Massachusetts-based Air Space Intelligence (ASI) is delivering AI-powered decision support for electric grid planning and operations at utility National Grid in the USA.

The effort will apply ASI’s predictive modelling and scenario optimisation capabilities to a range of critical grid challenges, including resilience planning, outage detection and energy storage deployment, helping reduce costs and time in the field.

“The electric grid is one of the most complex systems in the world, and the decisions utilities face are only getting harder,” said Phillip Buckendorf, CEO of ASI (www.airspace-intelligence.com). “ASI has spent years building advanced AI technology for mission-critical operational environments including aviation, logistics and defence, and we’re proud to partner with National Grid to bring those same capabilities to support the critical infrastructure that powers everyday life.”

The electric grid faces a period of complexity. Surging demand, extreme weather, aging infrastructure and the rapid proliferation of distributed energy resources are fundamentally changing how power is delivered, creating problems to maintain reliability, affordability and efficiency.

“As the electric grid becomes more complex, data and advanced analytics play an increasingly important role in how we plan and operate the system,” said John Franklin, vice president of National Grid (www.nationalgridus.com). “ASI’s action-oriented AI tools will help us leverage existing and new grid related data to inform decisions, allowing us to respond more effectively to emerging challenges.”

ASI will fuse grid topology, asset, reliability, outage, forecasting, geospatial and environmental data into a continuously updated predictive world model of the grid. From this foundation, ASI’s AI autonomously generates, evaluates and optimises across millions of planning scenarios, surfacing actionable recommendations that can help grid operators and planners act faster and efficiently to reduce costs across the system and deliver enhanced reliability.

The collaboration will initially focus on several high-impact areas: optimising the siting and interconnection of distributed energy resources; enabling scenario-based resilience planning for extreme weather and demand surges; and outage mapping capabilities. Across each, the AI platform will provide probabilistic assessments and recommendations, helping planners and operators navigate the growing complexity of a rapidly evolving grid.

The partnership between ASI and National Grid is supported by a grant from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center’s Innovate Mass programme (www.masscec.com/program/innovatemass), a state initiative that promotes technologies with a strong potential for commercialisation, including a focus on gridtech demonstration projects.