Nathaniel Bullard, Columnist

Digital Twins Inch Closer to an Energy Takeover

Virtual models of jet engines, wind turbines and the like can help companies monitor their energy projects efficiently -- and cheaply.

June 30, 2017 at 3:59 PM UTC

By Nathaniel Bullard

Nat Bullard is a senior contributor to BloombergNEF and writes the Sparklines column for Bloomberg Green. He advises early-stage climate technology companies and climate investors.

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Photographer: SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg

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In a prescient 2011 essay, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen declared that “software is eating the world.” Six years on, software is eating more of the world than ever -- and it is also creating. One of those creations is digital twins, virtual models of industrial equipment, built up with gigabytes and terabytes of sensor data, that allow companies to remotely monitor the performance of power plants, jet engines and … well, anything worth monitoring, really. These digital twins will create numerous opportunities for companies and their clients, as well as raise challenging questions.

Digital twins aren’t unique to a particular kind of company, though industrial conglomerates General Electric Co. and Siemens AG are their most visible proponents. The technology represents an evolution within industrial firms and the logical outgrowth of a number of factors that my Bloomberg New Energy Finance colleagues have identified: cheaper and better sensing, processing and data transmission.