CLP Innovation Enterprises Limited (CLP Innovation) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of CLP Holdings Limited (CLP.) CLP Innovation can be considered as a corporate-sponsored startup that is focused on building a “Utility of the Future” as decarbonization and digitalization continue to transform the energy market. The purpose of CLP Innovation is to help CLP transform from a traditional utility company to a digital company; to create new business streams in the digital area.

CLP Innovation helps customers achieve their sustainability goals. Not only do they invest in clean energy sources, but they are also help customers build clean energy assets, such as solar panels. CLP Innovation also offers a variety of products and services that make offices, buildings, or campuses smarter and more energy-efficient places. Their brand “Smart Energy Connect” offers all of those things simultaneously.

CLP Innovation has launched its online energy marketplace called, Smart Energy Connect (SEC), a smart energy platform focused on sustainability innovation by helping businesses and utilities find the applications they need to manage energy assets and achieve sustainability goals.

The main challenges that CLP Innovation face involve technical challenges of smart office development:
• Integration of closed-eco-systems: API maturity, people counting, HVAC control, office room booking, occupancy sensing, air quality monitoring, and lighting control
• Network and performance: APIs are offered with different OEM in different countries
• How to be “smart”: This requires a lot of data and clients.
• Sensor accuracy: There are issues when it comes to implementing people counting and video recognition solutions.

Alibaba Cloud has rich service offerings built around the microservice-architecture framework, which gives CLP Innovation the agility they need to quickly prototype and try different design ideas. By leveraging Alibaba Cloud DataV product, CLP Innovation was able to learn more about what Alibaba Cloud has to offer around data, especially in the Hong Kong region.

“I especially like its end-to-end, out of the box data analytics service offerings, such as MaxCompute and DataV. It lowers the technical barrier for data scientists, allowing us to keep a lean team and focus on data analytics or value-adding activities, instead of setting up and managing the underlying infrastructure and open-source tools. It offers very competitive pricing for its services. Just like any other startup, we are also on a very tight budget. Cost-effectiveness is important to us.”

DataV is unlike a traditional BI tool. It’s not based on a denormalized data warehouse and it has seamless integration with many data sources. There’s no need to download to the cache. There’s an AJAX-like feature that allows web pages to be updated asynchronously by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes. This means it can update parts of a web page without reloading the whole page. It also has very flexible GUI customization. You can add scripts, CSS, and animation, which is normally impossible for BI tools.

Alibaba Cloud is helping future CLP development by providing reliable infrastructure services for our projects in GBA . The performance will be good thanks to geographical adjacency. It will also help them solve a lot of compliance issues, such as data on-shore and other local regulations. CLP Innovation also leverages the China Gateway service to build Mainland China-based solutions that can be integrated into their international service offerings without compromising speed, accessibility, or compliance.

“Alibaba Cloud has a large customer base with lots of interesting use cases. I would like to listen to their stories and see what other users (Utility, IoT, MNCs) are doing with Alibaba Cloud. They also helps us improve our strategic architecture. In Sept. 2019, I learned the 'Middle Office Strategy' at the Aspara Conference. There were some interesting concepts, such as 'data middle-office' and 'business middle-office.' After studying and learning more, it inspired us to build our data mesh and service mesh fabrics following microservice architecture. I’m looking forward to future architectural guidelines. ”

CLP Innovation is also looking into implementing a solution that covers Kafka Ingestion with hot/cold data mesh and with a RestFul & GQL-based data service.