Digital drivers of the future energy mix and workforce

According to Mark Biagi, the fundamental challenge facing the energy industry today is the transition from a centralised grid to a system with lots of different distributed energy sources and power generation on the outside.

“We're moving to a system that is far more complex,” begins Bentley Systems’ Senior Director of Energy.

“The energy system must incorporate inputs from offshore wind farms and solar sites, alongside things such as geothermal or hydro facilities. Many of these energy resources are far from centres of population or far from industry, which further complicates the situation.

“One of the advantages of the big central thermal power plants is that they're very efficient – the downside obviously being that they're burning fuel.

These newer, distributed sources are providing power that is often more intermittent and of variable quality, so everything coming in needs to be regulated and rectified to make it appropriate for the grid.”

Despite these hurdles, Biagi is optimistic about the energy industry’s motivation and ability to overcome them. “The opportunity here is that these different players are providing ways of decarbonising the grid and indeed industry – particularly industry that's dependent on a lot of heat.

“Rather than burning something to generate that heat, you can take the waste heat from other things – data centres, perhaps, as an example. Therefore, the whole system is becoming more complex to address these needs.”

Biagi notes that as well as becoming more complex, the system is also becoming more interconnected. He says: “One recent project Bentley has been involved with featured the co-location of power production data centres.

“In this project, Fervo Energy was using Bentley tools to manage the drilling at its geothermal power plant – so, managing all the above- and below-ground infrastructure – but the plant was connected to a Google data centre, providing that baseload energy. That’s a really interesting story because it’s the opposite of a data centre that's connected to the grid. And we're seeing more of those co-location opportunities, more of that interconnection of electricity, generation, renewables, heat and so on.”

New opportunities require new ways of working, and Biagi’s colleague, Sharon Soler, Solution Manager for Energy, believes that digital tools can assist here.

“One of the challenges in energy has always been the issue of teams working in silos. This is an issue that’s not only related to data, but also to different disciplines.

“So, Bentley is really trying to help streamline data across the workflow – and this isn’t just about interoperability itself in terms of technology and how various systems are talking to each other: we want all players to work more efficiently right from the planning phase of a project.”

Illustrating this approach, Soler cites a subsurface modelling project involving Flux Energy, a finalist in Bentley’s recent annual user awards.

“Flux Energy is streamlining the workflow and the data for the workflow. The team is assimilating machine learning models to optimise their simulation regarding the predictability of the scenarios in the next five years, to properly model the subsurface facilities.

“This includes looking at where they are putting the power that is generated so this can be optimised right from the planning stage. Looking at the data that you are consuming, putting some layers of AI in effectively, this all helps to create a more efficient workflow and that case study is a nice example of how to tackle the longstanding siloed disciplines issue.”

Biagi and Soler both agree that digital tools can play a critical role in knowledge-sharing among different industry players. Here, Biagi highlights the issue of graduates joining the energy sector with a broad engineering understanding who then go into a very specific role “and a lot of the specificity is regarding the use of a tool that's esoteric”.

He explains: “For instance, the value of the data captured in that tool is locked in a proprietary format. It's difficult to access. You need specialist knowledge just to get access to it.”

The energy expert feels that opening up access to all interested parties is important in solving such problems.

“When it comes to something like an engineering simulation, if you're able to present the results of what was achieved with the tool’s inputs but demonstrate it in a way that a more generalist person has access to, all of sudden you are unlocking access to the value of the model.

“Different players can have access to results they can actually validate. They can see data presented in settings and in context even if they weren’t trained in the specific tool used to run the simulation,” he details.

“Being able to bring together disciplines and share data, rather than everybody being so discipline-specific is a big part of what Bentley’s Infrastructure Cloud is all about.”

Greater collaboration is also of value in unlocking the value of those engineering graduates that Biagi mentioned earlier, who he labels as ‘digital twin natives’.

On this subject, he comments: “The new generation may not need to be educated at that kind of historical ‘three sciences’ level – there are design and modelling environments that can be created whereby they can really add value from the off.

“They can be working very effectively in this new world of gamification – for example, we have several people at Bentley who come from a games design background.”

Soler is also keen to encourage the next generation of engineers and designers, and she too believes that although education and qualifications certainly play a role, attitude and mindset are likely even more important.

“My advice isn’t necessarily the usual ‘learn to code’ suggestion, despite the fact I’m an enthusiastic coder myself. Instead, it's about having the curiosity to want to learn to code – or indeed to do something else entirely. Technology is evolving at the same time as the generational gap is closing and it’s very important that technology captures more curiosity from people. It needs to become more attractive.”

Biagi reveals that Bentley is playing its own role in making technology more attractive for the next generation – and he explains that getting to them while they’re young is integral to the company’s approach here.

“Like many companies, we’re heavily involved in the university-level STEM education pipeline, but over the past few years we’ve been working with a group of industry partners at schools in the UK.

“This spans simple things such as talking about qualifications that might lead to a place in further education or an apprenticeship and creating the notion of a foundational apprenticeship called Global Infrastructure in the Built Environment,” he says.

“And this idea is all about targeting the kids that aren't doing the three sciences and maths and so on, but who will get inspired by more practical skills such as how to become a drone pilot and how to take digital images using the drone.

“They can then take images of their school and campus and stitch everything together using Bentley's iTwin Capture software; and they end up generating models of their own environment. It's gamification and it’s showing them that you don’t necessarily need to understand every aspect of a specific technology to use it and easily integrate it with various other tools.”

Biagi describes this style of freeform experimentation as being representative of what's happening in industry: “But the experimentation these young kids are doing is actually far ahead of what many industry players are doing,” he laughs.

“There’s a lot of work to do but we want kids to learn about what the opportunities might be in industry, because they’re currently often behind closed doors. Bentley is passionate about the new and emerging opportunities in the energy sector – and we’re all about inspiring this new generation of digital twin natives.”