivity and unlock flexible geothermal power in a range of new places. 

This won’t be the first time that Google is applying software solutions to clean energy applications: we’ve just announced an update to our carbon-intelligent computing program that helps us reduce emissions associated with running applications at Google data centers. And other forms of AI and machine learning are currently being used to increase the value of wind energy. 

Already this year, Google has taken significant strides toward sourcing 24/7 carbon-free energy for all our data centers, office campuses, and Cloud regions. On Earth Day, our CEO Sundar Pichai announced that for the first time, five of our global data center sites operated near or at 90% carbon-free energy in 2020. 

Not only does this Fervo project bring our data centers in Nevada closer to round-the-clock clean energy, but it also acts as a proof-of-concept to show how firm clean energy sources such as next-generation geothermal could eventually help replace carbon-emitting power sources around the world.

Wipro has partnered with Google for migration of its enterprise-wide SAP footprint to the Cloud platform. The engagement will bring SAP applications and workloads to the cloud to support the country’s fourth-largest software services firm’s 180,000-plus employees.

Bhanumurthy B.M, President and Chief Operating Officer, Wipro said that as a provider of digital transformation services to some of the world’s most impactful businesses, it is critical that the company’s own core systems and technologies are running on intelligent and modern platforms that encompass the needs of the future.

“The technology that we’re getting into right now, and the kind of design led approach that we are taking, I think customers will benefit significantly from this,” he told ET.

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