Grid Data Fabric for IT: Discovering, Governing, and Utilizing Data for Grid Orchestration

In a past blog, we discussed the function of the GridOS® Data Fabric and the important role it serves in helping utilities accelerate the energy transition. Now let’s take a deeper dive into how it works.

As a recap, grid orchestration requires data from multiple parts of the energy ecosystem – finding and integrating this information is not an easy task, given the size, speed, and siloed, scattered nature of grid data, to name a few challenges. The GridOS Data Fabric cuts through those hurdles and enables quicker, easier access to grid data.

The functions of the GridOS Data Fabric center around improving the discovery, governance, and utilization of grid data. Here’s a look at each:

With today’s wide assortment of applications and services, there are many places for data to hide. The GridOS Data Fabric provides a centralized view of metadata to discover this data. It does this through the Discover catalog, which centralizes key information associated with decentralized data. Employing metadata makes it faster and easier to discover and model data, as well as enable policy-based data governance to improve integrity, consistency, and accuracy.

A significant barrier to digital transformation is the massive growth of grid data in a monolithic application environment. Data silos, resulting from separate databases tied to individual applications, make it increasingly difficult at times for data practitioners to find data using standard data management tools and techniques. The GridOS Data Fabric solves this problem by enabling data federation, which allows multiple databases to virtually function as one. 

Inaccurate, fragmented, or “out of context” data can do more harm than good. The GridOS Data Fabric uses a metadata catalog to accelerate data governance workflows, increasing accuracy and confidence in the lineage and quality of grid data. One can think of a metadata catalog as an “index,” of sorts. Essentially it sorts different data sets based on their attributes. This type of organization makes it much easier for utilities to access the exact type of data that is needed for certain applications and use cases.

Utilities often struggle to generate meaningful insights from data that originates from different departments. Very often, an organization’s attempt to unify data in centralized locations causes unmanageable workloads for IT teams, leads to inaccurate and siloed data, and obscures valuable insights in a sea of information. The GridOS Data Fabric enables utilities to implement data governance strategies using the metadata catalog to organize, index, and enable easy access to the data (and its associated metadata) flowing through various applications and databases. With metadata and automation capabilities, the GridOS Data Fabric accelerates governance workflows and can provide API-based diagnostic tools for development and troubleshooting.

To explore and analyze data, utilities need a way to work with it. The GridOS Data Fabric enables users and applications to access data with secure, process-driven, self-service tools like SQL query functions and dashboards (i.e. user-friendly, with minimal coding required). The GridOS Data Fabric uses federation to collect data from multiple sources and convert it to a unified model or a “single source” that is consumable or interactable by front-end applications. Federating and virtualizing data simplifies data queries across sources. This enables utilities to have better organizational buy-in, as federated access brings data together while control remains with the owning division or branch (thus ensuring continued accuracy through decentralized ownership).

Data federation architecture also allows utilities to confidently embrace disparate ownership of data (as we discussed in our last blog, this is crucial for maintaining data quality and reliability), while empowering teams to build insights by querying across siloed sources.

The GridOS Data Fabric allows organizations to be more agile and innovate more efficiently by improving access to data across different energy participants (not just within the utility), to enable outcomes like greater markets participation and aggregator visibility. It is an essential tool in unlocking grid orchestration.

For more information on how the GridOS Data Fabric can help you align IT and OT, drive grid innovation, and other outcomes that are critical for orchestrating the grid, download our whitepaper on the topic.