Utility companies are closely watching the demand that burning temperatures lie on the power grid. Technologies like artificial intelligence are also bringing more demand for systems.
Dorchester's Eversource Procerch Distripce Operations Center is filled with real-time information that monitors the power grid to ensure that crews perform as designed.
“The blue line is predicted energy use, and there are actually lighter lines,” said Doug Foley, president of Eversource's Massachusetts electric business, showing real-time energy consumption data for the NBC10 Boston.
In the heat of Wednesday, Eversource called for partners who agreed to voluntarily reduce consumption during the day of use.
“It was about 80-100 megawatts that customers reduced to match the production,” Foley said.
Emergency rooms are reporting a surge in heat-related issues.
Balanced behaviour has become even more tricky with AI tools.
“We are pleased to announce that we are committed to providing a range of services and services to our customers,” said Mathew Carrara, president of Doble Engineering.
Boston-area companies can work with utilities such as Eversource to help them determine if the system needs to fine-tune it to meet demand.
“We basically monitor the equipment we play with and say, 'Hey, you're operating at a safe level. You have to be OK with a certain amount of demand, depending on what that demand is,” Carrara said.
Holden's Vincent Ropopolo says he uses power and AI. “I never graduated from university without AI. I never thought there would be a lot of demand. I thought it was something like Google search.”
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Carrara says AI relies on supercomputing to allow queries to be executed in seconds.
“Every time someone uses the AI format, the drain of the power grid is instantaneous and the drain of the grid is unknown because you don't know when someone will do a ChatGPT search,” he said. “It can be 24 hours at any time of the day, so AI and the entire data center have a lasting impact on the power grid.”
Carrera even calls one question: “How do you generate this same type of intelligence, but how do you generate less energy?”
Carrara said companies are trying to make the technology more efficient, but it is likely that it will be years away.
