Free of Charge: GE Renewable Energy Integrates Wind Energy Into the Power Grid

by Clarissa Garza

At GE Renewable Energy, CTO Danielle Merfeld and technical leader Arvind Rangarajan are among those making advances throughout renewable energy.

Merfeld and Rangarajan spoke with NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about how the company uses AI and a human-in-the-loop process to make renewable energy more widespread.

The International Energy Agency has set a goal to reach a net zero energy sector by 2050. To reach this goal, 88 percent of electricity needs to come from renewable sources.

Wind energy will account for 40 percent of that, but today only makes up 8 percent of renewable energy.

Key Points From This Episode:

  • Through pretrained models used on image datasets, the team is able to analyze wind turbines for manufacturing defects.
  • Given the number of natural disasters on wind turbine farms, field inspectors periodically check the turbines to ensure they’re safe to operate. With AI and digital cameras, the system can preselect 20 photos from a set of 3,000 to help spot potential defects more effectively.
Arvind Rangarajan, technical leader at GE Renewable Energy.

Tweetables:

“This AI, supplemented by human-in-the-loop, is really doing a great job of providing value.” — Arvind Rangarajan [19:44]

“There’s a whole new realm here of behaviors, operations, markets and physics — almost boundless opportunities.” — Danielle Merfeld  [22:29]

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