AI comes to California’s electric grid

Artificial intelligence figures to impact virtually every aspect of the global economy and now it’s making a foray onto California’s electric grid.

The California Independent System Operator, which manages the power system for about 80% of the Golden State and a portion of Nevada, just agreed to launch a pilot program that will use an AI software program designed by Open Access Technology International Inc., aimed at helping run the California ISO’s operations more efficiently.

The Minnesota-based company, known as OATI for short, says “to our knowledge, this is the first instance of AI supporting real grid operations.”

OATI’s artificial intelligence software system, called Genie, will focus on enhancing the California ISO’s outage management system.

While it’s not well known by the typical utility customer, the system operator known as the CAISO for short handles hundreds of planned outages on transmission lines and generators each day — for things like repairing and maintenance of equipment or “derating” a line to reduce power capacity in cases such as high winds and hot weather.

“There’s a lot of ongoing challenges that the operators who do the planning for managing these outages run into on a day-to-day basis,” said Abhi Thakur, OATI’s vice president of platforms, visualization and analytics.

Everyday at about 6 p.m., grid managers pore over reports of planned outages scheduled for the next day — scanning for things like keywords in the texts and calculating how a downed line or transformer may affect power supply. It’s an important job, but it’s painstaking and cumbersome.

Under the pilot, the Genie software program will use generative AI (that leverages machine learning models trained on vast datasets) as well as agentic AI (systems designed to act autonomously and take actions with minimal human intervention) to do much of the laborious work.

“The AI can aggregate meaningful, important information and analyzes and presents it to you so you only have to focus on the important parts and reduce all the overhead of looking for unnecessary information,” Thakur said in an interview with the Union-Tribune.

Genie is designed as a tool to help the California ISO manage planned and unplanned transmission grid outages — not the distribution-level power outages experienced by the general public.

And should the pilot program prove to be a success, there are certainly future implications for AI to be used to improve operational efficiency and reduce the risk of unplanned power outages across the grid operator’s service territory.

The Genie platform can also be used to compare upcoming outages with ones that occurred in the past that, for example, used the same set of equipment, and perform cross-checks.

“If there’s a mismatch, the Genie assistance can flag it in the report” to grid operators, Thakur said.

The pilot program was announced earlier this week at a major transmission, distribution and utility conference in Minneapolis.

California ISO officials highlighted Genie’s potential for improving the grid operator’s situational awareness and freeing up time for working on other important items.

“This initiative fits in perfectly with our ongoing control center modernization program,” Khaled Abdul-Rahman, CAISO’s chief information and technology officer, said in a statement, “which is designed to make sure our operators have the best tools available to them for maintaining system reliability.”

The Genie pilot program is expected to go into place by early next year, and California ISO officials will set the timeline and criteria to determine if it deems the project a success.

Thakur said OATI is optimistic its AI platform will be effective. “So far, our results have been very promising,” he said.

Looking broadly, the development and ever-increasing popularity of artificial intelligence applications such as ChatGPT have caused a sensation by producing coherent responses to questions or prompts from a user’s computer by processing gigabytes of data, scanning billions of words and using models that adaptively learn over time.

“AI is something that stretches across and will impact every single sector of the global economy and pretty much every single industry,” Kevin Dennean, technology sector equity analyst for UBS, told the Union-Tribune in 2024. “I’m really hard-pressed to think of a single sector where we won’t see AI and generative AI put to work.”

But the International Energy Agency has estimated that an internet search with AI uses as much as 10 times the amount of electricity as a traditional Google search. That has led to worries that demand from AI and the data centers that feed it will strain the electric grid and lead to higher electric bills — a real concern in California, where ratepayers already pay among the highest rates in the country.

But the CAISO-OATI pilot project offers a potential example that AI, its power-hungry nature notwithstanding, could keep a lid on electricity demand by enhancing grid efficiency.

“We’ve been talking a lot about what the grid can do for AI and not nearly as much about what AI can do for the grid,” Charles Hua, executive director of PowerLines, a nonprofit aims to lower utility bills while growing the economy, told MIT Technology Review. “In general, there’s a huge opportunity for grid operators, regulators, and other stakeholders in the utility regulatory system to use AI effectively and harness it for a more resilient, modernized, and strengthened grid.”

The California ISO serves 32 million consumers and covers about 26,000 circuit miles of transmission. The CAISO also operates the Western Energy Imbalance Market, a wholesale energy trading market that allows utilities and other participants to buy and sell power in real time.

OATI may be unfamiliar to general audiences, but the company is a major player in the energy sector, boasting 95% market share in the bulk power transmission segment.