Some 40 energy companies and the largest U.S. data center developers have formed a research project to find artificial intelligence solutions to increasingly complex issues on the electric power grid.
The Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) announced Thursday the formation of an Open Power AI Consortium with membership spanning the largest utilities like Southern Co. and Exelon to North Carolina’s electric cooperatives. Microsoft; Nvidia; and AWS, Amazon’s cloud services provider, are also among the members.
“Over the next decade, AI has the great potential to revolutionize the power sector by delivering the capability to enhance grid reliability, optimize asset performance and enable more efficient energy management,” said EPRI CEO Arshad Mansoor.
The biggest data center challenges for the power sector are not on the consortium’s plate at this time, said Jeremy Renshaw, EPRI senior program manager for AI. A previously announced EPRI-led project called DCFlex, also with grid and technology industry members, will take on the most consequential issues such as the goal of having data center operations support power system reliability instead of threatening it. “We’re like a cousin to DCFlex,” Renshaw said of the new program.
