STEP – Suomen Teollisuuden Energiapalvelut

Suomen Teollisuuden Energiapalvelut – STEP Oy offers sustainable energy solutions for industrial customers based on partnership principles. Customer needs, energy efficiency, and customized solutions are central to all offered energy solutions, combining local and international expertise. STEP is a joint venture established in 2008 by Veolia (51%) and Pori Energia (49%).

STEP utilizes the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to collect measurement data from various power plant PLC logics.

Different calculations are made from the measurement data for reporting, with the most demanding being steam enthalpy calculation (calculating energy based on pressure and temperature).

STEP previously used a “calculation engine” implemented by another provider, which ran calculation formulas specified for different plants, and the results were used for reporting.

Maintaining and adding calculation formulas was a multi-step and challenging process, even though it was supposed to be manageable by a “regular energy engineer”. Dyme built a new calculation engine for STEP and a user interface for managing and testing calculation formulas. At the same time, Dyme took over the technical maintenance responsibility for STEP’s GCP infrastructure.

The new calculation engine uses GCP’s serverless services, such as Pub/Sub and Cloud Functions. The old Kubernetes-Java cluster implementation was replaced, and the new Cloud Functions are implemented with Node.js (Typescript). The user interface is an Angular application.

Maintaining calculation formulas has become much easier, and the customer has been extremely satisfied with the performance of the new engine. The maintainability and reliability of the new engine are significantly better than the old one.