Dive Brief:
- GE Vernova on May 23 announced the launch of Thinklabs AI, a startup developing an AI-powered digital assistant for utilities that helps ensure electricity supply matches demand and reduces grid congestion.
- Thinklabs Copilot is intended to help ensure reliability in areas that have a high penetration of renewables and distributed energy resources, Thinklabs said in a May 23 news release. Thinklabs Founder and CEO Josh Wong said Copilot will analyze the grid, make recommendations before problems happen and learn from its experience.
- “It’s similar to a car that has sensors,” Wong said. The sensors let the driver know if they are drifting out of their lane or getting too close to another vehicle, while ThinkLabs’ product lets grids know if congestion is about to become a problem.
Dive Insight:
ThinkLabs’ tool makes immediate recommendations about where to redirect power. For example, it can suggest cutting off power to some customers or drawing power from storage batteries.
ThinkLabs is already working with electric utilities to deploy its Copilot digital assistant, Wong said.
“In the real world, we need to think quickly on the spot,” Wong said. A computer program can make calculations faster than a traditional engineer, with artificial intelligence programs able to learn and adapt, he added.
Many of the company’s employees — including Wong, who worked as a general manager of grid orchestration for GE Vernova from 2022 until earlier this year — have an engineering background and have worked with electric grids, Wong said. This gives them the experience and the data necessary to teach a computer program how to monitor the power supply, he noted.
The nature of the modern power grid necessitates a program such as Copilot, Wong said. Electric vehicle charging stations, along with the data centers supporting online shopping, social media sites, and artificial intelligence queries, among other demands, are drawing more and more power from the grid. At the same time, the electricity powering the grid comes from a more diverse set of sources such as solar and wind farms, he said.
Ensuring that demand is always matched with supply helps address one of the most pressing challenges of clean energy — its reliability, Wong said.
“EV charging and data centers are causing unpredictable congestion on the grid and causing grid reliability concerns,” Thinklabs’ release said. “By utilizing an AI copilot, grid conditions can be continuously monitored, violations detected, and solutions automatically recommended before problems occur.”
GE Vernova said that it pre-seeded ThinkLabs with an initial early-stage investment
“An additional first-time seed-stage investment of $5 million was co-led by Powerhouse Ventures and Active Impact Investments. Other participants in the round included Blackhorn Ventures, Amplify Capital, Mercuria Energy, and a national US energy company,” GE Vernova said in its release.
“There’s a bunch of things to be excited about here,” Active Impact Partner Sam Hasty said.
But above all, Hasty said he’s happy to be contributing to a company with the potential to bring more renewable energy onto the grid.
“Grids are increasingly strained,” he said. “We electrify everything, and all this is happening as it’s getting hotter, that makes for a very complicated balancing equation. The time is right for something that supports the management” of the grid.
