Alliander has announced that it will be opening an ‘AI for Energy Grids Lab’ to coordinate research into Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions to enable the digitalisation of the country’s grid.

Primary aims for future research include making the power grid simultaneously as reliable and affordable as possible, a known conundrum as thicker cables, which are the answer for reliability, are also more expensive.

To accelerate the energy transition, the energy system in the Netherlands must become more sustainable, more decentralised and more digitalised.

The country’s grid over the last few years has been experiencing frequently occurring bottlenecks as the grid no longer has the capacity to take on new renewable sources.

Grid expansion initiatives, the GOPACS platform and several funding scenarios have been made available in the hopes of correcting the issue, which continues to slow down the country’s energy transition.

“We must do in the next 10 years what we have done in the past 40 years. This is a huge challenge. Digitisation is seen as an important part of realizing this major assignment. We can accelerate by investing in digitisation and AI is an important part of that,” added the release.