Electrical & Renewable Utilities
Artificial Intelligence- The brain of this future smart grid
The utility industry, AI and ML demonstrate some of their most impactful effects on many aspects of the business. Utilities have been using drones and AI to improve the inspection of transmission and distribution assets and helping transform operations, customer relationships, and business models. The transmission and distribution infrastructure inspections are among the most well-known AI applications in the utility industry. Managing the massive and accelerating influx of distributed energy resources, like solar and battery storage, can be made easy with AI. Automation and AI can help us with maintenance, performance, and diagnostics within our homes, buildings, and the grid. Power companies are increasingly leaning on AI to improve their electricity delivery-from data collection and analysis to present actionable insights. AI and ML algorithms are quickly redefining how utility companies manage their electrical infrastructure.
Today, the key for utilities is to identify low-cost, low-risk opportunities to enter the AI world. Complex machine-learning algorithms can be executed to sustain everything from home energy management to job site safety. Artificial intelligence and data science are causing positive developments in the utility industry. AI ensures more accurate data collection, and ML techniques can spot any faults in the sensors or the drone’s flight path while in the air, recalibrating as needed and identifying individual elements.
The electric utility industry is frequently in a changing environment, and deregulation is a crucial pressure driving this change. Energy production and delivery access to the customer will need to become more aggressive. The general issue of this industry is how to provide high-quality energy cost-effectively. Also, reducing the need for the capital investment of new generating capacity, cutting back on the depletion of nonrenewable fuels, and reducing emissions. This industry is looking at solutions to
improve operating efficiency, safety, and productivity of electric utilities, optimized power consumption, reduced energy costs. Adding on to these issues is the need to focus on customer service and satisfaction.The utility industry has great potential to embrace artificial intelligence. Machine learning could be used to forecast stocks and demand in real-time and optimize the economic load dispatch. Predictive maintenance can be bolstered with drones for asset inspections, replacing time-intensive and risky manual inspections. Demand management can be automated and made smarter with machine learning. AI can detect usage patterns, payment history, and other customer data that may prevent power theft. AI opens a wide range of exciting possibilities for utilities and can deliver real value to serious adopters. The opportunities and rewards are waiting for those willing to take the plunge. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)
are now set to unleash the next wave of digital disruption by transforming business. Our solution will enable utilities to provide higher quality services at a lower cost with lower environmental impact and give consumers better control over their power usage.
Utilities have successfully enabled business success through the adoption of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Here are some instances of how technology helps:
- Easing the transition to renewable energy- AI can take a predictive approach to the metrics to discover that renewable energy sources get used the most during specific hours of the day.
- Preventing power outages- AI can be used to predict the conditions that cause power outages, identify weak points in the electric grid, and proactively repair them before outages occurred.
- Learning more about customers and their needs-Consumers can control their thermostats by sending text messages via their phones or set them to power-saving modes when the house is empty.
- Reducing waste- Data analytics platforms can highlight inefficiency areas, allowing providers to take prompt action and keep their costs down.
Featured Solutions & Services from AIGC
- DIGITAL CONSULTING
- ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND DATA ANALYTICS
- ASSET PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT
- DIGITAL FIELD WORKER
- DIGITAL HELP WITH SMARTER GRID OPTIMIZATION AND AGGREGATION
- ROBOTICS & DRONES DRIVES MAINTENANCE COST DOWN
- REINVENTING CUSTOMER SERVICE THROUGH DIGITAL INNOVATION
- SMART CAPITAL PROJECT EXECUTION
Today’s modern world runs on utilities- electricity, water, and gas. Despite being unchanged for over a century, the power, water, and gas utility service industry is all set to transform to utility 2.0, thanks to the evolving customer expectation, heightened environmental awareness, decreasing energy intensity, and primarily due to the advancement of technological capabilities. With the expertise about electric utility companies gained over the years by working with industry leaders across the globe and our core competency with digital solutions, our team at AIGC is all set to transform the electric utility companies. From helping electric utility companies deploy digital technologies to optimize asset portfolio and their operations, processes, and energy management to transmission and distribution through the transformation of power networks, and everything else in between. We are the go-to company when it comes to digital consultants for electric utility companies the world over.
Creating a digital transformation will increase the productivity and performance of the industry. We provide end-to-end digital solutions with our digital consulting services, comprising digital strategy consulting, digital architecture designing, and transformation roadmap development. Using emerging technologies, we provide insights into the business, we support companies to innovate and function to become more competitive. To enable competitive advantage and generate growth, we set strategies in motion for clients that unify business and technology architectures. Once we identify the critical business imperatives, we map out initiatives, using information from the data platforms to achieve them.
Significant opportunities are being created by new digital transformation to stay competitive and relevant in business today. Digital Transformation offers new ways to reinvent processes with data, analytics, APIs, machine learning, and other technologies. This results in lowering costs, reducing cycle times, or increasing quality. Adopting technology in process transformation can create significant value. It transforms traditional business models with digital technologies. Today it is easier to convert the plants and factories to smart industries, where no human needs to travel to hazardous locations.
Harvard University observed the following in a blog post on revolutionizing the energy industry using AI in 2017.
“AI will be the brain of this future smart grid. The technology will continuously collect and synthesize overwhelming amounts of data from millions of smart sensors nationwide to make timely decisions on the best-allocating energy resources. Additionally, the advances made from ‘deep learning’ algorithms, a system where machines learn on their own from spotting patterns and anomalies in large data sets, will revolutionize both the demand and supply side of the energy economy.”
For achieving progress in this digital era, ‘data’ has become a significant critical asset to an organization today who wants to build their transformation models. Be it for improving performance or productivity, AI and Analytics will be the core DNA around which companies need to develop their transformation model. By harnessing the power of analytics, automation, and artificial intelligence (AI), organizations can quickly find a correlation within volumes of data gathered and make informed decisions that can be used across the entire organization.
However, it’s critical to implement the best mix of strategy and technology to balance speed, cost, and quality in delivering any measurable business value. As observed by McKinsey, ’50 % of companies that rely heavily on data, embrace AI over the next five to seven years, and have the potential to double their cash flow. By extracting hidden patterns from data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are playing a critical role in building intelligence. They help make informed decisions, facilitate in reducing human interventions, and lead to enhanced operational efficiencies.
The electric utility industry is an asset-intensive industry. With each asset planing, a critical role towards the uninterrupted supply of power, a failure of any one piece of the asset could cause a significant problem for the utility company. Sustaining reliability from their developing infrastructures plus workforce and the subsequent drop in operational efficiency are some of the major hurdles on the path for the utility companies across the globe, resulting in all the utility companies increasingly turning towards Smarter Asset Management solutions.
AIGC’s Asset Performance Management (APM) solutions and services provide implementation and integration solutions that help connect all systems, capture data frequently, analyze and monitor the data continuously and use the results for forecasting the possible breakdown in support but also for planning or periodic maintenance and asset life cycle management. Our APM helps lower maintenance costs drastically, reduces asset downtime, critical investigations, and increases the margins exponentially.
With continuous change across the electric utility industries-hunger for higher productivity, a push for more agile operations, and many more, has created a great deal of pressure on today’s already very challenging operating environment with digital transformation helping the electric utility industry meet all the growing needs and demands of operational efficiencies, the market for a digital field worker solution to have become mandatory.
The Digital Workforce Mobility transforms organizations through- Human-Centered Design. Smart operators are enabled by advancements in technologies, including mobile devices, radio-frequency identification (RFID), wearables, analytics, and automated systems to execute their work more effectively. The portable digital workforce platform offers efficiency, control, and predictability built into the plant operations, no matter the workforce’s size. They leverage process and technology applications that help eliminate paperwork, reduce non-productive work, create a safe work environment, automate workflows, and improve efficiencies –ultimately saving money.
For operations, the use of digital tools, wearables, and mobility-enabled solutions helps prioritize, manage, support, and automate high-frequency operator work tasks to transform field operations’ efficiency and safety. Use cases include the creation of configurable forms and checklists, and safety and field audits. For maintenance, digital technology’s workforce connectivity will transform maintenance processes in the field across the asset life-cycle. It’ll do this by using wearables and mobility-enabled solutions to manage and execute tasks such as work orders, in-field asset data management, and workflow improvements between workers, crews, and sites.
For capital projects, the combination of workforce connectivity and digital capital project solutions will enable companies to deliver more excellent value from projects at a higher speed. These benefits will be driven by better control, reduced time to market, minimized budget variances, and improved asset performance. Simultaneously, better management and execution of field construction and commissioning tasks will boost safety and efficiency.
Powered by millions of smart meters and devices installed into their power system grid and upgraded advanced data transmission networks, the utility industry’s data utilization is directing utility operations’ transformation journey. With connected devices and advanced monitoring capability, companies are thorough with real-time load balancing and network controls to achieve grid optimization and aggregation. This allows them total control over their utility consumption, including the latest usage information from customers and, simultaneously, also offers the customers access to their up-to-the-minute pricing signals and tariffs.
Smart grid solutions by AIGC provides advanced data and predictive analytics capabilities to utility companies to manage their networks, allowing the system to dispatch the most economical, reliable, and sustainable sources to meet demand and deliver higher efficiency, leading to a transformational impact of grid optimization and aggregation. Utility companies can now create energy aggregation platforms with our smart grid solutions by bringing small-scale distributed energy sources onto a single platform. Through monitoring load supply and demand, our solution acts as a real-time supply and demand platform. Our offerings also allow real-time network controls by enabling real-time adjustments to change loads. Our smart grid solutions allow seamless linking of devices to the distribution network.
Industrial revolution 4.0 has helped the industry reduce costs, increase profitability & productivity. Today, the robots and drones perform tasks that were not possible earlier and have pushed uncertainties away from humans. The power of industrial robots is many times more than the leisure market ones. They can now be used not only for loading or unloading in factories but also inside pipelines and confined areas, otherwise difficult for human reach, for repairs.
With the recent advancement of edge computing and connectivity, drones/ aerial robots with AI-on-the-edge capability can perform analytics in-situ and autonomous operations. In hardly accessible uninhabited areas, industrial drones perform tasks such as the inspection of elevated equipment, visual recognition as they have specific features and a piece of special equipment or payload.
By automating the entire surveillance system to help deploy sensor-equipped robots to monitor the contaminants in the air in chemical industries, robotics and drones are slowly taking over many hazardous and challenging tasks in modern plants. Deploying drones and robots by AIGC can help improve efficiency and automate mundane and repetitive tasks, thereby helping increase the bottom line. From thermal inspections to the monitoring of production lines through real drones to small robots canning entire lines of pipeline and machines for cracks or minor damages, the use of robots and drones can improve the chemical’s efficiency and productivity industry significantly.
In a digitally-connected world, customer experience management plays a vital role in engaging customers in demand response programs. With AIGC’s solutions, electric utility companies can now move from being ‘energy-centric’ to ‘customer-centric’ by facilitating their adoption of integrated customer services. By enabling the collection and analysis of increasing volumes of customer data, we help companies understand their customers and their behavior better. Knowing what the customer wants offers tremendous opportunity to develop innovative, digitally-enabled products and services bundled together to provide integrated customer service, leading to exceeding customer expectations.
With our data-oriented customer service solutions, Energy companies can start to play a more prominent role in their consumer’s electric utility usage. They optimize the home, assist in selecting tariffs, manage consumption and payments, and even embed on self-generation of bills. We help identify and design add-on services to the utility companies and presenting a new revenue stream that will help them overcome the risk of a low-profit or low-growth market. With our core competency in data analytics and artificial intelligence, we help utility companies with customer segmentation, analytics, customer self-service, omnichannel customer service, integrated customer communications, and even social media monitoring and analysis.
Today, capital projects grow in scale and complexity, making it more challenging with shorter execution timelines. AIGC, are your only reliable technology partners with the expertise and ability to provide utilities with the tools to reliably operate, support, and accomplish the journey. The capital project planning process involves multiple departments (operations, engineering, planning, substations, lines, finance, and accounting) due to project work’s multi-functional nature. With our deep-seated experience in utility operations, we can simply solve your best-of-breed problems with a platform of integrated solutions that are best in class. We focus on identifying the issues, and based on our findings, we recommended a series of strategic initiatives and ultimately supported in implementing them. Our team ensures the solutions are practical and would be immediately adopted.
Effective project planning is crucial to selecting the projects that will deliver your investment’s most outstanding value. Conceptual and feasibility studies help you narrow your focus to two or three different approaches to be explored. Our solution ensures companies benefit from better-maintained assets, greater customer satisfaction, and higher shareholder returns by turning capital excellence into a functional strength.