The rise of digital technology disruptive power has been felt industry-wide across sectors in enterprise and consumer markets.
The 4th Industrial Revolution describe this as part of a huge change in social, economic and society changes driven by rapid technology advances, changing environment, social and infrastructural changes. This is reshaping traditional industries and their role in the years to come demanding new ways of thinking and working (World Economic Forum 2016).
Energy and Utilities industries are at the epicenter of this convergence, manifesting in new innovation and automation "in front of the smart meter and behind". While cost to service and regulatory compliance continue to be core to the industry, the energy paradoxes exist in competing issues of energy security, environmental pressures, and efficiency in operational while transitioning and migrating to new forms of innovative energy and utility business models.
In recent research by enzen global In the next 2 to 5 years we forecast potentially 30 to 50% of business processes could be fundamentally altered by digital capabilities and their impact on Cost-to-serve and efficiencies. In the longer term 30 to 60% of existing operator revenue could be impact by digital channels modernization and shifts in consumption. This will occur at different rates of local, national and global energy markets in both Developing and existing economies will national and international regulation push clean energy, decarbonization and renewable energy performance targets.
In the micro-economic performance, digital enterprise best practices are rapidly diffusing into enabling smart assets, digital workforce, connecting sensors to SCADA and operations to build an Industrial Internet of Things set of capabilities in generation, distribution, transmission and into consumer and remote markets. At a Macro-economic level new business models of Distributed energy, renewables, and alternative energy hybrid models are generating new investment planning issues. Digitization is cutting across these through new levels of sensorisation, new informatics, Artificial Intelligence and robotics. New forms of digital data capture and visualization in 360 location and asset scanning, Virtual and Augments reality advances are changing the landscape of how assets, work and productivity may get done in the near future. New Consumer Internet of Things and the Internet of People driven by consumer behavior customer centric data powered services are changing the loci of demand and supply to new community and peer models. Underpinning this is Health and Safety and security of supply as well as rapidly developing cyber security management challenges expanding the risks and scope for regulators and market governance locally and internationally.