Teréga: using digitisation to enable energy transition

Our ambition is to make digital work for Teréga’s workers, allowing them to manage our gas infrastructures in the best possible way, in terms of safety, functional efficiency and environmental efficiency. The first step in our digitisation process was to prioritise our actions according to Teréga’s specific needs. We therefore defined the following action plan:

• The acquisition of tools currently available in the market to meet the needs of business-wide departments (human resources, purchasing, accounts etc.) and Teréga’s IT requirements (availability on all devices, cloud integration etc.).

• A freedom of information programme, with the creation of a data hub and the introduction of a data management process.

• The use of IT infrastructures (AWS and GCP) which already support billions of users around the world to run our tools and produce a modern, reliable, secure, cost-efficient and low environmental impact digital ecosystem.

• The development of new expertise and new agile working methods (Devops, Safe, LeanStartup etc.) to allow the development of services which are distinctive, appropriate and innovative, working hand in hand with  business teams.

These days, everybody uses electrical sockets to connect their electrical appliances to the public mains. We do not all create our own electricity. In the same way, we have chosen to “plug” our Teréga tools into the public cloud. This is the best way of building digital services which are accessible on all platforms, perform well, are secure and use the least possible amount of energy. The size of industrial data centres means that their operation can be optimised in terms of efficiency, security and energy consumption. Running servers actually consumes a lot of energy. When that energy is pooled to serve a large number of clients, it can then be shared out according to each individual’s own usage, in contrast to private data centres, which need to maintain energy consumption even when the tools are not being used.

One of the main challenges facing industry today is the optimisation of infrastructures, both operationally and environmentally. Such optimisation can only be achieved through a study of the data. Without digital, only about 10% of industrial data can be used. At Teréga, our priority has therefore been to find a way to make our existing data capture tools smart and communicative. For that to work securely, without us being hampered by the amount of data being sent, we have created a smart box. Alongside that, we have set up a Data Hub and launched a Data Management process to take best advantage of this new information. Thanks to that platform, which we have called IOBASE, and the business expertise we have built up, we can now create distinguishing services for the company.  

Our objective is to continue drawing on the IOBASE to increase its range of activities and design a true smart multi-energy grid. Various digital tools are currently in development and will allow us to design and then manage the system introduced in our IMPULSE 2025 multi-energy grid demonstrator.

In this way, Teréga is in the process of building a new range of services which can be of use at corporate, regional or territorial scale, or beyond. The first bricks of that new digital offer are already in place:

• smart design and optimisation services: continually enriched with new data, they enable the scope of the offer to be widened, so that a multi-energy, multi-actor system can be designed,

• a hypervisor: a management tool relying on the cloud and instantaneous data collection for the real-time management of the equipment in the multi-energy system,

• a multi-energy and multi-actor marketplace tool: thanks to its high-performance technological platform (cloud, blockchain etc.), it manages commitments between producers and consumers to offer the optimal configuration for efficiency of the model, in real time.