The power grid and the utilities that manage it have an important role to play in the next industrial revolution driven by artificial intelligence and accelerated computing, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang said at the meeting Tuesday. annual of the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), an Association of American and International Utilities.
“The future of digital intelligence is quite bright, and therefore the future of the energy sector is also quite bright,” Huang said in a conversation before an audience of more than a thousand energy and utility industry executives.
Like other companies, utilities will apply AI to increase employee productivity, but “the biggest impact and return comes from applying AI to delivering power across the grid,” Huang said. in conversation with Pedro Pizarro, president of EEI and president and CEO of Edison International, the parent company of Southern California Edison, one of the largest electric companies in the country.
For example, Huang described how the networks will use AI-powered smart meters to allow customers to sell their excess electricity to neighbors.
“They will connect resources and users, just like Google, so that their power grid becomes a smart grid with a digital layer like an energy app store,” he said.
“My feeling is that, like previous industrial revolutions, (AI) will drive productivity to levels we have never seen,” he added.
A video of the talk will soon be available here.
AI lights up power grids
Today, power grids are primarily one-way systems connecting a few large power plants to many users. They will increasingly become two-way, flexible and distributed networks with solar and wind farms connecting homes and buildings equipped with solar panels, batteries and electric vehicle chargers.
It is a big job that requires autonomous control systems that process and analyze a huge amount of data in real time; a job very suitable for AI and accelerated computing.
AI is being applied to power grid use cases, thanks to a broad ecosystem of companies using NVIDIA technologies.
In a recent GTC Sessionutility provider Hubbell and startup Utilidata, a member of the NVIDIA Home program, described a new generation of smart meters that use NVIDIA Supersonic platform that utilities will deploy to process and analyze grid data in real time using AI models at the edge. Deloitte Announced today your support for the effort.
Siemens Energy detailed in a separate session of the GTC his work with AI and NVIDIA Omniverse create digital twins of transformers in substations to improve predictive maintenance and increase network resilience. AND a video reports on how Siemens Gamesa used Omniverse and accelerated computing to optimize turbine placement for a large wind farm.
“Deploying AI and advanced computing technologies developed by NVIDIA enables better and faster modernization of the network and we, in turn, can deliver for our customers,” said Maria Pope, CEO of Portland General Electric in Oregon.
NVIDIA offers a 45,000 times greater gain in energy efficiency
The advances come as NVIDIA reduces the costs and energy required to implement AI.
Over the past eight years, NVIDIA has increased energy efficiency of running AI inference on large next-generation language models a whopping 45,000 times, Huang said in his recent fundamental in COMPUTEX.
NVIDIA Blackwell Architecture GPU will provide 20x more power efficiency than CPUs for AI and high performance computing. If all CPU servers for these jobs were switched to GPUs, users would save 37 terawatt-hours per year, the equivalent of 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and the electricity use of 5 million homes.
That's why NVIDIA-powered systems swept the top six spots and took seven of the top 10 in the latest classification of the Green500a list of the most energy efficient supercomputers in the world.
Besides, a recent report Calls on governments to accelerate the adoption of AI as an important new tool to drive energy efficiency in many industries. He cited examples of utilities adopting AI to make the electric grid more efficient.
Learn more about how Utilities are implementing AI. and accelerated computing to improve operations, saving costs and energy.
