Jensen Huang discussed how the next industrial revolution of generative AI is changing the future for utilities and their consumers in a speech at the Edison Electric Institute
.At the annual meeting of the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), an association of domestic and international utilities, on Tuesday, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang stated that the electric grid and the utilities that manage it have a significant role to play in the next industrial revolution that is being driven by AI and accelerated computing.
Speaking to a crowd of over a thousand utility and energy sector executives, Huang declared, “The future of digital intelligence is quite bright, and so the future of the energy sector is bright, too.”
While utilities, like other businesses, plan to use AI to boost worker productivity, Pedro Pizarro, the chair of EEI and president and CEO of Edison International—the parent company of Southern California Edison, one of the biggest electric utilities in the country—said that applying AI to the delivery of energy over the grid will have the biggest impact and yield the highest return.
Huang gave an example of how smart meters with AI capabilities will be used by grids to allow users to sell their extra electricity to nearby homes.”Like Google, you will link users and resources, transforming your power grid into a smart network with a digital layer akin to an energy app store,” he stated.
He continued, “I feel that [AI] will drive productivity to levels that we’ve never seen, like previous industrial revolutions.”
Soon, this talk’s video will be accessible online.
AI Enables Electric Grids to Glow
Electric grids of today are mostly one-way systems connecting numerous users to a small number of large power plants. They will develop into more flexible, dispersed, two-way networks with solar and wind farms linking residences with electric vehicle chargers, solar panels, and batteries.
Large-scale autonomous control systems that process and analyze enormous amounts of data in real time are needed for this task; these systems are well suited to artificial intelligence and accelerated computing.
Because a large ecosystem of businesses employ NVIDIA’s products, artificial intelligence is being applied to use cases across energy grids.
Utilidata, a startup that is a part of the NVIDIA Inception program, and utility vendor Hubbell discussed a new generation of smart meters that use the NVIDIA Jetson platform during a recent GTC session. These meters will be used by utilities to process and analyze real-time grid data using AI models at the edge. Deloitte declared today that it will back the endeavor.
In a different GTC session, Siemens Energy described how it is using AI and NVIDIA Omniverse to create digital twins of substation transformers to enhance predictive maintenance and increase grid resilience. Additionally, a video describes how Siemens Gamesa optimized the locations of turbines for a sizable wind farm by using Omniverse and accelerated computing.
According to Maria Pope, CEO of Portland General Electric in Oregon, “Deploying AI and advanced computing technologies developed by NVIDIA enables faster and better grid modernization, and we, in turn, can deliver for our customers.”
NVIDIA Delivers Increases Energy Efficiency by 45,000 Times
The breakthroughs occur when NVIDIA reduces the energy and cost required to implement AI.
In his recent keynote at COMPUTEX, Huang stated that NVIDIA has improved the energy efficiency of conducting AI inference on cutting-edge big language models by a staggering 45,000 times over the last eight years.
For AI and high-performance computing, NVIDIA Blackwell architecture GPUs will offer 20x more energy efficiency than CPUs. Users would save 37 terawatt-hours annually, or the electricity used by 5 million houses and 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, if all CPU servers for these jobs switched to GPUs.
For this reason, in the most recent ranking of the Green500, a list of the most energy-efficient supercomputers in the world, NVIDIA-powered systems took seven of the top ten positions and swept the top six slots.
Furthermore, governments should utilize AI as a major new tool to increase energy efficiency across various industries as soon as possible, according to a recent paper. It gave instances of utilities implementing AI to improve the efficiency of the electrical grid.
