Aclara, a division of utility and electrical solutions provider Hubbell Incorporated, will set in a distributed AI platform, Karman developed by Utilidata, an AI-powered technology company, in a smart meter to enable a connected grid delivering clean and reliable energy.
Karman is not only built on a custom module leveraging the NVIDIA Jetson platform for artificial intelligence but also captures and analyzes robust, high-quality data to improve grid operations and manage distributed energy resources (DERs).
Aclara has more than 30 million electric meters deployed in North America and will implant Karman into a smart meter to provide utilities with 100 times more processing power than traditional solutions. The Karman embedded meters will provide powerful local computation at the edge of the grid to understand and predict grid conditions and the impacts of DERs.
Local AI models will continuously learn to improve grid planning, grid operations, load management, customer service, and a range of other benefits.
While Marissa Hummon, Utilidata’s chief technology officer and Hubbell’s chief technology officer, Alexis Bernard, will speak together at NVIDIA’s NVIDIA GTC, a global AI developer conference, on March 20, 2024 in San Jose, California, Jess Melanson, Utilidata’s president and chief operating officer, will speak at the Hubbell Utility Connect conference in Atlanta, April 15-18.
Recently, the Department of Energy announced $3.5 billion in funding for grid modernization projects, including awards to Portland General Electric and Duquesne Light Co. to deploy over 100,000 Karman units to increase reliability and accelerate decarbonization and electrification.