By Ariana Hurtado, Editor and Director of Special Reports
For the offshore sector, Amazon Web Services' (AWS) work focuses on helping energy leaders from across the value chain transform, innovate and accelerate their businesses by utilizing the cloud.
To assist with the industry's energy transformation, AWS provides services such as enterprise modernization, artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI, high-performance computing, edge and Internet of Things (IoT), and energy data platforms. AWS also is investing in tools specific to the energy industry, such as the work it is doing on digital permitting, interconnection and supply chain optimization. In addition, AWS is quickly innovating in new areas such as machine learning (ML) and AI, IoT, serverless computing, and custom-designed processors and chips.
Case studies
In the offshore wind sector, AWS worked with a wind turbine developer that has more than 49,000 units installed and generating wind electricity across the globe. The digitally enabled turbines collect data, run diagnostics, monitor production and optimize the turbines as they operate.
"Using AWS, the company can gather, monitor, analyze and act on all this data from anywhere in the world," Damien Buie, industry lead for Renewables and New Energies with AWS, told Offshore. "The company has also created a data lake to collect and analyze machine data captured from its wind turbines. They are using Amazon Simple Storage (Amazon S3) to store and protect the growing collection of data and Amazon Redshift to gain news insights from this data. These services also provide a foundation for the company to explore AI and ML capabilities in the future."
In another case study, AWS recently collaborated with WindEurope and Accenture to streamline wind permitting in Europe.
"We’re working together to create a digital platform solution that could facilitate the permitting process of wind energy projects in Europe and an exciting opportunity to help accelerate the energy transition," Buie added. "We are excited about the potential of this solution to help us support the industry."
Generative AI
Buie explained how generative AI is just beginning to be incorporated into offshore wind projects and said there is significant potential for enhancing operations.
"I first want to stress that it’s still early days when it comes to defining the potential impact that generative AI will have on the energy industry, and specifically for offshore projects," he said. "In these early stages, we believe that generative AI-based systems will serve as chat or natural-language interfaces that complement existing machine learning and AI-based systems. And there’s great potential for the future."
He continued, "More specifically, we are trialing generative AI across the full value chain, from enhancing the customer experience, through permitting and interconnection process optimization, training for occupational health and safety for offshore workers, to decision support for operational assets. These applications have been an extension to the ML and AI applications we have been developing across industry for over 10 years, and gen AI is continuing to allow us to innovate across this space."
As companies try to navigate the ebbs and flows associated with technology advancements and the ever-evolving digitalization era, Buie said generative AI could assist with knowledge management challenges.
"Data access and discovery is a long-standing issue, not just for offshore but the entire energy industry," he explained. "For example, some energy companies have decades of documents and data in different formats. Finding and accessing useful information takes a considerable amount of time. Ingesting all of those documents into a generative AI-based solution augmented by an index could dramatically improve data access, which could lead to making better decisions faster. This technology could be further augmented through the support of a generative AI-enabled digital assistant, which could also be used to help train and assist workers, which is particularly useful for offshore."
Buie said Amazon has invested heavily in the development and deployment of AI and ML for more than two decades for both customer-facing services and internal operations, from the recommendation engines that personalize the shopping experience on Amazon.com to the AI-powered robots that optimize order fulfillment in the company's warehouses.
"We are now going to see the next wave of widespread adoption of ML, with the opportunity for every customer experience and application to be reinvented with generative AI," he continued. "For the energy industry, we see generative AI playing a pivotal role in increasing operational efficiencies, reducing health and safety exposure, enhancing the customer experience, minimizing the emissions associated with energy production, and accelerating the energy transition."
Looking ahead
The offshore wind sector—and energy industry as a whole—are focused on meeting decarbonization goals, optimizing production and improving digital processes. AWS provides services to assist with each of those goals. Buie said the path forward for the wind industry is the continuation of technological innovations and successfully implementing those new tools.
"The offshore wind industry has seen incredible amounts of innovation to move it to being a critical part of the overall energy mix. There are some key challenges that the industry faces today, particularly around supply chain management, permitting and interconnection backlogs and the costs of product development for large offshore generators. Effectively implementing digitalization and leveraging data to optimize the deployment, reduce risks in the business model and allow the learning from the existing operations to support the global rollout into new markets will continue to allow the industry to grow," Buie concluded.
