POWER UTILITY SOFTWARE MANUAL
POWER UTILITY SOFTWARE SOFTWARE

But there’s no guarantee that’s not going to change in the future. “North America is currently, for the most part, a regulated environment.

POWER UTILITY SOFTWARE SOFTWARE

“Why not just do business-as-usual? I think utilities are starting to understand that, like a lot of other industries, if they do that their business could be affected in a significant way,” said Abhay Gupta, co-founder and chief executive officer at Bidgely, a software company that works with utilities around the world to harness the power of AI. AI has the potential to manage the already- large and accelerating influx of distributed energy resources like solar and battery storage, which has triggered a substantial increase in the bi-directional flow of energy and the creation of a whole new class of so-called prosumers – residents and businesses that generate electricity themselves. While transmission and distribution infrastructure inspections may be the most well-known application of AI in the utility industry, it’s hardly the only one.

POWER UTILITY SOFTWARE MANUAL

There is already a broad agreement in the industry that this approach has the potential to identify equipment at risk of failure in a manner that is much faster and safer than a current method that relies on manual inspections. The underlying rationale is simple: Unmanned drones equipped with cameras can collect massive troves of images of conductors, transformers and other equipment that can then be analyzed quickly and thoroughly by AI. The simple fact that utilities are now evaluating and testing AI to help transform their operations, customer relationships and business models is a testament to how mainstream it has become.įor example, led by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the industry’s premier research organization, a broad swath of utilities has been investigating the use of drones and AI to improve the inspection of transmission and distribution assets. What’s even more exciting is that AI thrives on data: As the volume of data gets larger, AI’s ability to translate that mountain of information into meaningful insights gets better.

It’s why AI’s ability to identify trends and anomalies in huge data sets is such a potentially powerful tool for detecting diseases. Underneath that big umbrella definition, though, are machine learning technologies and sophisticated algorithms that help machines and computers work smarter and more effectively than us mere mortals. At the biggest-picture level, AI is simply the capacity of machines and computers to mimic human behavior. Despite its ubiquity and hype, not everyone understands what AI actually means.

Power utility software