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An Interview with Erik Maqueda Moro

from Tecnalia

November 22, 2022

Erik Maqueda Moro is the Data Analyst and Project Manager in the Digital Energy & Environment team in Tecnalia and Technical Coordinator of PLATOON H2020 project.

 

He has an MEng in Industrial Engineering by the E.T.S.I. Bilbao, an MSc in Gas Turbines from Cranfield University, and is currently finishing an MSc in Data Science from Aston University. He has a proven track record in a wide variety of projects applying data analytics and A.I. into the energy sector (e.g. digital twins for wind turbines, ML models for energy efficiency, predictive maintenance, soft sensing in Oil & Gas, etc.). He is also currently working on different projects and initiatives based around energy data spaces. Previously, he worked for four years in the department of predictive maintenance at Rolls-Royce.

 

He also worked as a researcher for Lufthansa Technik in the development of a new methodology to estimate the effect of engine operating conditions on maintenance costs.

 

Can you please tell us about the challenges of your role as PLATOON’s Technical Coordinator and some of the most significant challenges of the project in general?

 

PLATOON is an ambitious project that aims to reinvent the data paradigm in the energy sector shifting from siloed data platforms to a federated ecosystem formed of diverse data and service providers. Indeed, PLATOON can be considered as one of the pioneers of the so-called dataspaces. This is an ambitious transformation that involves diverse digital areas such as big data architectures and communication protocols, semantic ontologies, data sovereignty, privacy and security and data analytics, artificial intelligence and edge computing.

 

These solutions need to be deployed and validated in different pilots at different maturity levels. All this involves continuous coordination of different partners with different skill sets ranging from energy experts to digital experts.

 

Can you tell us about the different services TECNALIA are developing as part of the project and why they are so important to PLATOON’s objectives?

 

Tecnalia actively participates in 3 out of the 8 pilots of the project covering the whole electricity value chain from renewable generation, smart grid management and optimisation of the end use of energy in smart buildings. On the one hand, we have developed a hybrid digital twin of an electric power drive train of a wind turbine that combines both physics-based model and data analytics techniques that can diagnose failures and reduce the operation and maintenance costs enhancing the performance of current techniques. On the other hand, regarding smart grid management, we have developed a soft sensor of the top oil temperature of distribution transformers that is used for predictive maintenance and remaining useful time extension.

 

Also, in the same use case, we have developed data analytics tools for non-technical loss detection to optimise the smart grid operation. Finally, regarding the end use of energy in smart buildings,  we have developed an advanced EMS tool for optimising HVAC systems and PV self-consumption in order to reduce the energy bill.

 

Additionally, in this use case, we have developed a vibration analysis tool for hydraulic pumps at the edge using GPU machine learning algorithms. All these data analytics tools perfectly summarise the objectives of PLATOON. In fact, as we understand it, interoperability and trust are just the means to foster collaboration of different stakeholders to unlock new valuable information that cannot be obtained otherwise and that will be translated into an improvement of the energy sector.

 

Interoperability represents a key challenge for a more adapted and integrated interactive energy sector. Can you please tell us in what ways PLATOON will contribute towards overcoming this challenge?

 

Interoperability is a necessary requirement in order to build any data space/ecosystem. Up to now, organisations have tackled these issues defining ad-hoc one-to-one connections using in-house data models and APIs. However, this is not scalable. In fact, as the number of participants in the ecosystem increases, the number of connections increases, and the number of one-to-one connections increases exponentially, making it unmanageable.

 

Hence, it is necessary to establish a common framework so that heterogeneous platforms from different stakeholders can exchange data and services with each other. This common framework is formed of a set of common vocabularies (semantic ontologies) and communication protocols (APIs) that all the stakeholders understand and adhere to, ensuring interoperability and making the ecosystem scalable. In this sense, PLATOON has defined an open-source common reference architecture, semantic data models and Open APIs based on existing open standards such as IDSA, FIWARE, SAREF, SEAS, CIM etc.

 

One of the stated aims of PLATOON is to offer access to cheaper and sustainable energy for energy consumers and maximise social welfare. To what extent do you feel these goals will be achieved, and do you see PLATOON paving the way for a wider rollout of the technology that is being tested in the future?

 

As explained in a previous question, in PLATOON we have developed, implemented and validated several use cases in real large-scale pilots that leverage the exchange of data and service from different stakeholders to extract valuable information from data and help on decision-making to optimise the whole energy value chain. For example, we have worked on diagnosing failures of distributed renewable energy sources, increasing availability.

 

Equally, we have developed several data analytics tools to ensure grid stability and power quality supply on smart grids and microgrids.

 

Finally, we have developed several tools to optimise the usage of flexible devices and self-consumption in smart buildings. All these use cases aim to reduce energy prices and greenhouse emissions, resulting in cheaper and more sustainable energy, consequently increasing social welfare in Europe.