Melanson: Grid activity is inverting from bulk generation to edge infrastructure
Jess Melanson · Will poor data hold back the potential of AI on the grid? · Jun 29, 2023 · at 21:21
Jess Melanson, President and COO of Utilidata, speaks at Transition AI about the shift toward distributed edge intelligence on electric utility grids.
0:00 / 0:24exact quote · 24.6s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Historically, the action and the money and the competition was at the bulk part of the system, and so the last mile was sort of the sleepy last mile infrastructure. That's about to invert, where you have all this activity, you have mobile batteries, you have engaged customers, you have all this technology in the home, and the utility is sitting there with the least amount of data, the least amount of information, and virtually no AI, certainly AI that runs real time or on the physical infrastructure.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Jess Melanson
Melanson: Hardware-defined grid investments are slower and more expensive than software updates
“What you end up doing is stacking a lot of hardware defined limited investments on top of each other. And you end up with a grid that's not Modernizing quick enough. It's expensive because ultimately in the bigger picture, that's a more expensive way to do thi…”
Melanson: Selling distributed AI to utilities is harder than executing the technology
“Selling distributed AI to utilities is harder than actually executing the AI because they, and everybody who sells and works with utilities knows that their historic incentives are not pro-innovation, not pro-software, not pro-future-proofing investments, and …”
Melanson: Deploying non-AI-ready assets on the power grid will become a non-starter
“Once we do, I think it's going to really be an exponential change, because this will just become the industry standard, and the paradigm will shift, and then everyone will say, well, why would I put an asset out on the grid that's not AI ready and smart? It'll…”