Smart Grid AI Centre of Excellence launched in Canada
The City of Summerside on Canada’s Prince Edward Island is home to a new centre focussed on AI innovation in the energy transition.
The new centre, an initiative of Ottawa-based AI solution developer BluWave-ai and the city utility Summerside Electric, comprises a wind farm, solar array, battery storage, grid connection, smart metering assets and a cloud-based AI optimisation platform.
The proposal is that the centre will serve as a real-world AI test centre and support international customers worldwide.
Devashish Paul, CEO of BluWave‐ai, explains that the company has been working with Summerside Electric Utility for over three years inside the live testbed, validating and proving that AI optimisation and efficiency is possible and proving itself out in Summerside.
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“As many jurisdictions transition to a low carbon economy and integrate more renewables into their portfolio, the challenges of managing, predicting, and forecasting production has always been a huge undertaking,” he says.
“By setting up this centre in Summerside we have a global competitive advantage with a real‐world test centre already invested in by the city that leverages data and renewable assets that the rest of Canada and the world are only catching up with.”
In November 2021, BluWave‐ai and the City of Summerside completed what they called the first-end to-end AI‐optimised grid in North America as the first industry proof point of a scalable system applicable to entire regions and countries for transitioning energy networks toward maximising the use of renewable assets.
BluWave-ai has subsequently been awarded the contract to advance Summerside’s system utility manager software in order to integrate a new 26MW solar and battery project.
The first version of the Centre of Excellence is fully operational, combining the renewable and distributed resources at the utility and BluWave-ai’s cloud-based Edge and Center platform.
Future releases will enable third-party researchers and labs, both in Canada and internationally, to access and load synthesised data and AI models from the Centre’s cloud and tailor them for their own deployments with different physical assets.
