Azure IoT provides real-world sustainability solutions

Organizations are implementing cutting edge IoT and Digital Operations solutions to support sustainable business practices, meet energy conservation targets, and improve operational efficiencies in today’s fast paced environment. he want to share a few recent tales that demonstrate how businesses use technology to address actual sustainability concerns for their clients since he is so impressed by their work.

Sustainability measures cut expenses, waste, and energy use

Microsoft Azure makes sure that manufacturing firms are well equipped to comprehend, minimize, and validate their environmental consequences by utilizing technologies like open industrial IoT, advanced analytics, and AI. Two instances of Azure customers adopting IoT and Digital Operations to cut costs, waste, and energy utilization are Celanese and SGS.

The firm Celanese, which produces speciality chemicals and materials, envisions a digital plant of the future that will be run on Microsoft Azure and Cognite Data Fusion. The plan is to integrate their operations, resources, and 25,000 personnel into a single, secure platform where AI algorithms actively recognize and address manufacturing issues.

For a multinational specialized manufacturer like Celanese, the capacity to quickly and affordably implement a variety of solutions anywhere throughout its value chain translates into savings of millions of dollars through the optimization of heavy equipment and industrial processes.

The foundation of Cognite’s infrastructure is Microsoft Kubernetes Service (AKS). Complex calculations are orchestrated by Azure Functions using Azure Data Lake stored data. With contextualized industrial data, Azure’s AI capabilities and Azure Machine Learning give useful insights. In nearly 30 industrial facilities around the world, the solutions increase energy efficiency and lower carbon emissions.

SGS, a business that does testing, inspection, and certification, collaborated with Microsoft Azure to create OCM-Online, an intelligent wind turbine device that makes use of Azure IoT Edge, Azure IoT Hub, and three Azure database services.

The solution gathers information from sensors that provide data on more than 17 distinct metrics from more than 315 wind turbines to monitor and forecast turbine oil conditions and levels. The Three Gorges Yangiiang Shaba Offshore project, one of the biggest wind farms in the world that supplies power to 2.4 million homes, has the solution installed throughout.

Wind farm operators no longer change oil according to a predetermined schedule, just when data indicates that it is necessary. As a result, recycling issues and pointless oil changes are considerably diminished. In the past, field crews would manually gather samples and transport them to a lab for examination.

Digital solutions like OCM Online are crucial for addressing waste and recycling issues because the global market for online oil fluid monitoring is expected to grow from 689.7 million USD in 2021 to 1.4 billion USD by 2031.

Energy saving measures are driven by data

The development of clean energy technologies, such as wind, solar, hydropower, and nuclear power, is accelerating. But addressing the supply side of energy use alone won’t help us reach our ambitious global energy reduction targets. Reduced demand is necessary.

Without clear and readily available data, it can be difficult for customers to make decisions about their energy use. Innovative solutions from Azure customers like SA Power Networks and Watts provide consumers with the information they need to make wise decisions.

The Danish energy technology business Watts offers one consumer-based solution. Watts’ smart home energy-tracking software uses Microsoft Azure to enable homes to watch their own energy usage patterns, understand how energy is being utilized, and decide whether or not to operate equipment. Customers can opt to power their homes with green energy because they can see where the energy is produced.

The business is in the forefront of creating simple, open-source tools that anyone can use to track their power usage. Almost all households connected to the grid now use less energy thanks to near real time data monitoring.

The Microsoft.NET platform, a free, open-source software development framework and ecosystem created by Microsoft, is the technology Watts decided to use for his project. It produced a network of 50 microservices that utilized Azure Event Hubs and the Azure Service Bus for communication.

Azure Table Storage and Azure Blob Storage are also used by the system. The company’s customer base has significantly grown, showing that people desire to make decisions that have an impact. By the end of 2022, Watts had increased from 150,000 users to 550,000.

SA Power Networks, a South Australian utility business, has developed a further consumer-focused solution. It created ac-based solution that enables people with rooftop solar panels to export extra solar energy to the electrical grid. The system that serves 1.7 million clients over 180,000 square kilometers uses a sizable portion of the extra energy that is generated.

Data from the devices gives SA Power Networks visibility into local network conditions, enabling it to react more swiftly to possible problems. Additionally, it enables dynamically regulated network capacity to maintain the balance of energy resources for a grid that is more reliable and stable. All customers on the SA Power Networks grid now have access to more low-cost, renewable energy as the typical customer’s energy exports have doubled in only a year.

Operational effectiveness lowers expenses while promoting growth

Businesses that streamline their processes see higher productivity and lower manufacturing costs. They also utilize fewer materials and less energy. A platform powered by Azure IoT is used by Telefónica, a telecommunications company, to effectively and securely manage 6.5 billion messages daily.

With the help of Microsoft Azure IoT and the Azure IoT Hub device provisioning service, its Home Advanced Connectivity (HAC) technology enables real-time, bidirectional data flows between 4.5 million in-home gateway devices and the Telefónica cloud.

By obtaining information directly from a customer’s router and delivering a patch inside a single, continuous data flow, operations teams can identify or anticipate connectivity problems. Additionally, HAC employs IoT Hub device twins to support accurate, remote router configuration. With this effective digital solution, growing to 20 million devices over the next five years will be simplified.

Let Azure bring out the best in you

Azure is fostering innovation and accelerating success across numerous industries globally, from startups to Fortune 500 powerhouses. The work our clients are doing to support sustainability objectives for the public and private sectors is just a small sample of what they do.

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