Huawei Agile POL Empowers Enel for Smart Sustainability

Enel now ranks 84th in the Fortune Global 500 list. As a multinational company, Enel has grown its business to more than 30 countries, and owns the largest global distribution grid network. As the world faces greater challenges than ever before, Enel has the power and responsibility to change the world in new, sustainable ways. Innovation and sustainability are at the heart of Enel’s business strategy, in line with Enel’s ‘Open Power’ vision. Open Power means opening energy access to more people; opening the world of energy to new technologies; opening new ways for people to manage energy; opening new uses of energy; and opening more partnerships.

There is another company that also places innovation and openness at the heart of business strategies through its New ICT solutions. The company is Huawei, a leader on the road to digital transformation with its partners and customers.

Innovation and openness brought Enel and Huawei together. The two companies decided to do something innovative, starting inside Enel’s own headquarters building.

Challenges

Need to Upgrade Enel’s Headquarters Network

To accelerate its global presence and improve office efficiency, Enel had introduced bandwidth-consuming services such as desktop cloud, mobile office, and video conferencing; however, its original network failed to support these new services due to complex network structure, high latency, and low network speeds. This affected employees’ office efficiency.

Additionally, the previous traditional networks had several issues with cabling, rising costs, energy consumption, space occupation, and upgrade/capacity expansion. For example, expensive separate cabling for audio, video, and data services costs took up about 80 percent of the total campus network investments. A large number of access switches were used, consuming much electricity and requiring an air conditioning system for cooling. This not only resulted in large energy consumption but also occupied much valuable physical space.

Enel decided to find new ways to deliver smarter, faster, and more economical Office Automation or OA services, with simpler deployment, less space, and lower energy. Enel teamed up with Huawei for network analysis and renovation of the old network system. To tackle the problems, Huawei proposed a Passive Optical LAN (POL) Solution based on Gigabit Passive Optical Networks or GPON technology.

Solutions

Agile POL Pushes Forward Sustainability and Digitization

A POL solution can deliver gigabit speeds up to more than 20 miles while providing video, data, and voice all in one fiber cable with better security and durability, enabling a smarter network.

Huawei’s Agile POL Solution has a flat network architecture and is composed of converged Optical Line Termination (OLT), passive Optical Distribution Network (ODN), and Optical Network Units (ONUs). Additionally, Huawei’s POL solution uses a dual-home mechanism to ensure high network reliability in case of network failure. The switchover time is not more than 50 milliseconds, ensuring a good user experience. Additionally, the ODN network is future-proof to support smooth evolution to 10G PON/40G PON.

Now, Huawei’s AgilePOL network stably operates inside Enel’s headquarters to support services, provide positive user experiences and improvements, such as:

Benefits

Embracing New Technologies for the Energy Industry

Digital transformation is changing the way enterprises do business, offering invaluable opportunities to innovate and to increase the competitiveness of production systems worldwide.

Enel’s 2017 to 2019 enhanced strategic plan will focus on digitization and customers. Enel thinks that digitization would help employees become more environmentally conscious in everyday activities, by enabling: Live streaming of meetings and conventions, mobile work capabilities, GPS tracking tools for operational teams, and drones to monitor networks and systems — this series of innovations allows users to cut down on CO₂ emissions. For example, 421 telepresence meetings were held at Enel during the first nine months of 2015, avoiding the emission of 4,815 tons of CO₂.

Digital transformation also supports Enel’s business in advancing the development of network technologies, from smart grids to digital meters, to the collection and analysis of data, in order to optimize electricity generation from renewable sources.

All these innovations and transformations are inseparable from ICT, and this is why ICT helps make businesses become more sustainable. As a global leading ICT solutions provider, Huawei has developed fully connected power grid solutions that cover every aspect of the Electric Power Industry. These solutions utilize a wide array of access and communications technologies that enable comprehensive sensing of electricity terminals, either wired or wireless. Huawei cloud data centers consolidate and share grid-wide data to support intelligent analytics and management, offering the outstanding support that smarter grids need.

Enel was founded in 1962, and continues to work hard to enable businesses, nations, and individuals to thrive by connecting them to electricity, gas, and the right services for their needs. To this end, Enel interacts with key players of the digital world and constantly embraces new technologies, including cloud computing, Big Data, and the IoT, to make energy reliable, affordable, and sustainable, from the introduction of the first smart meter to becoming the world’s largest producer of renewable energy.

With their respective advantages in innovation and openness, Enel and Huawei are looking forward to continual collaboration in the Energy Industry, aiming to make this world more sustainable. Imagine an intelligent world where everybody benefits from smart energy.