PSC and Harmonic Analytics announce strategic partnership
August 3, 2021
Tim Miles

PSC and Harmonic Analytics are pleased to announce they have entered into a global strategic partnership, combining PSC’s independent consulting and engineering services for utilities and energy companies with Harmonic Analytics’ world-class data quality, advanced analytics and data science services.

Why partner?

PSC helps its global clients power a more sustainable world by applying our deep domain experience and specialized skills to solve the real-world problems facing the electricity industry today. We recognize we operate in a niche market; our consultants possess very particular experiences and expertise that make us extremely valuable to our clients in certain scenarios. We know we can’t ‘be everything to everyone’ and we don’t intend to be. That’s why we’ve cultivated our strengths around what we do well, namely, specialist consulting and engineering solutions for the global electricity market.

Partnering with other like-minded companies allows us to deepen ties with complementary businesses, foster collaboration and longevity, and enables us to offer services and solutions that help our clients bring the most value to their customers, electricity consumers.

Why data analytics?

The largest producers of power grid data are the hundreds of millions of sensors and controls embedded in smart devices installed in buildings, substations, generators, transformers, and other equipment in electricity transmission and distribution networks. The amount of data from a higher penetration of variable renewable generation resources, demand response programs, weather agencies and distributed energy resources like electric vehicles and battery storage has the potential to overwhelm even the most experienced grid operator.  Add to that the potential social media data and video surveillance available from various sources and the challenge becomes clear: Extracting actionable information from this abundance of operational and non-operational grid data.

Electric utilities and their customers are challenged by their ability to harness the tsunami of available data to help make more informed, actionable decisions. Utilities need quality data and analytics to forecast activities such as changes in power flow, make investment decisions, and model consumer behavior.  As the utility value chain becomes more automated, grid operators benefit from data and analytics by providing them efficient ways to anticipate risk and respond faster to changes in the system. 

Why Harmonic Analytics?

PSC has a long-term relationship with Harmonic Analytics and both teams recognize the value of bringing our global specialists with deep domain knowledge and technical experience together. PSC has 26 years of working with electric utilities worldwide and is offering our power systems engineering, technical, and project management expertise to this partnership. Harmonic Analytics brings 18 years of data science and data engineering services to our joint projects aimed at helping clients make better, faster data-driven decisions. 

As an indication of our commitment, PSC and HA are already working together with client WPD in the UK on their Network Innovation Allowance funded  NEAT (Network Event and Alarm Transparency) innovation project.

PSC President & CEO Alex Boyd said, “By supporting WPD with its innovation projects, PSC and Harmoinc Analytics together are helping develop critical knowledge and expertise shared with other network operators, delivering potential environmental benefits, making electricity networks smarter, reducing costs to customers, and maintaining security across the grid.”

Additionally, Harmonic Analytics has been awarded funding for intelligent alarm system R&D from Callaghan Innovation, New Zealand’s innovation agency.  The R&D will bolster the WPD development and support other electricity clients in the field of alarm analytics. 

“As electricity networks evolve to support carbon zero targets, DER and other new challenges, the resulting complexities increase alarm floods and the volume of noisy alarms.  The solutions being developed by PSC and Harmonic identify, manage and resolve these impacts, predict failure trends and improve asset performance.” HA has named PSC as a key technical participant in the R&D program.

We’d love to speak with you about how we can collaborate – our teams working with your teams – to discover meaningful insights, increase operators’ situational awareness, and better inform decision-making across your business. Please contact us to talk about working together.