Customer Stories / Power & Utilities

2023
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EGO Energy: near-real time forecasting and a more sustainable future with AWS cloud services

Founded in 2011, the EGO group operates in the renewable energy market. Over the years, it has grown by optimizing its performance in the energy market, relying on a solid IT infrastructure capable of analyzing large amounts of data. In 2018, EGO chose AWS's cloud and managed services to gain the scalability and computing power needed to run its machine learning algorithms. One example is that of EGO's internally developed weather forecasting engine, which has shown a 10 percent improvement in accuracy over the years.

10% reduction

in the error rate of weather forecasts

8x the rate at which

big data is used for forecasting purposes 

15 kilometers

is the granularity of forecasts over the territory

6 hours (near real time)

 the frequency of forecasts

Overview

EGO is a group operating in the renewable energy market. The company's specialty lies in skillfully mixing energy sources to build and manage its energy portfolio in a decidedly dynamic market. To achieve these goals, a key element is weather forecasting, which is used to anticipate and govern supply and demand trends. In 2018, EGO Energy chose AWS cloud and managed services to gain the scalability and computing power it needed: at an affordable cost, it was able to improve forecast accuracy by 10 percent.

Opportunity | Weather is the key to the renewable energy market

Founded in 2011, EGO operates in the energy trading market. It now employs approximately 50 people and generates a turnover of about 1.2 billion euros (forecast figure for 2022). The company operates mainly in the trading of energy produced from renewable sources (photovoltaic, wind, hydroelectric, and biomass), and has under contract more than 1,500 plants with a rated capacity of 2,000 megawatts, which it resells mainly on the wholesale market and to large industrial enterprises. In order to always find the right combination of sources and thus be competitive in the market, it relies on an accurate weather forecasting service. While other competitors rely on third-party operators, EGO has developed its own in-house solution, also leveraging the know-how of EGO Data, the group company that provides data management services, collaborating with leading international research centers and universities.

"Renewables are often not programmable energy sources," says Stefano Cavriani, EGO Energy's sales director, "so to be competitive in our market, we need to be skilled at collecting large amounts of data and making the most accurate and quickest possible forecasts about the changing weather conditions and thus energy production and demand in the market."

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Of the various alternatives on the market, AWS was the one closest to the way we operate. It's more suitable for a technology company that, like us, wants to "get its hands dirty" and master the subject matter, developing a lot of software with a high level of resilience." 

Matteo Fattore

CTO, EGO Energy

Solution | Grow and differentiate through the cloud

In 2018, the Group was at a crossroads: it was a typical SME, but had a turnover of several hundred million euros a year. It had to decide whether to have a " substantial" information system or to rely on a lightweight and inexpensive infrastructure.

To support business growth and the increasing complexity of the competitive landscape, the group chose to rely on AWS for its cloud solutions and managed services, seeking greater scalability and elasticity, to gain storage and computing power at low cost and when needed, and ultimately to improve and keep key business metrics such as EBITDA under control.

"We have been able to build an in-house solution," says Matteo Fattore, CIO and CTO of EGO, "and this is also thanks to AWS managed services. Our company started out digital, always focused on innovation and performance excellence, so at EGO we talk not so much about transformation as evolution; with AWS we have found a great fit. Their solutions are best suited to an innovative company like ours, which aims to master the subject matter by developing software with a high level of resilience."

Therefore, over a period of four years, leveraging the cloud and serverless technology, EGO came to manage about 7 thousand docker containers per day, using more than 150 thousand lambdas. "We are talking about hundreds of microprocesses that run thousands of times in a single day," says Fattore, "all managed by a team of only 12 people, half of whom are data scientists."

The EGO group has therefore turned to AWS Fargate and AWS Lambda to take advantage of maximum elasticity in computing capacity and to Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) and Amazon RDS for Aurora for big data storage.

Outcome | Ten percent more accurate, and EBITDA gains

With a vocation for innovation and digital, today EGO turns services on and off as needed, thus taking advantage of resilient, high-performance platforms but incurring SME-like costs with the Pay per Use model. "It is thanks to this real digital evolution," explains Fattore, "that we now navigate a veritable sea of data, about 5TB every day, which we use to perform Machine Learning and analytics and thanks to which we can operate more effectively in the marketplace." 

In just a few years and thanks to its managed services, EGO has improved the accuracy of its weather forecasts by 10 percent, a significant leap considering the bearing of these forecasts on the ability to anticipate and govern the very dynamic energy market. Not only that; today EGO can count on a finer geographic granularity (1.5-kilometer cells) and a higher temporal frequency (forecasts are made every 6 hours), achieved in parallel with the greater capacity to use the data (8 times more than before).

"Beyond the statistics, which in any case lead us to stronger business fundamentals because they indirectly increase our ability to excel in the market and improve our operating margins," says Cavriani, "today thanks to the cloud we are leaner and more efficient. We have also completed a process of "digital democratization": today even business users, not just data scientists, are able to query the DB and derive information useful for improving the company's performance."

Resilience occupies a separate chapter in EGO's recent history. "AWS also has the ideal characteristics to operate at the systems level, with excellent technical and business support," says Fattore, "so we use services that are evolved but, above all, resilient (with replications on remote DBs, for example). Resilience is a key factor for us as we will increasingly be called upon to directly manage energy facilities and infrastructure (e.g., hydropower plants or any other remotely modulable energy asset), which obviously require guaranteed security and continuity."

The cloud contributes to sustainability

By more accurately mastering the data, the EGO Group will be able to support energy plant operators and industrial customers to an even greater extent in the future, increasing the added value of its offerings, which in the meantime could also expand to international markets. "By forecasting energy production more and more accurately," Cavriani concludes, "we can also help producers optimize production, thereby increasing the share of renewable energy as opposed to fossil fuels and thus contributing to sustainability."

The company

Founded in 2011, EGO operates in the energy trading market. It now employs approximately 50 people and generates a turnover of about 1.2 billion euros (forecast figure for 2022). The Group trades energy produced from renewable sources (photovoltaic, wind, hydro, and biomass) and offers advanced energy services to large industrial customers. 

AWS services used

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda is a serverless event-based computing service that allows you to run code for any type of back-end application or service without provisioning or managing servers. Lambda can be activated from over 200 AWS services and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications, and you only pay for what you use.

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AWS Fargate

AWS Fargate is a Serverless engine with pay-as-you-go pricing that allows you to focus on building applications without having to manage servers. AWS Fargate is compatible with both Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS).

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Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is an object storage service that offers industry-leading scalability, data availability, security and performance. Customers of all entities and sectors can store and protect any amount of data for any use, such as data lakes, cloud-native applications, and mobile apps. 

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Amazon Aurora

Amazon Aurora offers built-in security, continuous backups, serverless processing, up to 15 read replicas, automated multi-region replication, and integrations with other AWS services.

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