Areas all around the world are facing a variety of different effects from climate change, with different extreme weather events and storms becoming more frequent and more powerful. From wildfires to hurricanes and everything in between, communities are having to find ways to deal with these events. In addition to these storms, we are also seeing more extreme temperatures, particularly on the hot side. In order for people to continue living comfortably in many places, more power is required to keep homes and other structures cooled or heated during the summer and winter months – and in some places, all year long.
On top of that, we are in the midst of a boom around artificial intelligence that is powering new capabilities across nearly every industry. While there are clear benefits to many of these new tools, the generative AI models in particular require massive amounts of data that are being held in an increasingly large number of data centers, which in turn require tremendous amounts of power to keep running.
Put all of these factors together – to say nothing of increasing urbanization all around the world – and our demand for power is at never-before-seen levels, and doesn’t figure to slow down. In one report from late in 2023, for example, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in the U.S. estimated that electricity demand would grow by 4.7 percent over the next five years, a jump of 81 percent compared to the previous year’s estimate.
In many cases, it is not an exaggeration to say that keeping these power systems running is a matter of life and death. Unfortunately, while the demand for this power is increasing the AEC industry tasked with inspecting and maintaining these systems is experiencing a shortage of workers. To fill that gap, many utilities are starting to lean on digital twins powered by that aforementioned AI to streamline this work and ensure they can keep up with the demand of the power grids they are tasked to upkeep.
Recently, Geo Week News spoke with representatives from a pair of companies who are working in this realm, providing the software for utility companies to transform their imagery and lidar data into digital twins. Geo Week News spoke with Sharper Shape’s Vice President of Global Sales and Commercial Processes, Kristy McDermott, and Buzz Solutions’ Co-Founder, COO, and CTO Vikhyat Chaudhry to learn more about this space and how it’s developed.
Both companies serve a similar purpose and have been around long enough – Sharper Shape was founded in 2013, and Buzz Solutions in 2017 – to see how the industry has changed today compared to prior to this current AI boom. There are some differences in the platforms – Buzz Solutions largely deals with RGB imagery and photogrammetric models as well as thermal imagery, while Sharper Shape works with both RGB imagery and lidar data – but both are seeing similar trends in the industry.
Both McDermott and Chaudhry, for example, point to three main functions that their customers are looking for these digital twins to automatically detect: Asset inventory, potential maintenance concerns, and vegetation encroachment. For the first point, as McDermott points out in a conversation at the annual Commercial UAV Expo earlier this month, “Most utilities don’t know exactly where their assets are with absolute accuracy.”
This is a point Chaudhry also makes, and thus both systems will use artificial intelligence to automatically identify assets within their utility systems to accurately place them in spatial context. Generally speaking, these solutions will include a library of assets within the software that customers can use, while also having the ability to “teach” their own assets to the AI.
One of the other big themes that came through in these conversations was the idea of integrating these digital twins and the resulting insights into other systems. Like many other industries, the power utilities sector is dealing with something similar to what we know as “app fatigue,” needing to shift through a handful of applications for one piece of a project. Increasingly, we are seeing solutions create integrations with bigger platforms, something both Chaudhry and McDermott backed up. Both solutions are integrated with big systems like SAP and IBM, with Chaudhry also calling out Buzz Solutions’ integration with Esri’s ArcGIS and McDermott noting that Sharper Shape is often integrated with companies’ internal GIS systems.
“The main purpose of [our integrations] is that we don’t want these insights to just be sitting on a server that we own,” Chaudhry said. “We want these insights to go back to the utility so they can take quality actions on top of them.”
One of the other main themes that came across in both of these conversations was that, while AI has certainly come a long way, and particularly over the last few years, it’s still not a wholesale replacement for human workers. Both express the idea that keeping a human in the loop is crucial for this work, and that the AI is meant to assist that work. McDermott, for example, talks about Sharper Shape’s confidence score, which serves as a way to prioritize areas that are still going to be manually inspected by human workers.
Chaudhry, meanwhile, talks about their “human in the loop” feature that came directly from a customer ask. “It’s a key part of our software platform. It helps utilities to basically use AI as a first-pass filter, and then subject matter experts provide their feedback. So they don’t have to solely rely on AI.”
As many people within the tech industry will attest to, we are still very much in the early days of artificial intelligence and digital twins. In many ways, in fact, these remain buzzwords. However, that is not the same as saying they are yet to provide any tangible value. The power utilities space is a great example of an industry that has a huge need for technological lift in the midst of rapidly growing demand and increasing worker shortages. As solutions from Sharper Shape and Buzz Solutions, among others, prove, there is plenty of demand right now for ways to take imagery and lidar data and turn them into digital twins to streamline work and meet that growing demand.
