Eletrobras digitalises with Google Cloud

Brazilian energy giant Eletrobras has selected Google Cloud as its cloud partner to accelerate its digital transformation journey.

Electrobras intends with the initiative, which includes the migration of the group’s technology infrastructure to Google Cloud, to make intensive use of data and artificial intelligence solutions to meet key challenges in areas including transmission and generation asset management, energy trading and enterprise sustainability management.

“Google cloud technologies can be used in a variety of projects in the operational areas of companies, such as monitoring vegetation along transmission lines, in the search for better use of the incidence of light in solar energy projects, in the use of augmented reality in hydroelectric plants and transmission lines, among other functions,” comments Wilson Ferreira Junior, President of Eletrobras.

“The partnership will allow optimising the performance of the generation and transmission assets, besides being a key arm of the intensification of investments in clean sources, predicted by senior management in the post-capitalisation scenario.”

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As part of the agreement, Eletrobras will migrate much of its infrastructure and applications from its private cloud to the Google cloud, which should enable greater efficiency and scale.

In addition, the modernisation should enable a more holistic data analytics strategy with data from all of Eletrobras’s information sources, delivering better and more rapid insights for business decisionmaking.

Marco Bravo, head of Google Cloud Brazil, says that Google Cloud will work with Eletrobras to “bring greater efficiency to its operations and explore new use cases to solve its main challenges in the industry.”

For example, the initiative opens up opportunities for using artificial intelligence and machine learning to help the company achieve its efficiency and expansion goals. Among the possibilities are the development of indicators for risk reduction, maintenance optimisation, project innovations, management of current assets and planning for the implementation of new assets.

Eletrobras also intends to explore the use of these technologies to accelerate clean and sustainable energy projects, including delivering insights for the optimisation of the renewable energy generation, transmission and marketing chain.