During the live event: NeuTigers AI Talk – The IoT / AI Landscape and Market Trends, NeuTigers CTO Vishu Ghanakota explains why AI is the most efficient technology to monitor the electric grid.

When it comes to grid monitoring, the utilities are pretty far behind the consumers’ adoption of electric vehicles and electric appliances.
California passed a law stating that all new homes should only have electric appliances. This is creating a rush towards energy efficiency and getting off fossil fuel. This is also increasing consumer demand for electric appliances.
Now, the problem is that the utilities are unprepared to manage their grids. If everybody in our neighborhood plugged in their electric cars at the same time, the grid would collapse.
In fact, we are working with a utility in the Northeastern US where if just four households plugged in their EVs simultaneously, their local transformer would collapse.
So now the question is, how do you detect what appliances are plugged in? That’s not a trivial problem to solve.

The only option is to sense these appliances, sensing the energy usage using a machine learning approach. You could use shallow learning approaches, but they’re not as accurate as a deep learning machine learning algorithm to detect these appliances.
And beyond detection, you then you get into optimization, your energy source optimization there, you could have a combination of rule-based approach and an AI approach. Classifying these appliances that is really better solved through an AI approach.