How Uniper is providing sustainable energy for everyone with a modern digital platform

The energy industry supplies electrical power to consumers from a variety of sources, including gas-based and hydroelectric plants, as well as nuclear and coal-based power plants. As temperature, economic and political events occur along with changes in demography, preferences and technology, shifting demand and supply interact to form prices in competitive energy markets. 

Supply and demand need to be managed on a daily second-by-second basis, otherwise blackouts may occur. In this complex world of ever-changing technologies and markets, Uniper, who ranks among large energy generation and trading companies in Europe, didn’t have data readily available to make decisions. Once the idea of an organization-wide data strategy emerged, Uniper decided to go with a public cloud solution for reasons of scalability and cost. Uniper concluded that Talend would be the best cloud integration platform for their cloud architecture.

Providing self-service data and analytics in real time

To create the Uniper Data Analytics Platform, Uniper selected Talend to integrate more than 120 internal and external data sources into a Snowflake central data lake in the Microsoft Azure Cloud. Data governance, provided by Talend Data Catalog, was also essential to the success of the data lake that contains data from very disparate sources. By enabling integration, centralization, and standardization of Uniper’s most valuable data, Talend gives Uniper a single point of truth for decision support. Employees in selected departments now have access to data in self-service mode enabling faster to make the right decisions while ensuring high data quality and governance. Integration costs have been reduced by more than 80% and the data lake project was profitable within 6 months. 

Trading successfully and managing risk

Uniper’s team is a mix of business and IT staff who collaborate to address specific business use cases and solve real pain points for the company.

Now that the relevant information is aggregated in the data lake, questions from traders that previously required months of research can now be answered by market analysis teams right away. Speed is critical because the earlier trading teams can react, the earlier they can take a position and that can make a difference of millions of euros. Once traders have taken a position, Uniper gets real-time information from sensors in the plants, which monitors their status and receives early warnings if components need to be replaced, and ramps up or ramps down production depending on demand. Post trade, the Uniper data lake and Talend have also greatly reduced operational risk and helped easily meet regulatory challenges.