AI comes to California’s electric grid

Artificial intelligence figures to impact virtually every aspect of the global economic system and now it s making a foray onto California s electric grid The California Independent System Operator which manages the power system for about of the Golden State and a portion of Nevada just agreed to launch a pilot effort that will use an AI utility scheme designed by Open Access Equipment International Inc aimed at helping run the California ISO s operations more efficiently Related Articles ChatGPT helps prepare this mayor s talking points Now he wants a thousand city workers using AI Agents react to proposal for a futuristic AI tech city on Alameda Point Keanu Reeves pays AI firm thousands a month to stop online imitators analysis Nvidia to resume H AI chip sales to China in US reversal Musk suggests Tesla shareholders will vote on xAI financing The Minnesota-based company known as OATI for short says to our knowledge this is the first instance of AI supporting real grid operations OATI s artificial intelligence program system called Genie will focus on enhancing the California ISO s outage management system While it s not well known by the typical utility customer the system operator known as the CAISO for short handles hundreds of planned outages on transmission lines and generators each day for things like repairing and maintenance of equipment or derating a line to reduce power quota in cases such as high winds and hot weather There s a lot of ongoing challenges that the operators who do the planning for managing these outages run into on a day-to-day basis noted Abhi Thakur OATI s vice president of platforms visualization and analytics Everyday at about p m grid managers pore over reports of planned outages scheduled for the next day scanning for things like keywords in the texts and calculating how a downed line or transformer may affect power supply It s an major job but it s painstaking and cumbersome Under the pilot the Genie application campaign will use generative AI that leverages machine learning models trained on vast datasets as well as agentic AI systems designed to act autonomously and take actions with minimal human intervention to do much of the laborious work The AI can aggregate meaningful key information and analyzes and presents it to you so you only have to focus on the fundamental parts and reduce all the overhead of looking for unnecessary information Thakur noted in an interview with the Union-Tribune Genie is designed as a tool to help the California ISO manage planned and unplanned transmission grid outages not the distribution-level power outages experienced by the general population And should the pilot activity prove to be a success there are certainly future implications for AI to be used to improve operational efficiency and reduce the menace of unplanned power outages across the grid operator s organization territory The Genie platform can also be used to compare upcoming outages with ones that occurred in the past that for example used the same set of equipment and perform cross-checks If there s a mismatch the Genie assistance can flag it in the summary to grid operators Thakur reported The pilot activity was reported earlier this week at a major transmission distribution and utility conference in Minneapolis California ISO functionaries highlighted Genie s expected for improving the grid operator s situational awareness and freeing up time for working on other critical items This initiative fits in perfectly with our ongoing control center modernization activity Khaled Abdul-Rahman CAISO s chief information and device officer declared in a comment which is designed to make sure our operators have the best tools available to them for maintaining system reliability The Genie pilot operation is expected to go into place by early next year and California ISO authorities will set the timeline and criteria to determine if it deems the project a success Thakur revealed OATI is optimistic its AI platform will be effective So far our results have been very promising he noted Looking broadly the evolution and ever-increasing popularity of artificial intelligence applications such as ChatGPT have caused a sensation by producing coherent responses to questions or prompts from a user s computer by processing gigabytes of figures scanning billions of words and using models that adaptively learn over time AI is something that stretches across and will impact every single sector of the global financial market and pretty much every single industry Kevin Dennean tool sector equity analyst for UBS stated the Union-Tribune in I m really hard-pressed to think of a single sector where we won t see AI and generative AI put to work But the International Vitality Agency has estimated that an internet search with AI uses as much as times the amount of electricity as a traditional Google search That has led to worries that demand from AI and the content centers that feed it will strain the electric grid and lead to higher electric bills a real concern in California where ratepayers already pay among the highest rates in the country But the CAISO-OATI pilot project offers a feasible example that AI its power-hungry nature notwithstanding could keep a lid on electricity demand by enhancing grid efficiency We ve been talking a lot about what the grid can do for AI and not nearly as much about what AI can do for the grid Charles Hua executive director of PowerLines a nonprofit aims to lower utility bills while growing the market communicated MIT Hardware Review In general there s a huge opportunity for grid operators regulators and other stakeholders in the utility regulatory system to use AI effectively and harness it for a more resilient modernized and strengthened grid The California ISO serves million consumers and covers about circuit miles of transmission The CAISO also operates the Western Power Imbalance Sphere a wholesale capacity trading sector that allows utilities and other participants to buy and sell power in real time OATI may be unfamiliar to general audiences but the company is a major participant in the potential sector boasting sphere share in the bulk power transmission segment