In recent years, the energy market has had to deal with a fast-moving evolution, closely linked to two significant issues impacting and reshaping the reference scenario: the fight against climate change and the growing integration and liberalization of the EU's internal energy market. These two phenomena create a unique opportunity for players operating in this sector.
Energy transition has to go hand in hand with ecological transition. It represents the primary key to the sector’s development, following a trend already established at an international level and which has recently accelerated at a significant pace thanks to the European Green Deal. The European Union has identified the decarbonization of its energy system as one of the key elements for implementing its long-term strategy of achieving carbon neutrality by 2050.
To this end, it has set intermediate targets for 2030, the most important of which are a 55% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to 1990 levels, the achievement of a 32% share of renewable energy, and the improvement of energy efficiency by at least 32.5%.
At the same time, the growing integration and liberalization within the European energy market are leading to a constant rise in competition extended to an ever-greater degree to new players. For this reason, the utilities sector is being called upon to implement digital transformation projects to eliminate inefficiencies. This involves developing products and services based on the integration of all utilities businesses, to create an ecosystem and optimize processes.
Data is the central element for developing new business models moving in this direction. It is essential to adopt an evolutionary approach using the tools offered by digital to allow companies to become sustainable, fast, inclusive, and data-driven. This requires infrastructure and application modernization to enable all the data-related advantages, such as the capacity for predictive maintenance, real-time reporting, and the involvement of artificial intelligence, to take a new step in the energy sector.
Dedagroup focuses on developing these new models, proactively contributing to creating solutions to face the future challenges in three major areas of digital transformation: Public Services, Treasury & Finance, and Cloud.
Utility operators play a central role in this new political and economic strategy. Water, environmental, and energy resources are the three vectors that can accelerate the transition to a zero-emission economy. Still, supporting local areas with fairer and more sustainable development models is essential. Achieving the ambitious decarbonization objectives requires a fully resilient, digital, and flexible distribution network to ensure both optimized production management and timely governance of the resources available regarding actual consumption needs. Today, a network information system and Building Information Modeling (BIM) solutions are enable this transformation in sustainable terms, fully supporting the planning, surveying, implementation and maintenance processes. A development that will also overcome the challenge of the north and south infrastructure gap — a critical issue for Italy — to be overcome.
Rethinking and optimizing processes through digital, fully exploiting the potential of technologies by embracing the advantages offered by emerging ones, are some of the first steps to improve operations in the utilities market. In this context, modern application paradigms, able to exploit even the most advanced digital enablers such as machine learning, cognitive computing, and data analysis, can prove to be real game-changers. Therefore, it is necessary to recognize the critical of data, both for offering customers timely and effective services and, above all, for reducing the complexity of all billing, payment and cash flow reconciliation, and cash audit procedures.
For building a fully integrated and interconnected energy market, it is essential to complete the digitalization of utilities. This development finds its most valuable ally and a digital enabler in cloud computing. One of the Green Deal’s main objectives is the promotion of innovative technologies for creating a modern energy infrastructure, building interconnected energy systems, and better-integrated networks.
