Application of big data for distribution and consumption of power

Abstract

The exponentially growing and tremendous collection of data stored in the power sector, combined with the need for data analysis, has produced an urgent need for powerful tools to extract hidden data as to effectively distribute the power for proper consumption for the household. This research work was embarked on to show the business value of big data analytics in Energy and utilities with a focus on how analytics can help solve problems of inefficiency and wastages in electricity generation, production and distribution and how raw energy datasets can be converted into insights that can be used by energy policy makers to make major business decisions. To explicitly show how raw data can be turned into insights, the study deploys the use of the Hadoop on Hortonworks’ open-source apache-Hive licensed data warehousing framework run on a windows operating system to turn raw datasets (in excel formats converted to .csv format) gotten from the prepaid meters of 196,000 consumers (households and businesses) in 11 business units of Ikeja Electricity Distribution Company (IKEDC, Nigeria) to analyze the distribution and consumption of power.