Energy management firm Blue Pillar’s latest update to its Aurora platform, which connects businesses to a single energy system, may help secure energy access to allow them to avoid power outages — while also boosting energy efficiency.
Aurora – billed by the firm as an “energy network of things” now has end-to-end encryption and logs records for business to react to threats before they occur.
Blue Pillar has also made the Aurora 5.0 platform more scalable through the addition of public and private cloud services, which give large businesses the ability to deploy changes at the same time across multiple sites.
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Aurora at the intersection of big data and big energy
Aurora 5.0 also makes an attempt at optimizing big data collection, to provide businesses with usable and actionable data instead of tons of unusable and random energy data. Blue Pillar claims that this reduction in size will bring faster insights to businesses and lower storage costs.
“New Internet of Things (IoT) technologies improve everything from how we live to how we work and these capabilities are desperately needed within the energy industry. Without IoT, energy information that is instrumental to the success of the business remains trapped inside siloed systems and must be manually obtained through expensive truck rolls or time-consuming facility walk-throughs,” said Tom Willie, CEO of Blue Pillar.
Blue Pillar’s platform comes at a time where grid failures are almost commonplace, rising six-fold in the past 13 years. The Aurora platform looks to use IoT to vastly reduce the amount of energy loses, even with poor grid performance.
“Blue Pillar has been a fast-growing leader in the behind-the-meter nanogrid, microgrid and virtual power plant space in terms of total on-line capacity,” said Peter Asmus of Navigant Research. “Adding stronger security, scalability and data management into the Aurora platform will be fundamental as more facilities and service providers connect a more diverse set of energy assets to strengthen infrastructure resiliency and avoid grid failures.”
