Alphabet-Led AI Project to Shield New Zealand Grid From Outages
(Bloomberg) -- A consortium of four utilities serving a quarter of New Zealand will join an Alphabet Inc.-led initiative that uses artificial intelligence to fortify the country’s grid against failures caused by extreme weather or earthquakes.
Northpower Ltd., Orion Group, Unison Networks Ltd. and WEL Networks Ltd. will share information about infrastructure networks with Tapestry, part of Alphabet Inc.’s moonshot factory, X, according to Page Crahan, the project’s general manager.
The consortium will build on models trained by Vector Ltd., the country’s largest utility, which became the first to adopt the AI tool five years ago.
Power grids around the world are being strained by rising electricity demand from data centers, growing integration of clean but intermittent renewable sources, and extreme weather like cold snaps and heatwaves. Tapestry says it aims to use AI to quickly and cheaply identify problems that otherwise would trigger outages, Crahan said.
In Brazil, the Tapestry software will be used to assess the grid before deciding whether to add data centers, Rio de Janeiro’s vice mayor recently said.
Tapestry sought out New Zealand for expansion because of the challenges its grid faces from wildfires, floods and seismic activity. Tapestry’s GridAware tool creates the power-infrastructure equivalent of Google Maps that uses street view, satellite and drone images.
The initiative expands an initial rollout made more than five years ago at Vector, reducing manual pole inspections to as little as five minutes from 30 to 45 minutes, according to Tapestry data.
Meanwhile, Orion — which serves Christchurch and had to rebuild much of its infrastructure after the devastating 2011 earthquake — signed up because of hurdles it ran into when testing AI tools about three years ago.
“We deferred a whole lot of proactive maintenance,” said Orion Chief Executive Officer Nigel Barbour. “It’s now time to start bringing that all back in and scheduling that.”
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