Tata Power on Wednesday announced that it has roped in renewable energy AI (artificial intelligence) company BluWave-ai. “Tata Power, India’s largest integrated power utility, announced that it has signed a three-year commercial agreement with BluWave-ai, the world’s first renewable energy AI company,” it said in a statement.
According to the statement, this agreement was signed after a successful trial project, during which Tata Power evaluated the performance of the BluWave-ai cloud platform to generate intra-day and day-ahead dispatches for use in its power scheduling operations.
India recently put measures in place to mandate accurate energy scheduling and introduced a real-time market to improve onboarding of renewable energy in the national grid, it informed.
As a result, electricity distribution companies now face strict penalties for deviation from planned energy usage, which increases with inaccuracy in power scheduling, it added.
As an innovator in its industry, Tata Power decided to activate the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to optimise power scheduling and thus address the new regulatory changes.
The company has deployed a few AI solutions such as The Central Control room for Renewable Assets (CCRA), which uses machine learning based on loss estimation, forecasting and alert/notification.
To optimise the coal supply and order inventory management, Tata Power’s Coastal Gujarat Power Limited (CGPL) and Maithon Power Plant (MPL) units also use the pit to plant Coal Supply Management (Coal SCM) and Management Strategic Review (MSR) solutions.
In addition to this, the company’s Mumbai Distribution team has implemented a sentiment analysis tool for email classification and routing that will help in the proactive assessment of consumer needs.
Apart from the forecast provided by BluWave, the PSCC team has also developed and implemented change overload prediction and RTM optimization, which utilises neural network and linear programming, respectively, thus ensuring optimised power purchase and hence keeping the power purchase cost at the optimum levels.
The leadership demonstrated by Tata Power and BluWave-ai was recognised with an India Smart Grid Forum (ISGF) top-level ‘Diamond Trophy’ in the Utility Distribution category. The award recognises the benefits of BluWave-ai’s method for forecasting energy consumption load at Tata Power.
“We are working with BluWave-ai to operationalise Artificial Intelligence in our day to day power distribution in Mumbai. Working with AI-enabled system improvements via cloud computing in real-time operations enhances our baseline systems, resulting in higher operational efficiency and accuracy,” said Sanjay Banga, President, T&D, Tata Power, in the statement.
“Our team at BluWave-ai has sought out innovative early adopters of complex AI technologies to onboard our products. We have focused on working with leading global energy companies, such as Tata Power, to build the world’s premier AI cleantech company,” said Devashish Paul, CEO of BluWave-ai.
The BluWave-ai software-as-a-solution (SaaS) has been live in operation 24x7x365 since February 2020. It also adopted rapidly to last year’s massive COVID-related shutdowns and the subsequent lockdowns in Mumbai.
“In Canada, our solutions delivered the first real-time AI electric utility dispatch and standalone industrial applications. We were able to take our platform and quickly train it for the Indian market using real-time data from Tata Power Mumbai DISCOM to integrate with its operations.
“This technology provides our customers a solution that realises a significant financial benefit from the 35,000+ yearly electricity dispatches,” Paul said.
The current collaboration is signed for three years with an option to extend to five, the statement noted.
