The United Nations established 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and the fulfillment of the 7th, defined as “Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable, and modern energy for all”, requires energy industry transitions and digital transformations, which implies that diverse stakeholders need to move fast to allow the growth of more flexible power systems. This paper contains the case report that addresses the commercial digital transformation process developed at AES Colombia, through the implementation of a modern platform based on specialized applications that use Industry 4.0 tools. The Chivor hydropower project, a 1000-MW powerplant that covers 6% of Colombia’s demand, which is owned by AES Colombia and constitutes its primary asset, is first described. Then, a description of Colombia’s complex market (energy matrix, trading and dispatch mechanisms, and future projects) is presented. Then, the methodology followed for the digital transformation process using modern tools is described. The project, conceived as a broad framework, comprises applications for the management of hydrological, operational, and market information, commercial information systems and platforms to facilitate consultation and analysis by different users. Such an innovative project in the Latin American context has been developed in order reduce risks and to contribute to a sustainable energy supply for the future.

Sedimentation is an important issue that has been studied for the watershed of reservoirs, since it increases operational costs of hydropower installations, reduces the life expectancy, and compromises the generation capacity due to volume reduction. This work addresses the implementation of Chivor’s Life Extension Project (CLEP), developed in order to extend the life of La Esmeralda reservoir, which is used for power generation in Colombia. Sediment dynamics studies are first described and connected to the need of the AES Corporation to extend the life expectancy of the Chivor Hydropower Project. The geotechnical and hydraulic designs are described and the main considerations and tools for the execution of such a project are addressed. The construction of the new intake system was developed under favorable geomorphological, geological, and hydrogeological conditions, and the project is being developed without affecting the current operation. Such an innovative project is the first of its class in Colombia and goes from studies of sediment transport and sediment management strategies in the watershed to the design and construction of new intakes, in order to extend the life of an existing 1000-MW (6% of Colombia’s demand) powerplant for 50 more years, contributing to a sustainable energy supply for the future.

The energy-aware scheduling problem is a multi-objective optimization problem where the main goal is to achieve energy savings without affecting productivity in a manufacturing system. In this work, we present an approach for energy-aware flow shop scheduling problem and energy-aware job shop scheduling problem considering the process speed as the main energy-related decision variable. This approach allows one to set the appropriate process speed for every considered operation in the corresponding machine. When the speed is high, the processing time is short but the energy demand increases, and vice versa. Therefore, two objectives are worked together: a production objective, paired with an energy efficiency objective. A generic elitist multi-objective genetic algorithm was implemented to solve both problems. Results from a simple comparative design of experiments and a nonparametric test show that it is possible to smooth the energy demand profile and obtain reductions that average 19.8% in energy consumption. This helps to reduce peak loads and drops on applied energy sources demand, stabilizing the conversion units operational efficiency across the entire operational time with a minimum effect on the production maximum completion time (makespan).