The Hybrid Approach: Building on a Shared Data Foundation

A Digital Control Platform (DCP) is the data infrastructure that connects, collects, normalises, and manages operational data from renewable energy assets. Most operators frame the decision as buy or build. In practice, the strongest approach combines both.

The renewable energy industry will not benefit from more organisations investing in building data collection infrastructure from scratch, or from more operators being locked into inflexible vendor platforms that exercise lock-in through data control.

What’s needed is a fundamentally different approach—one built on a best-in-class unified data foundation. A Digital Control Platform can serve as the OT data lake that powers your custom analytics and reporting. It can also connect you to a thriving ecosystem of pre-integrated digital solutions, each designed to extract actionable insights from your operational data through the platform’s API.

The beauty of the hybrid approach is that you don’t have to choose just one path. Organisations can pursue both buy and build strategies simultaneously—building proprietary applications while leveraging third-party solutions—to assemble the optimal digital ecosystem for their unique operational needs.

Building effective data infrastructure for renewable energy operations starts with accepting a fundamental truth: some problems are worth solving once for the entire industry, while others are genuine sources of competitive advantage. The key is correctly identifying which is which.

The Extensible Foundation

A true digital control platform delivers value through its architecture. All PV plants and wind farms are assembled from common infrastructure elements—inverters, turbines, weather stations, and the like. The platform should come with a vast library of pre-built plugins for collecting data from all common equipment and maintain those plugins over time as firmware and protocols evolve. The plugins normalise data at collection, then reliably and securely centralise all OT data in a cloud datastore.

The key is what happens next: a high-performance RESTful API and real-time streaming interface make your data easily accessible whilst eliminating the cyber risks of allowing third parties to connect directly to local plant SCADA systems. This architecture gives you complete control over who accesses your data and how it’s shared, enabling you to build your differentiated applications on a solid, secure foundation.

In practice, this means starting with a robust platform that handles data collection, protocol handling, normalisation, edge management, and secure transport. These are solved problems that don’t need your custom attention. Look for platforms that handle the maintenance burden of supporting hundreds of equipment types and protocols, but don’t lock you into their analytics or visualisation tools.

Build your differentiated logic on top: your custom forecasting models, specialised analytics, unique optimisation algorithms, and proprietary workflows. This is where your engineering talent should focus because this is where you create value that competitors can’t easily replicate. We cover where to focus your engineering resources in more detail in What to Buy and What to Build.

Maintain a clean integration layer that keeps these components loosely coupled via APIs. If you need to change your analytics approach, you shouldn’t have to rebuild your data collection infrastructure.

The Path Forward

The choice isn’t really between building and buying—it’s about building the right things. Let a proven Digital Control Platform handle data collection, normalisation, security, and cloud infrastructure. Direct your engineering talent toward the proprietary forecasting models, optimisation algorithms, and custom analytics that create genuine competitive advantage.

When evaluating your strategy, ask a simple question: are your engineers solving problems unique to your business, or reinventing solutions that every operator needs? The complexities of maintaining data infrastructure at scale—across hundreds of sites, dozens of equipment types, and ever-evolving security requirements—consume resources that should be focused on capabilities that differentiate your operations.

Choose a platform that puts you in complete control of your data from the source to the cloud. If the commercial solution you’re looking at limits what you can collect or how you can access or share your data, it’s the wrong platform. Build where it matters, buy where it doesn’t, and architect the integration layer that keeps both options open.

This flexibility becomes even more critical as AI is rapidly maturing. A widely adopted Digital Control Platform makes clean, gap-free, normalised data easily accessible to a growing ecosystem of solutions that can extract increasingly valuable insights from your operational data. We’ll explore how AI is transforming renewable energy operations in an upcoming post.