Photo courtesy of the Vermont Electric CooperativeThis story by Aaron Calvin was first published in News & Citizen on March 27.After weathering several severe floods and windstorms in the last half-decade, Vermont Electric Cooperative is turning to new software that will allow them to identify t he most vulnerable aspects of their infrastructure.The Johnson-based utility announced last week it would be partnering with Rhizome, a software that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to identify potential points within the power grid that are likely to be damaged in future weather events.Cyril Brunner, the utility’s innovation and technology director, said Rhizome software will help tackle the monumental challenge posed by the increasingly severe storms fueled by a changing climate.“The example I’ll often use is that we have a $200 million problem and can spend $5 million a year,” Brunner said. “You do the quick math, and you’re like, ‘Cool, maybe in 50 years, we’ll have a better system in place.’ But the reality is, unless we want to have significant rate impacts — and we have a territory that has a lot of low-income folks on fixed incomes — we’re trying to minimize the rate impact. Because we have those limited resources, it’s all about prioritization.”Enter Rhizome. Brunner was familiar with the company from its work on Vermont Electric Power Company, the state’s transmission operator. The company reached out with a new software it had designed specifically for smaller utilities, with a price-point to match.Instead of Vermont Electric Cooperative spending far beyond its means to try and protect all its systems and transformers, Rhizome will allow Brunner and the co-op to take a more surgical approach. As Brunner explains it, the software takes publicly available climate models and analyzes them with the kind of powerful machine learning available through recent artificial intelligence breakthroughs, applying massive datasets to three-mile squares, downscaling the analysis to look at how weather events can impact extremely specific pieces of land.After the massive flooding the county saw in 2023, and the many downed power lines that caused extended outages following Hurricane Debby last summer, utility officials are hoping Rhizome will help them identify the power lines and substations that could be the most easily damaged in a variety of weather scenarios.“It’s much more about making investments into the system, replacing lines, moving lines, upgrading lines,” Brunner said. “It probably won’t help us if there’s a storm coming next week.”Using software like Rhizome is just one way the utility is trying to make their severe weather response more efficient. Vermont Electric Cooperative recently hosted a webinar this week with COO Peter Rossi and operations supervisor Shawn Juaire on how the co-op is making use of drones in post-weather event repair and maintenance efforts.Brunner pointed to several recent state-commissioned climate reports indicating increased precipitation will continue while the winters shorten. And technology powered by artificial intelligence like Rhizome has an outsized impact on the demand for electricity and water, which can contribute to climate change, according to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Brunner said, while the changing climate will affect everything, the co-op must do something to invest in its own resilience with its limited budget.“We’re trying to figure out what is the worst problem,” he said. “We know that everything’s going to be impacted in some way, but where is there going to be the most impact to the power system and what can we mitigate the most?”Read the story on VTDigger here: Electric co-op turning to AI to weatherize grid against future storms. ...read more read less