Last month, the office of Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that LA’s City Council had approved development of the largest solar and battery energy system in the United States. The approved development will provide renewable energy for nearly one million residents at a fixed cost of less than 2 cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for the power, the lowest price offered in U.S. history.
At ACE IoT, we are brimming with pride to be associated with this historic project. Indeed, we agree with Mayor Garcetti’s admonition that the coming decade needs to be “the action decade, the climate decade.” Projects that marry utility-scale battery storage to solar power projects represent a significant and exciting step forward.
In this post, we seek to highlight the small - but important - role that open source tools play in the IT infrastructure that supports 8minute’s solar deployments.
Data is a key input into a cost-effective solar power and battery project
ACE IoT Solutions’ customer, 8minute Solar Energy, is responsible for the development, maintenance, and operation of the facility in Kern County, California. 8minute will develop the project and begin commercial operation no later than December 31, 2023.
While it might not be intuitive, delivering a low-cost, solar and battery solution is a data intensive exercise. 8minute analyzes data from a variety of sources to design and operate its systems most efficiently. In order to continue delivering record breaking value to its customers, 8minute reevaluates its data sources and acquires new sources regularly, with a variety of structures including both streaming and batch datasets, this results in the need of for a flexible and easily expandable data pipeline architecture.
Working with 8minute’s software team, ACE IoT Solutions has designed a resilient and cost effective data pipeline infrastructure that easily scales as 8minute adds new sites and new data sources. On top of best-of-breed cloud services that provide elasticity, we’ve included open source tools like Grafana to change monthly batch reporting into real-time dashboards that reduce data QA cycle times and enable more rapid business decisions. This resulting infrastructure ensures that 8minute is prepared to deliver the leading solar and storage solutions at a scale that truly impacts our planet’s Climate Crisis.
As we look to add more sites to our portfolio, ACE IoT Solutions’ expertise has allowed us to reduce our costs related to data ingestion and data analysis by 10X, compared to our previous solution. Moreover, data-driven insights that took overnight runs are now available in minutes.”
Bora Akyol, Senior Director of Software Engineering, 8minute Solar Energy
New Tools + Approaches are Changing How Effective Organizations are Managing Data Flows
To Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) space, ACE IoT is bringing our expertise working with the advanced tools and approaches that Internet Service Providers and Cloud Service Providers use to monitor and orchestrate thousands of services.
If you plan to pursue projects related to integrating renewables, distributed generation and storage, or grid interactive buildings, we invite you to reach out to us. We would be pleased to explore how modern cloud systems and open source software - including Eclipse VOLTTRON - can help your organization (and/or your customers) reduce costs and improve outcomes when managing data flows.
Please drop us a line at info@aceiotsolutions.com.