Buzz Solutions Uses Vision AI to Supercharge the Electric Grid

The reliability of the electric grid is critical.

From handling demand surges and evolving power needs to preventing infrastructure failures that can cause wildfires, utility companies have a lot to keep tabs on.

Buzz Solutions — a member of the NVIDIA Inception program for cutting-edge startups — is helping by using AI to improve how utilities monitor and maintain their infrastructure.

Kaitlyn Albertoli, CEO and cofounder of Buzz Solutions joined the AI Podcast to explain how the company’s vision AI technology helps utilities spot potential problems faster.

Buzz Solutions helps utility companies analyze the massive amounts of inspection data collected by drones and helicopters. The company’s proprietary machine learning algorithms identify potential issues ranging from broken and rusted components to encroaching vegetation and unwelcome wildlife visits — before they cause outages or wildfires.

To help address substation issues, Buzz Solutions built PowerGUARD, a container-based application pipeline that uses AI to analyze video streams from substation cameras in real time. It detects security, safety, fire, smoke and equipment issues, annotates the video, then sends alerts via email or to a dashboard.

PowerGUARD uses the NVIDIA DeepStream software development kit for processing and inference of video streams used in real-time video analytics. DeepStream runs within the NVIDIA Metropolis framework on the NVIDIA Jetson edge AI platform or on cloud-based virtual machines ‌to improve performance, reduce costs and save time.

Albertoli believes AI is just getting started in the utility industry, as it enables workers to take action rather than spend months reviewing images manually. “We are just at the tip of the iceberg of seeing AI enter into the energy sector and start to provide real value,” she said.

Time Stamps

05:15: How Buzz Solutions saw an opportunity in the massive amounts of inspection data utility companies were collecting but not analyzing.

12:25: The importance of modernizing energy infrastructure with actionable intelligence.

16:27: How AI identifies critical risks like rusted components, vegetation encroachment and sparking issues before they cause wildfires.

20:00: Buzz Solutions’ innovative use of synthetic data to train algorithms for rare events.

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