Counties Energy Powers the Future with Snowflake’s AI Data Cloud

Counties Energy is a community-owned electricity distribution network. 

We've been around for about 100 years. We serve around about 50,000 customers, homes, businesses, community groups that span from south of Auckland to the north of Waikato. 

We want to unlock the full energy potential of our customers so they thrive sustainably. The key challenges facing the electricity distribution industry is the rise of decarbonization and decentralization. That means our customers will have the likes of EVs, EV chargers, solar, solar batteries and they will be connecting them to our distribution network. And for that we need insights on how our distribution network is behaving and operating. And that's where data comes in. 

As a distribution company, we've been looking at the same data for about 100 years. We gather a lot of it. It gets gathered from different devices, different parts of our network and different people on our network. There's been a dramatic change in the past five and certainly in the next 15 years. 

Now that means that we have to get a better handle on our data, understand the quality of the data that we've captured and get it into people's hands to make decisions faster than we previously had to do. So data provides us key insights into how the distribution network is operating. 

Using the Snowflake AI data platform, we'll be looking to democratize data and getting it into more and more people's hands across the business so they can make more intelligent decisions about the distribution network. 

Snowflake lets us have business users log into it. We've had particular success with the Cortex Analyst at this point. There's a dramatic difference having a conversational relationship with data as a business user rather than having an expectation that you're going to have SQL skills or any kind of engineering skills to be able to extract that data. And typically the expectation has been that if you want to self-serve, you're going to need some level of that capability. And Snowflake has allowed us to start to push that out and challenge some of that notion. 

dataengine’s been fantastic for us in getting up and running quickly on the platform. They knew exactly what they needed to do to get us started and Snowflake made it easy for them. Their expertise there was really helpful.  I didn't have to retrain our own team. I didn't need to rehire. Within a matter of months, we had gone from a system with no data in it to a system with data in it where people are able to query using the cortex analyst in a way that was never possible before. As we look to the future, we'll be looking to onboard more and more data sets across our technology platform. This will help us improve the network performance across the business and improve the cost to serve for our customers. 

Snowflake is foundational to our data strategy and our data strategy is foundational to our future.