New satellite-based grid resilience offer for utilities

AiDash and Schneider Electric have partnered on a new Grid Resilience offer to address utility infrastructure and environmental challenges.

The new offering draws on Silicon Valley headquartered AiDash’s satellite-based and AI offerings with Schneider Electric’s asset management and other products to create a portfolio of features to address current grid resilience challenges.

These are primarily due to an ageing infrastructure with the need to meet increasing demand and integrate new renewables and the growing prevalence of extreme weather events, along with the ever present problem of vegetation management, which is one of AiDash’s focus areas.

The full list of features for the Grid Resilience offer includes:
● Grid information management
● Asset inspection and maintenance
● Capital project management
● Vegetation inspection and management
● Storm and wildfire resilience.

“With growing natural disasters in today’s world, it’s essential to leverage several types of technology to prevent power outages, predict future outcomes and build climate resilience,” said Abhishek Singh, co-founder, and CEO of AiDash.

“Our partnership with Schneider Electric enables customers to leverage Schneider Electric’s asset management and our vegetation management capabilities to help utilities better understand resilience issues and detect ways to tackle them based on real-time data and insights.”

Schneider Electric is an investor in AiDash through its backed venture fund SE Ventures, which led a $10 million investment round in the company in November 2022.

Alexis Grenon, SVP Digital Grid at Schneider Electric, says the most noticeable effect from the multiple challenges facing utilities has been a 64% increase in power outages with the majority linked to weather and vegetation.

“AiDash’s satellite and AI-powered solutions are providing utilities an advantage to overcome these hurdles.”

Benefits of the new Grid Resilience offer are stated as improving data accuracy to better understand reliance issues and detect ways to tackle them, optimising assets and capital investments, improving vegetation management and pruning cycles and forecasting natural disaster outages.