Name: Edison International CEO: AI Tools are Transforming Utilities
Uploaded: 2022-08-29
Duration: 5 min 8 s
Description: CEO Pedro Pizarro says “We are doing things today we didn’t imagine five years ago”

CEO Pedro Pizarro says “We are doing things today we didn’t imagine five years ago”

Edison International CEO: AI Tools are Transforming Utilities

Leadership

Edison Intl. CEO: AI Tools are Transforming Utilities

Pedro is amazing to see how artificial intelligence has become such a valuable business tool for so many industries, including for utilities, tell us how ai has changed the way you operate your company, Edison International and your utility southern California. Edison. It is helping us to deal with the massive amounts of data that we generate across our business. Um and automate the processing of that and getting intelligent information out of it. We're just starting with this susie. Uh and the impact already is amazing. Nobody likes power outages, Nobody likes to be without electricity. And it is so critical for utility to check the status of this critical infrastructure. I know you're using ai to do that, explain how that works. First we have smart meters for all of our five million smart meters and those were men just to be a billing tool, but they're looking at voltage every fifth minutes. So we're now able to use machine learning based algorithms to examine all that data and look at the state of the system. And one application is allowed us to do is to if we have an issue where a car has hit a pole and a line has fallen to the ground. We can now detect the vast majority of those very quickly by using machine learning algorithms. And I understand that just for your standard maintenance work and inspections of your critical infrastructure, you're using drones with cameras that are doing the work that used to be done manually. Right? Absolute. And we have in uh significantly increased the amount of inspection that we do, particularly in the 27% of our territory. That's high fire risk areas. Uh And so now we're using drills to get 3 60 views of our assets out in the field powers folds wires, that generates a large number of photos. Right? So we're now able to use AI to examine those photos to the first fast identify areas of concern. We still need a human being to take a final look at that. But you know that AI capability has dramatically enhance our ability to be able to sort through the thousands of photos that we need to expect our system. Tell us a little bit about how AI is helping you deal with wildfires. I mean, we know that power lines ignite wildfires, but I understand that a I also helps to fight wildfires before they even start. How does that work? Certainly the examples I just gave you both go towards that. Right, Because down wires can start a fire and getting better inspections help prevent wildfires, but we're also using supercomputers to run over 100 million fire simulations nightly. And that gives us some sense of what is the fuel on the ground, what our weather conditions uh and therefore help us to triage out. What are the areas of greatest concern are the areas where we may need to double down on inspections or areas where we need to do greater hardening of the system. Um or areas potentially where things are, you know, conditions are tough enough. We might need to take a preventive outage to help a avoid a fire. So all of that is being assisted assisted through uh you know, significant supercomputing assets with the machine learning and Ai capability as well. How much has this changed and made detection much faster and easier? It's just night and day. So the rate of change is amazing. It's been amazing to hear and it's going to continue changing but much more automation across the system, the ability to, you know, to process all of this. We still need humor Beings in the equation but their capacity to move and move quickly, particularly as we get larger scale events with climate change. We we are doing things today that we didn't imagine five years ago. And it's making a huge difference in keeping our communities safer looking ahead. How do you see a I evolving in your business in the future? What are going to be the kinds of things that you'll do 5, 10 years from now that you couldn't have imagined right now? Well remember that our system itself is evolving. So we're going from what used to be a one way power grid with large central stations feeding all the power to a system that is more and more distributed. Right? So think about that as having now instead of a few dozen nodes, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of notes that we need to uh coordinate, monitor. Uh and so ai tools are going to be able big part in making sure we can run that kind of large scale and much more complex system also think will be helpful in terms of running the system with high cybersecurity standards to be able to monitor potential threats. And then finally, I think we're just scratching the surface now in terms of a ice capacity to improve the customer experience to anticipate customer, needs to find better ways to communicate with the customer. So it's just an exciting time.