A plant operator plugged a personal phone into an HMI to charge it and accidentally tethered the device, giving an air-gapped control system a live internet connection. At another site, the cybersecurity lead walked through the front gate wearing a USB drive on a lanyard at a facility with a strict no-USB policy. These are […]
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There certainly is no shortage of interest in applying AI to distributed energy operations. Battery storage operators want predictive analytics at the cell level. Renewable fleet managers want optimization recommendations across hundreds of sites. Grid operators want faster fault diagnostics closer to the asset. The ambition is real, and the use cases are sound.But ambition […]
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Edge AI enables energy companies to monitor aging brownfield infrastructure by processing sensor data locally, replacing the diagnostic expertise lost as experienced engineers retire. At IIoT World Energy Day, panelists from TDK SensEI, HiveMQ, PrivacyChain, and ARC Advisory Group outlined the operational frameworks required to deploy Edge AI for maintaining infrastructure uptime, covering prescriptive analytics, […]
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Most factory data architectures today serve between 10 and 50 consuming systems. Agentic AI will push that number into the thousands, a 100x increase in edge-based data consumers. The ISA-95 layer-by-layer model was not designed for this volume, and manufacturers need to rethink their data infrastructure before scaling AI agents. IDC reports that 56.6% of […]
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You installed the sensors. You bought the AI license. You hired the data scientist. Yet your million-dollar pilot is stuck, delivering quirky answers that no one on the floor dares to trust. The problem isn’t your algorithm. It’s the coffee-stained, handwritten maintenance log from 1998 that your new AI has no idea how to read.In […]
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Manufacturing knowledge is fragmented and mostly unusedEuropean manufacturers collectively hold decades of deep production knowledge: how materials behave, how machines are tuned, how quality issues emerge, how processes fail and recover. Yet this knowledge remains locked inside individual companies, plants, and teams. It is applied locally, rarely reused, and almost never scaled.At the same time, […]
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In 2026, the primary barrier to manufacturing efficiency is the abundance of data. Modern plants now monitor tens of thousands of assets and hundreds of thousands of individual points. However, this connectivity has created a new operational hazard: Alert Fatigue. When a plant manager receives thousands of notifications a day, the most critical “signal” is often […]
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Piezoelectric vibration sensors have been the factory standard for more than 50 years. According to Dr. Antoine Filipe, CTO of Tronics Microsystems, a TDK Group Company, MEMS-based digital sensors are now following the same replacement curve that already swept through consumer electronics and aerospace. This article examines why the shift from analog to digital vibration […]
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IIoT World covers OT cybersecurity for energy infrastructure, including removable media risks, air gap strategies, and ICS security frameworks for renewable energy operators. With estimated cybercrime costs reaching $10.5 trillion between 2020 and 2025, the energy sector has become a primary target internationally. Recorded attacks in recent years have left 600 apartment buildings without heat […]
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There is an unspoken rule in manufacturing technology that overrides every software license, every boardroom mandate, and every digital transformation roadmap. It is the OT Veto. This isn’t a failure of leadership or vision. It is the logical, inevitable outcome of a system where one group is measured purely on the certainty of production, and […]
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The data challenge facing energy operations todayPower grids, renewable energy sites, battery storage facilities, substations, and smart meter networks generate millions of time-stamped data points every second. This telemetry from sensors, SCADA systems, and field devices is the foundation for real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, and grid stability. Without the right data infrastructure, none of it […]
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There is a prevailing assumption in manufacturing that advanced AI is a “big company game.” Global enterprises have the deep pockets, dedicated data scientists, and massive datasets required to make AI work. However, evidence from the shop floor suggests a surprising inversion. While the largest organizations are spending more, Small and Medium Manufacturers (SMMs) are often more […]
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