DeepSummary
In this episode, Cody Sims interviews Mish Tadani, CEO of Rhizome, a company that provides AI-powered software to help electric utilities identify vulnerabilities from climate threats, quantify risks, and measure the economic and social benefits of grid-enhancing investments. They discuss the definition of resilience in the context of power grid infrastructure and how utilities are preparing for and mitigating the impacts of extreme weather events.
Tadani explains that resilience involves both the ability to recover quickly from incidents and withstanding impacts beyond normal conditions. He describes how Rhizome's platform models various climate scenarios and asset fragility to project risks and evaluate potential investments like vegetation management, insulated conductors, or battery storage. They also explore regulatory frameworks emerging to guide resilience planning and cost-benefit analyses.
The conversation touches on challenges utilities face in allocating capital for resilience, clean energy goals, and accommodating load growth from AI and electrification trends. Tadani highlights the value of leveraging AI and climate data to make prudent, high-resolution investment decisions that balance affordability with meeting diverse policy objectives.
Key Episodes Takeaways
- Electric utilities are facing increasing risks and vulnerabilities from extreme weather and climate change impacts on their grid infrastructure.
- Investing in resilience measures like vegetation management, insulated lines, backup power etc. can help prevent and mitigate power outages but requires data-driven cost-benefit analyses.
- Regulatory frameworks are emerging to guide resilience planning and investments, factoring in climate projections, equity impacts and tracking effectiveness.
- Balancing resilience needs with clean energy goals, load growth and affordability is a key challenge requiring high-resolution analysis of investment tradeoffs.
- AI-powered risk modeling and digital twin simulations provide a robust way to evaluate vulnerabilities and quantify the value of different resilience measures.
- Tailoring solutions to utilities' existing systems and regulatory constraints is critical for adoption of new resilience technologies.
- Federal funding from legislation like the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is enabling resilience initiatives by utilities.
- Collaboration and sharing best practices across utilities, regulators and technology providers can accelerate effective resilience strategies.
Top Episodes Quotes
- “Number one is around the ability to recover from an incident that does occur, whether it's the time or the energy that required to get a system back up and running. And so if you can actually measure that, quantify it, and reduce that time, then you're by nature, increasing resilience.“ by Ramesh Tadani
- “You can require that a utility does a risk assessment on their system, that they do a climate vulnerability study. You can require that a utility compares different scenarios of investments against each other for their cost benefit so that you can demonstrate why you chose the investment path forward.“ by Ramesh Tadani
- “What it's really coming down to is because these things are going to start causing affordability issues for utility customers, that utilities have to be more thoughtful than ever. Regulators have to be more thoughtful than ever about what investments are being made at fairly high resolutions that actually serve customers the best and help meet all of these policy goals that we've set out.“ by Ramesh Tadani
- “We've been able to get in front of executive level C suite executives at the utilities and actually pitch a solution that is directly embedded within their existing workflows. Because that's what a lot of technology companies get wrong, is they either don't understand the regulatory environment or they don't understand that even if you have a really cool technology, it needs to coexist with what the utility has already developed internally.“ by Ramesh Tadani
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Episode Information
My Climate Journey
Jason Jacobs, Cody Simms, Yin Lu
6/27/24