AI software company raises $2.5M for grid resiliency

Rhizome, a climate resilience planning platform for the power grid, announced its official launch, initial institutional capital raise of $2.5 million, and partnership with Seattle City Light and Vermont Electric Power Company (VELCO).

With ongoing engagements with several major electric utilities, Rhizome says it intends to make the electric grid more resilient by forecasting climate impacts on utility infrastructure and optimising grid investments.

“As climate change escalates and its impacts become more devastating, we must be precise and decisive in modernizing the grid,” said Rhizome co-founder and CEO Mishal Thadani.

“Rhizome’s veteran team is focused on helping utilities and regulators make the grid more resilient without significant cost increases for communities. Instead of looking at the past and hoping for the best, we are able to make high-resolution predictions about the grid of tomorrow.”

Rhizome’s software platform was made to calculate the economic and social impacts of potential future power grid failures caused by climate change-fueled disasters such as storms, extreme temperatures, floods and wildfires.

Infrastructure investment planning has traditionally relied primarily on historical data. Rhizome pairs resilience research from national labs with infrastructure data and proprietary machine learning to place a “value of resilience” on every proposed grid investment.

Have you read:
Grid modernisation top challenge for US utility executives
Funding for Capalo AI’s market optimisation platform

This is meant to inform utilities and regulators on the optimal investment plans that mitigate the most risk per dollar. Replacing and hardening aging assets, vegetation management, distribution automation devices, and distributed energy resources are all examples of interventions that Rhizome’s platform is able to assess.

Rhizome’s first utility partners are located on both coasts. Seattle City Light (SCL), the public utility providing electricity to Seattle and its neighboring communities, is the 10th largest public utility in the US. SCL is partnering with Rhizome to protect its service network in the face of future extreme weather.

On the East Coast, Vermont Electric Power Company (VELCO), works with Vermont’s 17 local utilities and the New England grid operator to meet high national and regional standards of reliability even during extreme weather events. Rhizome is also currently working with other major utilities in the Northeast and Pacific Northwest.

Since 2011, the country has experienced at least seven major extreme weather events, each of which stressed electric grid operations, The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) said earlier this year. The Commission finalised two rules that it said would help improve reliability of the bulk power system against threats of extreme weather that may cause risk to life and economic harm.

Originally published by Sean Wolfe on Power Grid.