The U.S. Energy Information Administration determined that 2024, which witnessed a raft of Category 5 hurricanes, was the worst year in a decade for U.S. power outages. The spike meant that the average utility customer was without power for 11 hours in 2024, nearly double the average of the preceding 10 years. Beyond the storms, worsening trends in wildfires and floods are raising costs for utilities, placing pressure on household budgets.
But volatile weather is not the only challenge facing today’s power networks. A rush of new devices, from electric vehicles to neighborhood microgrids and residential solar panels, are now pressing up against the gates, eager to plug into the system. These 21st-century challenges won’t be solved with 20th-century tools, however. In short, the power sector has a lot of growing up to do. What’s needed is a kind of NASA-like aerial and satellite capability, combined with grid-scale intelligence technology, that gives owners of infrastructure assets a top-down picture of their system that updates in real time. To meet the world’s demands for flexibility and resiliency, the grid needs a more advanced nervous system.
A New Era of Visual Intelligence
Thankfully, the evolution of power distribution technology is running at a fast clip these days and a new kind of intelligence is emerging. It is transforming the slow and temperamental grid of your grandfather’s era into an active sensory system, one with a high IQ. Through better sensory intelligence, we can both grow the grid with lower-carbon sources while also fighting off the losses and setbacks from an unpredictable climate.
Baptise Tripard, director of product marketing in the Visual Intelligence unit at GE Vernova, says AI is now converging with high-resolution mapping in order to manage the old nemesis of power lines: trees and other vegetation. “Years ago it would have taken a couple of days to process drone or aircraft visual data, even for just a small area of land. Today on the platform we have the entire network of Florida — not only digitized in 3D, but at inch-level accuracy. That’s 250 terabytes of data streaming in real time.”
The newly stepped-up pressure from weather extremes is making the transition to lower-carbon sources all the more complicated. To keep the welcome mat friendly and open to every possible low-carbon contributor — from big wind farms to a household’s home battery storage and rooftop solar array — a new kind of orchestration is required.
Turning Complexity into Intelligence for a Modern, Decentralized Grid
Utilities today must manage two-way power flows, the integration of fast-growing renewables, congestion, and visibility out to the far edges of the system. To get a complete picture, what they need is a federated data fabric to more seamlessly link their business software and customer data with the physical machinery on the ground — the switches and transformers that route the electricity. The emerging, modern power grid is one that extends much further out than before, so monitoring all the new devices in those distant realms is critical. Without those monitoring capabilities, the more organic, lively, and low-carbon grid we hope to achieve will remain beyond our grasp.
According to Del Misenheimer, vice president and CEO of Grid Automation and Software at GE Vernova, the increasing volume and granularity of data available from modern networks can give operators greater situational awareness and support faster operational decision-making. This enhanced visibility can help utilities identify changing grid conditions more quickly and, where appropriate, support timely operational responses as distributed energy resources and other grid participants are integrated.
“This greatly increases visibility,” says Misenheimer. “With access to detailed information, operators can gain insights into grid conditions much faster than was previously possible, in some cases within seconds rather than minutes. This can help utilities detect potential issues earlier. Early detection can enable teams to respond more effectively, which can help to reduce the risk and impact of disruptions and limit the potential for issues to spread across the system.”
These emerging solutions in grid intelligence promise to create a virtuous circle. Chronic costs from storms and vegetation are suppressed through preventive management and the use of weather data to yield insights that allow for more proactive, real-time decision making. This frees up resources to keep investing in lower-carbon power sources that are dependent on the sensory system software to manage their booming growth. California, for example, now manages to wrangle multiple gigawatts of behind-the-meter power — energy generated and stored by households using rooftop solar and home batteries — alongside a growing fleet of EVs that both charge and give back to the network. Without a modern data fabric, those resources might not even make it to the grid, which would cede back the growth opportunity to higher-carbon energy sources.
So much is at stake in the modern grid era. Orchestration and grid intelligence are arriving none too soon.