RFI for Data Lake Implementation

Project Description:

The City of Seattle is seeking responses to this Request for Information (RFI) from qualified organizations with related solutions regarding a Data Lake implementation. Seattle City Light, a department in the City of Seattle, intends to use this RFI to develop one or more Request for Proposal (RFP)s that meet known and future data related needs.

The major work products to be derived from this RFI will support Seattle City Light’s efforts to implement a data lake as a centralized and managed data repository that will enable the organization to store, manage and analyze data from various sources in a unified, scalable, and efficient manner.

Over the last 20 years, data for a utility has dramatically changed from being mainly voltage, current, and power flow focused on data that is highly variable and with exponential growth. This includes real-time sensor data, forecasts, environmental data, and the impact of distributed energy resources (DERs) and customer exposure. The focus in the past was on monitoring grid health and coordinating a reactive response. The future is data-driven with advanced analytics for predictive maintenance, dynamic pricing and integrated renewables which are all driven around data.

A centralized data repository, with common data definitions, that is scalable and secure will provide efficiency for the organization. It will facilitate the sharing of commonly used data sets and support analytics which will generate insights, create efficiencies, and realize cost savings. It enables Seattle City Light (SCL) to have robust descriptive analytics, while moving to support advanced analytics in the future such as predictive and prescriptive.

This RFI is aimed at understanding the available solutions that can support SCL in this goal. SCL understands that establishing a data lake will require multiple technological solutions to build an ecosystem that can support the desired future state. The expectation is that SCL will utilize the responses to this RFI to better understand the solutions options that can support the various architecture components that have been identified by the Information and Data Management (IDM)Team.

The IDM Team has developed conceptual architecture for the future data lake and have identified near-term, mid-term and long-term architecture components to focus on. Although the team is considering the future components, the initial focus of this response is on the near-term architecture components. We do ask what is missing from the current state of conceptual architecture. We also ask if there are more options to the current state of the developed conceptual architecture.