AiDash launches joint grid resilience offering with Schneider Electric

AiDash launches joint grid resilience offering with Schneider Electric
by Staff Writers
San Jose CA (SPX) Feb 08, 2023

AiDash, a leading provider of vegetation management and other satellite- and AI-powered operations, maintenance, and sustainability solutions, has announced the launch of its joint grid resilience offering with Schneider Electric. The new solution will address modern day infrastructure and environmental challenges, such as aging power grids, decarbonization and distributed power generation, vegetation growth inside rights-of-way, and the impact of storms and wildfires.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), nearly 70% of the nation's grid is more than 25 years old, so grid resiliency is more important than ever. Modernizing the nation's power grid is necessary to ensure it can endure intensifying natural disasters as climate change worsens and accommodate renewable energy sources. Vegetation management and asset management are also critical areas for utility companies and require the most spending to gather historical data and insights, and predict future outcomes.

AiDash and Schneider Electric's grid resilience offering will support this by leveraging their respective capabilities to improve data accuracy for safety, optimize asset maintenance and capital investments, improve vegetation management and pruning cycles, forecast natural disaster outages, and more. The full list of features includes:

+ Grid Information Management
+ Asset Inspection and Maintenance
+ Capital Project Management
+ Vegetation Inspection and M
+ 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."

The grid resilience offering adds to AiDash's list of products that leverage satellites and AI to help customers make more data-driven decisions. Its Intelligent Vegetation Management System (IVMS) helps utilities balance reliability, sustainability, and cost. The Disaster and Disruption Management System (DDMS) forecasts storms, wildfire outages, and damages to plan quickly and restore safely for utilities as well as energy companies, governments, and cities. The system works in near real-time before, during, and after a major natural disaster or extreme event.

"Utilities face challenges on multiple fronts: outdated infrastructure, increasing energy demands and the integration of clean energy, all while facing more extreme weather events. The most noticeable effect 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," said Alexis Grenon, SVP Digital Grid, Schneider Electric.

"We are excited to work with AiDash to provide a joint solution that helps utilities increase reliability of the grid while addressing the challenges of the new energy landscape."

In 2022, SE Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based global venture fund backed by Schneider Electric, led a $10M investment in AiDash, to drive climate resilience for utility assets. The funding is supporting AiDash's satellite and AI-powered vertical SaaS products including IVMS, DDMS and Intelligent Sustainability Management System (ISMS).

AiDash and Schneider Electric are officially launching the grid resilience offering at DISTRIBUTECH 2023 (February 7-9, 2023) in San Diego, CA, where the team will be on the ground at Booth #1529. Both companies will also be conducting a presentation on the new offering at the conference.