Digital Twins for the Energy Transition

Digital twins, live virtual models synchronized with physical assets through continuous data exchange, have moved beyond concept to operational and near-operational deployment across the renewable energy sector. Geologic® reviewed literature from approximately 2019 to 2025 on digital twin and Industry 4.0 deployments in wind farms, utility-scale solar plants, battery storage, smart grids, and microgrids, synthesizing the outcomes they report: cloud-hosted PV twins with AI fault diagnostics, real-time microgrid twins for resilience and cyber-physical security, and distribution-level twin operating systems that combine robust state estimation with renewable forecasting.

The review's central argument for the subsurface community is that the core building blocks a geothermal digital twin requires, multiphysics modeling, data assimilation and co-simulation with power system models, are already demonstrated in adjacent domains and could be extended to the subsurface, yet geothermal-specific and storage-centric twins remain underdeveloped in the open literature. The review distills cross-cutting architecture patterns, proposes an integrated multiscale twin framework for decarbonized energy systems, and sets four research priorities. Geologic® is positioned on exactly this gap: extending above-ground twin methods to coupled reservoir, well, plant, and grid systems through its aiION® geoscience intelligence platform.