Itron, which is innovating new ways for utilities and cities to manage energy and water, is collaborating with Snowflake, the AI Data Cloud company, to advance the future of grid planning and utility analytics. This collaboration, which is part of Snowflake’s Energy Solutions launch, brings together Itron’s expertise in grid edge intelligence and Snowflake’s fully managed, high-performance data platform to empower utilities to solve some of the industry’s most pressing challenges, such as distributed energy resource (DER) integration and grid modernisation.
The rapid proliferation of DERs such as solar, electric vehicles and battery storage has introduced a level of grid complexity that traditional tools were never designed to handle. Conventional models lack the computing power and sophistication required to meet the volatile, hour-by-hour dynamics of a modern electrified grid. To address this challenge, Itron is leveraging Snowflake's high-performance platform to deliver immediate value to customers.
Itron’s advanced Grid Planning solution, powered by Snowflake, simplifies utility planning and operations, providing validated data accuracy and advanced forecasting, and features Powerflow, a first-of-its-kind 8,760-hour system-wide analysis that can conduct load forecasts every hour of the day, years into the future and down to the individual bus level. The advanced Grid Planning solution enables utilities to identify capacity constraints, support DER proliferation and deliver enhanced reliability while realising substantial cost savings, setting the blueprint for the grid of the future.
"This collaboration has unlocked a meaningful solution to today’s grid complexity," says Vivek Raghunathan, Snowflake SVP of Engineering and Support. "The modern grid's electrification and distributed generation demand 8,760-hour power flow analysis to capture dynamics that annual or seasonal snapshots miss. This is computationally prohibitive for most utilities. Itron's power engineering expertise and Snowflake's powerful platform make this essential analysis practical, delivering the computational performance utilities needed to plan infrastructure for an electrified, decentralised energy future."
