The power grid is changing faster than ever. Renewable integration, distributed energy resources, workforce transitions, and customer reliability expectations are redefining how utilities must operate. To stay ahead, utilities need more than incremental upgrades—they need a pathway to intelligent operations.
That journey begins with visibility and evolves through automation, data intelligence, and AI-driven decision-making. Systems With Intelligence outlines six foundational capabilities that enable this evolution, guiding utilities from basic monitoring to fully autonomous grid management.
These six stages define the architecture of The Intelligent Grid.
1. Continuous Sensing: Building the Foundation of Awareness
Every intelligent grid starts with visibility. Traditional inspections and intermittent data collection leave long gaps between asset assessments. Continuous sensing fills that gap, providing uninterrupted visibility into the real-time health of critical assets.
Through Touchless™ Monitoring, utilities gain a live view of transformers, breakers, and switchgear. This always-on perspective captures subtle temperature shifts, environmental conditions, and performance anomalies as they occur.
With continuous sensing in place, utilities move from reactive response to proactive awareness, the essential first step toward intelligence.
2. Cloud Intelligence: Turning Data into Actionable Insight
Sensing alone isn’t enough. Without analytics, utilities drown in data. Cloud intelligence applies filtering, correlation, and learning algorithms to identify what matters, and when.
By pairing edge analytics with cloud computing, SWI’s systems transform sensor data into context-rich insights that operators can trust. Instead of reviewing raw images or thousands of data points, utilities receive clear alerts: which asset, what condition, and what action is needed.
This is where data becomes intelligence and efficiency begins.
3. Prescriptive Maintenance: Automating the Response
Once actionable insights are generated, the next step is automation. Prescriptive maintenance workflows automatically create and dispatch maintenance tickets, complete with thermal imagery, GPS coordinates, and fault descriptions.
This eliminates manual data entry and ensures no alert is overlooked. Integrated with existing work management systems, prescriptive maintenance closes the loop between detection and action.
Utilities now maintain assets based on condition rather than schedule, reducing costs, minimizing downtime, and extending equipment life.
4. Digital Twin Integration: Modelling a Living Grid
With data and automation established, utilities can create digital twins. These are virtual replicas of their physical systems that continuously update with real-time sensor data.
Digital twins enable scenario testing, predictive simulations, and planning for both short-term and long-term performance. Operators can simulate load changes, weather impacts, and asset degradation to predict outcomes before they occur.
This creates a living model of the grid, a digital environment where risk and opportunity can be measured before action is taken.
5. Assisted Autonomy: Enabling Semi-Automated Operations
True automation begins here. Assisted autonomy uses predefined logic and AI models to execute non-regret actions, such as activating cooling fans or balancing load across circuits.
Operators remain in the loop, validating and supervising automated actions. Each iteration strengthens confidence in the system’s decision-making capabilities, paving the way for greater automation maturity.
Utilities begin to transition from human-dependent operations to human-supervised intelligence, a balance of trust, safety, and performance.
6. Renewable Asset Monitoring: Expanding Intelligence Across the Energy Ecosystem
The intelligent grid isn’t limited to substations. It extends across renewable assets such as solar farms, wind installations, and battery energy storage systems (BESS).
Continuous monitoring in these environments ensures:
- Thermal management in solar combiners to prevent fires
- Temperature surveillance in BESS installations to detect thermal runaway
- Cable and connection monitoring in wind systems to identify early failures
By unifying visibility across traditional and renewable infrastructure, utilities create a single, intelligent operational view of their entire energy portfolio.
Real-World Results: From Concept to Implementation
Utilities like Southern Company, PSE&G, and Ozarks Electric are already deploying this six-stage framework. Using Touchless™ Monitoring, they’ve reduced O&M costs, prevented transformer flashovers, and improved situational awareness across their networks.
Their results demonstrate that intelligence is practical, proven, and scalable.
The Path Forward
Each stage of the intelligent grid builds upon the last. The key is to start where the impact is greatest: deploy continuous monitoring on critical assets, integrate data with existing systems, and scale intelligently.
With the right foundation, utilities can move confidently from visibility to autonomy—achieving a grid that is not only reliable and efficient but also predictive, adaptive, and self-healing.
Ready to explore the six building blocks in detail? Download the white paper:
"The Intelligent Grid: Enabling AI, Automation, and Predictive Operations Through Touchless™ Infrastructure" and see how leading utilities are building intelligent, autonomous grids for the future.