Summerside company to harness artificial intelligence to help utilities, universities

A company called BluWave-ai plans to use what it has learned from working with the Summerside electric utility over the last three years to expand its work to smart grids around the world. 

The new Canadian Smart Grid AI Centre of Excellence will also give university researchers a real world opportunity to test new products and concepts that take advantage of artificial intelligence, or AI.

"When we started BluWave-ai, as you can imagine, as a high tech-startup, you don't have a lot of budget to put up wind farms and solar panels and battery storage, and you don't have a grid to meter up," said company CEO Devashish Paul, who is based in Ottawa.

"So we embarked on a path to find suitable partners in the Canadian electricity market who may have some of those assets, and we figured that we'd have to get wind somewhere, solar somewhere else."

On the recommendation of a smart grid expert at Natural Resources Canada, the company reached out to the City of Summerside. 

"They actually have everything. They have local generation assets, wind, solar, diesel backup. They have a great connection. They've invested in battery storage, fully metered smart grid," Paul said. 

"Fast forward to last fall, when everyone met in Glasgow for COP26, and they talk about the energy transition. In 2017, Summerside already had all the building blocks in place that the whole world is talking about in 2021 to go decarbonize the planet.

"In 2017, Summerside was way ahead of Canada and actually much of the rest of the world."

Other executives are also fans of the city. 

"I was definitely familiar with Prince Edward Island before," said Mostafa Farrokhabadi, vice president of technology for BluWave-ai.

"But I wasn't really aware of the degree of advancement and complexity that the City of Summerside grid has, making it an ideal platform for us as a young company to basically prove our technology."

The company began working with Summerside's electric utility in 2018, with the software going live in 2019. It uses algorithms to determine energy needs. 

"Summerside had an existing software system, but the utility felt that it was not reacting well to changes in the grid, changes in the environment, changes in wind generation," Paul said.

"It was leaving money and carbon on the table, not as efficient as it could be."