William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, once said that what he could measure he could control. Other variations of this saying are, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it,” or, “To measure is to know.” In a highly intricate and delicate industry like utilities, it’s challenging to have reliable control over energy production and consumption without technology solutions, such as digital twins, that enable reliable means of measurement and modeling for improved operational efficiency.

A digital twin is a virtual representation that serves as a real-time replica of a physical object or process. While such a concept may sound advanced, digital twins are nothing new. In fact, 50 years ago (30 years before the term was coined), NASA used a solution thought to be the earliest instance of digital-twin usage to fix the damaged Apollo 13 spacecraft. Experts will even point to an older example, in the form of a train station track board that used lights to indicate train tracks, track switches, signals, and the positions of trains.

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