Bay Area group presents AI platform that predicts wildfire risk at PG&E Innovation Pitch Fest
By CBS Bay Area
PG&E recently wrapped up its second Innovation Pitch Fest, where more than 57 organizations out of more than 400 applicants pitched their platforms on how to improve the state’s energy and wildfire mitigation sector.
One Fremont-based group is hoping they’ll be one of the groups to be awarded a part of the total $25 million PG&E funding.
It’s all coming down to this moment for Subarna Bhattacharyya.
“Here, what you can do is select the time period, and the variables like temperature, minimum, maximum, and you can select fire weather, and it’ll give you the forecast,” Bhattacharyya, the co-founder and CEO of Climformatics, told CBS News Bay Area.
She and co-founder Detelina Ivanova, both former employees of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, created this AI platform to predict climate and extreme weather months in advance.
“We have actually trained our models to reflect on physics-based models, and that’s why we’re able to get much more accurate forecast with weather resolution far ahead in time,” she said.
Bhattacharyya said they can predict areas of wildfire risks with 95% accuracy.
“We showed this and pitched it to CalFire interested in adapting our solutions. And in this case, you can see we forecasted on May 1st, that you’re going to have severe, extremely high fire danger index, over the end of August. And it just so happened we had the Mariposa big fire that started on the 26th of August, she said.
She added that her team’s work is backed by Google, and they also have a growing collaboration with UC Berkeley.
Anant Mishra, the product manager, has previously worked at a startup center for entrepreneurship and technology. Therefore, he was excited to help be a part of the development of the AI platform.
“How would we incorporate that solution in some of our practices today?” Andrew Abranches, the Vice President of PG&E Wildfire Mitigation, told CBS News Bay Area. “Are there things that that they’re suggesting that we haven’t thought about? And that I think for me is the most interesting, because we are bringing in the wealth of pother people’s thoughts to this problem, sparks my thinking, sparks my peer thinking, and sparks my dialogue.”
Abranches added that with 5 1/2 million meters on California’s electric grid, their mission is to focus on what they call continuous monitoring to prevent wildfires.
“We’re trying to monitor how the grid is degrading, such that through the monitoring of it, we’ll be able to take action,” he said. “So, that if something is going down, we know it may break over here, over what time period will it break?”
Through the three-day pitch event, groups like Climformatics hope they will establish a partnership with PG&E with one goal in mind: protecting Californians.
“I think it went very well, I loved the opportunity to be able to present our technology to PG&E,” Bhattacharyya said after her pitch. “Put our solutions for other industries, like manufacturing they have a large department for water, energy, intense users of that.”
Now, it’s a waiting game to see if they qualified to move forward, which is expected to be sometime in October. PG&E is expecting to award anywhere from five to 10 groups from the Pitch Fest this year.
