The transformative grid tech no one is talking about

The energy world has spent 2024 giddy about the potential technological breakthroughs enabled by artificial intelligence. But accelerated computing, AI’s lesser-known companion, is also likely to dramatically impact how electric utilities operate.

Accelerated computing is a process that splits an application’s data-intensive parts from everything else, to be processed on a separate piece of hardware known as a hardware accelerator. Graphics processing units, or GPUs, are common accelerators because they can perform multiple tasks simultaneously, instead of one at a time like a central processing unit.

Recently, chip manufactures like Nvidia have been working to increase the speed and processing power of GPUs without driving up costs — with major benefits for a system’s energy efficiency.

“For the first time, you’ve got technology and compute resources like GPUs that are price-performant for this type of work,” said Marc Spieler, senior managing director of global energy industry at Nvidia, in an episode of the With Great Power podcast.

This development will have a significant impact on managing the power grid. Spieler added that there are many potential optimizations that are currently limited by how compute-intensive they are. Spieler and his team are currently working with utilities to speed up grid simulations, which show how the power grid will perform under different conditions and with certain equipment. The process is currently limited by processing power, and can often take longer than a day to complete.

​​”Today you can simulate a portion of the grid with so many interconnections…and it runs on CPUs and it can only go so big before you’re outgrown a single computer,” said Spieler. “With accelerated computing, you can actually add way more aspects to that,[like modeling power flow from distributed energy resources]. With a bidirectional grid, now all of a sudden you want to be able to see many different options.”

Accelerated computing also allows for day-of decision-making, which can quickly improve operations, he added — and that’s crucial given the urgency of the energy transition. Spieler said that utilities in states with renewables and electric vehicle mandates, such as Portland General Electric in Oregon and Southern California Edison and Pacific Gas & Electric in California, are leading adoption of accelerated computing.

“Some of these utilities that really are trying to incorporate more renewables onto the grid in a very fast way have to be innovative,” he said.

But that’s not the case everywhere. Spieler lives in Texas, and is concerned about how rising electricity demand will impact utility infrastructure. His 11-kilowatt Tesla, for instance, is drawing from his neighborhood’s 25-kW transformer.

“I’m thinking, there’s four houses attached to this. What’s going to happen when we have four Teslas plugged in?” he said. “It’s going to start to raise issues unless we’re able to send communication really fast, faster than electrons.”

That’s an area where he sees advanced computing as having the potential to help.

“Looking at that data and coming up with better plans and operational procedures, I think will save some of these companies tremendous amounts of money, and it’ll save people a tremendous amount of heartache,” said Spieler.

For the full conversation with Marc Spieler on accelerated computing, listen to his interview on season 3 of With Great Power here.

With Great Power is a show about the people building the future grid, today. It’s a co-production of GridX and Latitude Studios. Subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or anywhere you get your shows.

Read the original article from Latitude Media here.