Alphabet Inc.’s X moonshot unit is working on a project to develop tools that can help utilities monitor and predict activity on their power grids. 

The project was announced this morning by X Vice President Audrey Zibelman during remarks at the White House Leaders Summit on Climate. Zibelman joined the Alphabet unit earlier this year to lead its power grid moonshot after a several-year stint as the Australian Energy Market Operator’s managing director and chief executive officer. The executive earlier was the chair of the New York Public Service Commission.

“Our team has been working with partners to develop the tools required to move our grids out of the industrial age and into the age of intelligence,” Zibelman said at the summit.

As part of the project, X is exploring multiple ways of applying its know-how in artificial intelligence and related fields to optimize power grid management. The first use case the Alphabet unit is looking at is infrastructure monitoring. Its engineers are currently evaluating whether it would be feasible to build a platform that can provide a real-time view of all the power being sent into the grid and all the power being drawn. 

Currently, X head Astro Teller explained in a blog post, utilities often have only partial information about the electricity traversing their infrastructure. The challenges stemming from this lack of visibility are only expected to increase as more systems are connected to the grid. Moreover, X believes that there’s also an opportunity to improve the infrastructure visibility of other stakeholders besides power grid operators, such as regulators. 

“Everyone who manages, builds, regulates and provides electricity to our power system — from utilities to system operators — uses their own sets of tools and models of the system,” Teller explained. “And this is becoming a huge hindrance as operators are now orchestrating novel and unpredictable flows of power from billions of new devices both contributing to and drawing from the grid.”

A second question X is working to answer is whether it would be possible not only to monitor the current state of a power grid but also to simulate reliably how it will behave in the future. Such advance notice could potentially help energy companies better respond to operational changes. As part of its efforts to help utilities become more proactive with their operations, X will also explore if it’s “possible to forecast the weather so accurately that we could know when and where the sun will be shining and the wind will be blowing,” Teller detailed.

Another component of the Alphabet unit’s vision for power grid modernization is helping energy companies share the insights they gain from sources such as simulations with others. The reasoning is that data about power usage and other key metrics could potentially be useful for multiple different stakeholders and operational processes.

The project is not the first from X to focus on the energy sector. A few years ago, the Alphabet unit launched an initiative called Malta to build electricity storage systems using salt and other relatively inexpensive materials. Alphabet spun off the project into a standalone venture in 2018.

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