As electric utilities face mounting pressure to modernize infrastructure, minimize outages, and navigate the energy transition, one thing is clear: data is a critical asset. But collecting data alone is not enough. Utilities must also find smarter ways to store, analyze, and act on that information.
That is where two powerful technologies come into play: data lakes and digital, or data, twins. While they serve different purposes, when used together, they provide a foundation for smarter, faster, and more proactive grid management.
What is a Data Lake and Why Should Utilities Care?
Before diving into why data lakes become even more powerful when paired with a digital twin, it is important to first understand what a data lake is. At its core, a data lake is a centralized system that stores raw data exactly as it is. Whether the information is structured, unstructured, or somewhere in between, it is preserved in its native form. For utilities, this could include drone footage, LiDAR scans, maintenance logs, weather data, sensor readings, and GIS maps. Unlike traditional systems that require data to be cleaned and sorted before storage, a data lake allows utilities to keep everything intact and organize or interpret it later depending on the project.
This capability matters because utilities generate enormous amounts of data across departments that rarely communicate with one another. In many organizations, vegetation management teams cannot easily access inspection reports generated by aerial crews, and sensor data might be trapped in specialized formats that other departments cannot interpret. A data lake eliminates these barriers, creating a shared hub where information is stored and made available for anyone who needs it.
Even more importantly, data lakes use what is known as a schema-on-read approach. This means that users do not need to decide upfront how the data will be used. Instead, they can apply different organizational methods later depending on the question they are trying to answer. For utilities that generate terabytes of information each year, this flexibility is essential. The same dataset might be valuable to an operations team investigating storm damage, to a planning team modeling load growth, or to a vegetation management team analyzing tree encroachment patterns.
By breaking down silos and making data more accessible, a data lake creates better coordination, smarter analysis, and stronger decision-making across the entire organization.
What is a Digital Twin?
If a data lake is the library where information is stored, a digital twin is the living model that brings that data to life. A digital twin, sometimes referred to as a data twin, is a virtual replica of a real-world asset or system. This could be a substation, a single transmission line, or an entire segment of the grid. What makes a digital twin powerful is not just its ability to represent physical assets visually, but its ability to incorporate live data feeds that reflect real-world conditions in real time.
Through this connection, utilities can monitor operations, simulate disaster scenarios, and predict outcomes using both real-time performance metrics and historical patterns. A utility might, for instance, simulate how an incoming windstorm could affect a transmission corridor based on current load, the condition of nearby assets, and weather forecasts. This type of foresight enables utilities to act proactively, rather than reactively, and positions them to reduce risk and improve reliability.
Another advantage of digital twins is their ability to learn. The more inputs they receive, whether from aerial inspections, IoT sensors, LiDAR scans, or satellite imagery, the more accurate and intelligent they become. Over time, this creates a system that is not only descriptive but also predictive. Digital twins can highlight threats before they escalate into outages, identify areas of concern with surgical precision, and help utilities take preventive action. It is this blend of visualization, analytics, and foresight that makes digital twins one of the most disruptive technologies in utility operations today.
Why They Are Better Together
While data lakes and digital twins can each stand on their own, their true potential is realized when they are combined. Data lakes are excellent at handling the past, storing years of historical information that would otherwise remain unused. Digital twins excel at handling the present, providing real-time awareness and predictive capabilities. When these two are linked, utilities gain the ability to handle the future.
The data lake provides the deep historical context that a digital twin needs to make its predictions more accurate. A digital twin simulating vegetation risk, for instance, can perform far better when it has access to years of tree growth patterns, outage history, and inspection records stored in the data lake. This combination creates insights that are not only predictive but also highly actionable. Utilities gain systems that are smarter, more precise, and more reliable than what either technology could achieve alone.
Together, data lakes and digital twins form an engine for continuous improvement. The digital twin consumes live and historical data, produces new insights, and those insights can then be fed back into the data lake for future analysis. This feedback loop compounds value over time and drives better outcomes across operations.
What an Ideal System Looks Like for a Utility
Utilities that embrace both data lakes and digital twins build a grid that is more agile, resilient, and intelligent. The benefits ripple across nearly every function of the organization.
During storm response, for example, outage records stored in the data lake can feed into digital twins to model storm paths and identify the most vulnerable assets. With this information, utilities can deploy crews in advance to the right locations, reducing downtime and minimizing damage. In vegetation management, years of growth and encroachment data stored in the data lake can be combined with real-time aerial imagery in the digital twin to prioritize trimming in areas that pose the highest risk.
The integration also streamlines the adoption of renewable energy and distributed energy resources. By using digital twins to simulate how new solar arrays, wind farms, or battery systems will interact with the grid before deployment, utilities reduce risk and accelerate planning. This capability becomes especially valuable as utilities work to maintain stability while bringing more renewable resources online.
Inspection planning is another area transformed by this integration. Instead of scheduling broad sweeps across an entire service territory, a digital twin can highlight precise areas that show early signs of degradation or risk. Crews can then be directed to focus only on assets that need attention, saving time, reducing labor costs, and ensuring more efficient use of resources.
The larger implication is that integrating data lakes and digital twins moves utilities from a reactive mode of operation to a predictive and proactive one. Instead of waiting for outages to occur, utilities can anticipate them and act beforehand. Instead of investing broadly in costly upgrades, they can target spending where it delivers the greatest impact. Instead of struggling to keep up with an evolving grid, they can take control of it.
Preparing for the Future
The pressures facing utilities today will only intensify. Aging infrastructure, growing energy demand, climate-driven risks, and the push toward decarbonization require new tools and approaches. Data lakes and digital twins are not just technologies that solve today’s problems. They are foundational capabilities for the future of the grid.
Utilities that embrace this pairing will find themselves better equipped to manage risk, optimize investments, and deliver reliable service to their customers. Those that do not may find themselves constrained by data silos, outdated processes, and limited visibility into their systems.
In the end, the message is simple. Data is only as valuable as the insights it produces. A data lake ensures utilities can collect and preserve everything. A digital twin ensures they can make sense of it and put it to work in real time. Together, they provide the intelligence needed to build a grid that is smarter, stronger, and ready for whatever challenges lie ahead.
By Kristy McDermott, Vice President of Sales at Sharper Shape
