Securing tomorrow’s grid: How space technology and AI are transforming utility operations and reliability

**SPEAKER_1** (0:05)
Welcome to the AiDASH Evolve 2024 podcast. AiDASH makes critical infrastructure industries climate resilient and sustainable with satellites and AI. Evolve 2024 in New Orleans, Louisiana was our inaugural event. We gathered industry leaders, innovators, and visionaries to explore how cutting edge technology and satellites and AI is safeguarding critical infrastructure and fostering biodiversity to ensure a sustainable future amidst climate change challenges. In this podcast series, we are recapping the entire event, every speaker and session. You can find it all on our content hub at ai-dot-com slash Evolve 2024, or check the show notes for all pertinent links. In this episode, you'll learn how space technology and AI are revolutionizing utility operations. Explore cutting edge satellite capabilities for monitoring critical infrastructure and AI-driven insights enhancing grid reliability. Discover the future of data-driven operations and how this technological synergy is securing tomorrow's grid today. First, you'll hear from Josh Weiner, Senior Director of Enterprise Sales for Maxar Intelligence. Then, AiDASH's Chief Product and Technology Officer and co-founder, Rahul Saxena, takes the stage. Josh and Rahul talked about how very high-resolution satellite imagery collected by Maxar Intelligence provides a detailed view of Earth's critical infrastructure. With 30 cm class clarity and frequent updates, Maxar's constellation of satellites monitors everything from environmental changes to disaster impacts, enabling faster data-driven decision-making. They talked about how AiDASH turns data into targeted action. By fusing enterprise client data, the SatelliteVision pipeline, and geospatial inputs with AI, AiDASH's tools help utility companies manage vegetation, predict storm and wildfire risks, and enhance their resilience. And they talked about how together, Maxar and AiDASH deliver monitoring solutions that combine satellite imagery with AI-powered analysis, enhancing grid reliability by swiftly identifying emerging risks and keeping assets secure. Here's Josh, followed by Rahul.

**Josh Weiner** (2:23)
Hi, everyone. What an incredible morning the day started with. I'm going to have Lean On Me stuck in my head for the rest of the day. I know that. It was a beautiful gospel band to kick things off and then Abhishek to welcome us. And then, first for me, I get to follow a governor on stage here, so that should be fun. Little intimidating, but really amazing to hear from Governor Edwards talk about some of the challenges that he faced running in a state like Louisiana with respect to a lot of the solutions that you guys are all developing and bringing to market today. So, very appropriate and very excited. And I have to agree with him that even though I flew in from Denver yesterday, which is where Maxar is headquartered, not feeling too good about the Broncos tonight. I think the Superdome is a pretty tough place to play, so any New Orleans locals here, good luck, and I think you're going to be okay.
So, Maxar, just like AiDASH, we take a satellite-first approach to solving the world's problems, to saving resources, to saving lives, to saving time. No surprise there. We own and operate a constellation, an ever-growing constellation of satellites that are conducting Earth-imaging missions on a day-to-day basis. We started 2024 It was a huge year for us with four satellites in orbit. We've launched four since then, and we have two more ready to go that we're going to be talking about soon. So even if you're not from the space industry or the satellite industry, you've seen our imagery before. Whether it's looking at a news outlet, whether it's hailing a cab or a taxi and Uber, whether it's looking for a trailhead, you've interacted with our satellite imagery. You're all holding it in the pocket with your phone today. And so specifically, how do we collect all that data? Well, we have this constellation that collects 3.8 million square kilometers of imagery on a day-to-day basis. And I'm going to show you guys kind of what that looks like in just a few minutes here. We collect 1.4 billion square kilometers every single year. And to put that in the perspective, that's the Earth's landmass roughly 10 times over. And so one of the first questions I often think about in my job is, what do we do with all that data? It's an incredible amount of imagery. It's 25 petabytes going back to 1999 You could never look at all that with the human eye. You could never sit down and have a team of analysts, even a team of a thousand analysts, look at all that imagery. So we rely on industry partners like AiDASH to develop industry-leading solutions that rely on technology, on AI, to scour that imagery, to look for the most important objects, whether it's vegetation encroachment or asset management or the numerous other applications that folks have with our satellite imagery, to really have answers as opposed to just pretty pixels.