Dominion Energy and PingThings Harness AI and Electric Grid Data to Prevent Power Outages
Dominion Energy Virginia and data platform provider PingThings are revolutionizing how electric grids are managed by harnessing artificial intelligence and sensor data from across the grid to identify failing equipment and anticipate widespread outages before they happen.
They are achieving this through an initiative – Technology Acceleration Alliance – that establishes Dominion Energy as the leading utility for bringing sensor data into the AI future.
Utilities have increasingly sophisticated sensors producing vast amounts of data. But the technology needed to store, organize, and analyze all that data has not kept pace, limiting what utilities can do with it. This confines them to a reactive approach – only investigating when something fails.
Dominion Energy and PingThings are removing that barrier. PingThings has developed a data platform that can capture and analyze massive amounts of sensor data, from measurements taken every millisecond to years of history, giving engineers and AI new ways to proactively detect emerging issues and flag anomalies on the grid. This represents a seismic shift in how the electric grid has been maintained for generations across the country.
“It’s no exaggeration to say this initiative is a game-changer, not just for Dominion Energy, but for the utility industry as a whole,” said Kevin Jones, Director of Strategic Initiatives for Dominion Energy’s Electric Transmission division. “The grid is growing faster than ever, and that makes understanding its overall health and performance even more important. We now have the technology to do that at a completely different scale, allowing us to put AI to work on some of the industry’s biggest challenges.”
The platform is currently managing about 5 petabytes, or 5 million gigabytes, of sensor data from across the grid, including data from transmission lines, substations, transformers, and other equipment. That volume is expected to more than double in the next few years.
“The electric grid is the most instrumented machine ever built and, for most of its history, nobody could examine it in full detail after the fact. Dominion Energy and PingThings have spent seven years changing that,” said Sean Murphy, CEO of PingThings. “What we are announcing today is the commitment to take what has been learned here and establish it as the model for how utilities everywhere store, understand, and act on their sensor data. Dominion is the reference for that work, and Richmond is where we intend to build it.”
Dominion Energy and PingThings have worked together since 2019, creating a seven-year head start in the use of high-volume grid data. That work has built upon years of data and operational experience in a real-world utility environment. The Technology Acceleration Alliance advances that partnership to help define this emerging technology category for the electric utility industry.
Dominion Energy’s grid in Virginia and northeastern North Carolina includes 6,800 miles of transmission lines and 58,510 miles of distribution lines. Transmission lines transport energy over larger distances and connect to distribution lines, which then deliver power to homes and businesses.
Also published in: North American Clean Energy