AI Is Creating an Electric Power Crunch
Athena Is Helping Utilities As They Get Ahead of It
The rise of artificial intelligence is reshaping the world in many ways. One of these is the rapid increase in electrical demand. Yes, given the current heat wave, demand is up with the increased use of air conditioners. Yes, the changes in our international trading partnerships is impacting manufacturing, traditionally the largest consumer of electricity. But each Artificial Intelligence query is estimated to consume 10x the electricity of a traditional Internet search.
Thus, behind the scenes, AI is reshaping the grid. An article from the Federation of American Scientists’ Energy Policy group lays bare a growing tension: the AI revolution is accelerating energy demand faster than our infrastructure can respond.
For context, the U.S. currently has approximately 160,000 miles of high‑voltage transmission lines in service. These high-voltage lines are part of a much broader network that stretches over 500,000 to 600,000 miles of transmission infrastructure, including mid- and lower-voltage lines, like the ones that go to your home. It is widely known that to meet electrical demand if electric vehicles become widely adopted OR the U.S. loses international trade partners and rebuilds domestic manufacturing, these line miles numbers need to increase by 50% or more.
Artificial Intelligence and Large Language Models (LLMs) increase the need for capacity even further.
Since 2000, the U.S. has been adding 350 miles of additional lines per year, down from 950 miles per year in the 2015 to 2019 period. There are a host of reasons for this including availability of copper, transformers, and other equipment components. But there are also regulatory challenges to the connection of existing generation capacity to the existing grid.
The more than 11,000 clean energy projects stuck in the U.S. interconnection queue and the average connect time is 5 years. Many of these projects have variable output (solar and wind).
The authors of Enhancing US Power Grid by using AI to Accelerate Permitting suggest that AI is a tool that can reduce the permitting time. The link will take you the article which outlines 6 specific ways AI can be used to speed up the permitting time and break the regulatory bottleneck.
At Athena Intelligence, we’ve been applying Machine Language to environmental data, creating geospatial intelligence that ties raw data to planning, pricing and the balance sheet of companies and communities for over 5 years. Since a pivot during the Covid slowdown, our focus has been pre-wildfire insights which utilities in many states use.
Athena’s Voice of the Acre® platform uses machine learning and probabilistic modeling to help utilities pinpoint where risk is most acute, where mitigation will make the biggest impact, and which assets are exposed under different scenarios.
For utilities, this means smarter prioritization. For regulators, it means defensible transparency. And for communities, it means safer, faster grid evolution.
Athena helps utilities (electric, water, gas, investor-owned, municipal or co-ops) prioritize their wildfire mitigation projects in context for better decision making. Our clients have found that the reduction in engineering time (versus using tools like th WHP) has reduced their costs and future proofed their approach to wildfire risk.
The policy issue is real: in the early years of this century, the US was adding about 1,700 miles of high voltage transmission lines per year. The federal government is now backing AI-driven permitting innovation, and DOE labs are building the foundational datasets. But the entire energy ecosystem, from wildfire resilience to PSPS planning to vegetation management, can benefit from AI-infused insight.
Athena delivers solutions today. We look forward to sharing case studies with community leaders, utility managers, property insurance companies and investors.
Athena Intelligence is a data vendor with a geospatial, conditional, profiling tool that pulls together vast amounts of disaggregated wildfire and environmental data to generate spatial intelligence, resulting in a digital fingerprint of wildfire risk.
Our primary clients are electric utilities, especially municipal utilities, community owned cooperative electrical companies and community aggregators. Athena’s data is used to prioritize projects — equipment hardening vs. vegetation management and for discussions with bondholders, consumers and constituents. Athena’s data is currently used in wildfire mitigation plans (WMP) and public safety power shutoffs (PSPS), Community Wildfire Protection Plans (CWPP), Risk Spend Efficiency reporting to PUCs and other stakeholders.
You can reach out to me at Elizabeth@AthenaIntel.io and follow us on LinkedIn or Energy Central
