Germany is in the process of completely transforming its energy sector at a pace unmatched by other industrialized nations. Nuclear power is phasing out as renewables are gradually taking over, according to Deutsche Welle, Germany’s international broadcaster.

The country’s politically supervised shift in direction from nuclear and fossil fuels to renewable sources of energy is expected to reduce security hazards and ensure Germany creates a greater share of its own power in the future.

Serima Consulting GmbH, a leading specialist in network management, monitoring and automation solutions, was selected by a device manufacturer to help in the creation of a smart grid offering for a German power company.

Developing the smart grid solution

As an IBM business partner and an IBM Cloud user itself, Serima chose IBM Cloud Private for its development environment.

Because this would be a first-of-a-kind installation that would open the market for monitoring and predicting energy consumption, Serima wanted to protect its intellectual property and keep its smart grid development efforts in house.

Testing, monitoring and marketing elements, along with Kubernetes capabilities, are included with IBM Cloud Private in a microservices architecture. Those capabilities make developing and maintaining applications easier and faster than traditional software development methods.

The smart grid solution includes IBM Netcool Operations Insight and the Agile Service Manager extension, which enable alarms, event management and a view across the grid infrastructure.

Rolling out the solution

The initial rollout of the smart grid solution was successful. With IBM Cloud Private, Serima can show the solution live to potential customers to demonstrate the solution’s grid monitoring and managing functionalities as well as its scalability to accommodate new customers.

There are already other customers interested in projects that would replicate what Serima is doing. And because IBM Cloud Private is open, it’s possible for customers to easily make adjustments to suit their specifications.

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