Hitachi Energy has launched a new Artificial Intelligence (AI)- powered energy forecasting solution, Nostradamus AI. Developed using Hitachi Energy’s deep energy industry expertise, Nostradamus AI leverages the company’s 30 years of the most extensive energy market data to provide utilities, power system operators, energy producers and traders with highly precise forecasts for common energy-specific use cases.
One of the first AI forecasting solutions purpose-built for the energy industry, Nostradamus AI is a modern AI engine that can generate forecasts estimated to be over 20% more accurate than some industry targets. The solution optimises energy investments, trading strategies and revenue opportunities, streamlines operational efficiencies and resource planning, and ensures transparency for regulatory compliance.
Data volumes have exploded as the grid has evolved. According to the IEA, the world’s wind turbines, for example, register more than 400 billion individual data points annually and smart metres generate several thousand times more data points than the analogue metres they are replacing. In addition, today’s energy market and grid are increasingly volatile due to variability introduced by renewable power generation. At the same time, electricity demand is growing unabated, and organisations are under pressure to meet energy security and decarbonisation goals. Collectively, these market forces are driving organisations toward AI, which can process large, disparate data sets to significantly increase the accuracy of their forecasts, a move critical for managing energy markets and the grid in the energy transition.
“Advanced forecasting is integral to effectively manage a company’s energy portfolio strategy, allowing operators and analysts to make informed decisions across their businesses quickly,” said Massimo Danieli, Managing Director, Business Unit Grid Automation for Hitachi Energy. “We’ve applied our extensive energy domain expertise and data science background to create an AI engine that can significantly accelerate the ability of users to make impactful decisions with their energy data, deliver improved profitability across their businesses, and scale as the grid evolves.”
An AI tool engineered for the energy industry
Nostradamus AI, built specifically for the energy industry using Hitachi Energy’s domain expertise, combines grid-performance data, market forecasts, and advanced asset monitoring underpinned by machine learning and other data science best practices.
The solution is a configurable, predictive analytics tool that puts the power in the hands of investors, operators, developers, and traders. Users can plug their owned and third-party data and unique parametres into Nostradamus AI’s pre-tuned, off-the-shelf models to generate accurate, customised energy-specific forecasts – called pipelines – for system load, wind generation, solar generation, market pricing and more. Nostradamus AI creates regression style forecasts that make it easier for users to interpret and explain their forecasts and make better-informed business decisions.
Solution built on cloud-native, agnostic and composable architecture
Hitachi Energy Nostradamus AI is a cloud-native solution that can scale with ease from a single forecast to more than 100,000 forecasts. With users’ future forecasting needs in mind, the AI engine can, for example, generate predictions for the renewable generation of a single wind turbine and solar farm or thousands of different load points. In addition, Nostradamus AI is algorithm-agnostic and today supports several of the highest performing AI models. It is built with a composable architecture, allowing organisations to use their existing application programming interface (API) endpoints to speed and scale development, and is easy to automate and integrate with users’ systems.
“Hitachi Energy’s new solution integrates with customer data through its own AI energy product,” said Maryam Akram, Research Principal at Chartis Research. “Moreover, as well as extensive forecasting tools and application design, which support and guide customers’ use of machine learning models (including state-of-the-art techniques), Hitachi Energy’s solution transparently manages each stage of the model lifecycle, combining energy domain expertise with an effective Machine Learning strategy.”