What Electric Utility Professionals Can do About Blackout Risks

Leveraging AI is becoming a vital tool for improving grid reliability in the rapidly changing electric landscape. As more data is captured in the field, both structured and reality data, incorporating this into design and maintenance programs becomes even more crucial.

The electrical grid faces new challenges in the modern era. The rate of change is exponential, with large loads of information that place increasing stress on power generation. Data centers, especially those that service artificial intelligence applications, are particularly demanding. The International Energy Agency expects them to double within the next five years, placing increasing pressure on electric utility professionals to prevent blackouts.

This new landscape requires an agile mindset open to new technologies that reduce the likelihood of blackouts and make addressing them when they occur a more efficient process. Further, it demands new methods of assessing reliability. Providers must understand the potential stresses on their systems if they are to plan for reliable outputs.

Utilities have never been so willing to adopt new approaches as they are today. They are increasingly eager to integrate novel technologies in constrained places in order to maintain consistent power to their clients.

Reality capture software can use photographs to create 3D renderings of assets to simplify design, construction and maintenance. For example, BAM Infra Netherlands designed a new high-voltage station at Schiphol-Centrum near the main airport in Amsterdam. The company utilized simulation technology to reduce transport time by some 25% and to execute construction in record time. It will serve as a crucial nexus for the air traffic terminal, which is heavily reliant on a steady supply of power.

Another organization, APD Global, designed a new substation and critical upgrades to another substation in Perth, Australia. The city will see increasing power demand as the region attempts to grow its stake in global commodities and refined product supply chains. The projects used a digital twin as well as other data workflow efficiencies to reduce construction time and make the operation more sustainable—thus setting the region up for a more resilient grid as it prepares for new economic advancement.

The conceptualization of these projects using 3D technology and rich sources of data makes them far more resilient to potential blackouts. Each component is identified both in isolation and in relation to the other components to which it is connected. In the event of a storm or other catastrophic event, any damage can be quickly identified and remedied.

Innovative technology has worked to bring digital twin capabilities to the power grid, allowing for deeper understanding and analysis of the environment. These digital twins provide exact representations of where infrastructure is located and how it has been damaged—thus allowing for precise reconstruction to its optimal functioning state in the real world.

The identification of locations that are particularly susceptible to environmental damage and the materials that they are made of can lead to further on-the-ground improvements. If a certain circuit or type of construction is consistently in need of repair following storms or events, it can be reinforced or replaced to prevent the same damage from occurring in the future. These efficiencies do not just obviate future need for repair; they keep rates down in the long term.

However, the industry still needs to adapt to the particulars required for effective implementation. Engineering firms contracted to design new power structures often possess the capabilities to gather highly tuned data on the built environment that would allow for the integration of resilient technology into the projects. But because their contracts are often constraining, they are unable to leverage that data in a practical way - it is viewed as too complex for the contracting process and is not utilized.

A move toward integrating 3D and data-rich plans using modern design tools into the contracting process would be enormously helpful for all parties, creating a more sophisticated picture of the project and allowing for a more rigorous analysis of the resources required to create something lasting and resistant to environmental stresses.

Emphasizing these factors to stakeholders throughout the process - including regulators - will serve to drive costs down in the long term. The same tools utilized by the Going Digital Awards finalists to make their projects more efficient will be implemented down the line during their actual operations. The concisely plotted routes for construction in their very constrained spaces will be infinitely useful when it comes time to conduct preventative maintenance or repairs. These projects serve as examples to other utilities attempting similar improvements, showing that technology-driven design and its resulting efficiencies are scalable.

A fine-grained view of the built environment, an understanding of how the components interact and can be accessed, where redundancies exist and where they do not. These are essential when it comes to preventing blackouts or rectifying them when they inevitably occur. AI visualization tools are living investments. They continue to accrue dividends throughout a project’s life cycle.