DigitalTWINS FOR THE ENERGY TRANSITION

Digital twins — live virtual models synchronized with physical assets through continuous data exchange — have moved from concept to operational deployment across the renewable energy sector. Geologic® reviewed the 2019 to 2025 literature on digital twin and Industry 4.0 deployments in wind farms, utility-scale solar plants, battery storage, smart grids, and microgrids, synthesizing what these systems actually deliver in operation: 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 every methodological building block a geothermal digital twin requires — multiphysics modeling, real-time data assimilation, co-simulation with power system models, and edge-cloud architectures — already exists in these deployments, yet geothermal-specific and storage-centric twins remain largely absent from 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 proven above-ground twin methods to coupled reservoir, well, plant, and grid systems through its aiION® geoscience intelligence platform.