Featured: The profound promise of AI for the power sector

Our views on AI and Power Sector Transformation are featured in GreenBiz.

“David Groarke, managing director of the utility consultancy Indigo Advisory Group, offered a narrative that helped me make sense of this moment last week as I navigated the Transition AI conference in Boston. AI is more than a technology; it is a harbinger for a new epoch for the utility sector. 

Here’s the arc: 

• In the 1970 to 1990s, the power sector entered an era of restructuring, which tracked along the emergence of renewable energy. 

• From 2000 to 2020, the sector entered an era of digitization, which powered the start of the energy transition. 

• Starting in 2020, we entered the era of automation, which is supercharged by AI and will help drive net-zero goals. 

As we move into that third era, solution providers and startups aim to capitalize — promising to leverage data to make power systems more resilient, efficient and cleaner. There are already hundreds of these startups racing to leverage new technologies to drive value (and hopefully other benefits) for utilities. 

Machine learning, for example, can use algorithms to learn data patterns for applications such as predictive maintenance, energy forecasting and outage management. Distributed AI would allow intelligence to be distributed across devices to enable decentralized decision-making and deeper penetration of distributed energy resources. 

All of these solutions are dependent on the same prerequisite: the availability of good, clean data.”

Read the Article here