UK: National Grid and Keen AI have secured Alpha-phase funding to develop Britain’s first shared AI system for electricity network asset management.
The project, called Foundational Shared Model Operations, or FoSMo, has received $476,934 (£355,985) through the Strategic Innovation Fund, an Ofgem programme managed with Innovate UK. The funding follows the successful completion of the project’s discovery phase.
FoSMo is designed to standardise how electricity network operators collect, analyse and use visual data from physical assets such as pylons, cables, insulators and fittings. Instead of each operator building its own detection tools separately, the project will allow anonymised data to be pooled across the industry to create a shared AI model.
The Alpha phase brings together National Grid, SP Energy Networks, SSEN Transmission, UK Power Networks and Electricity North West.
According to the project partners, a shared model could improve condition assessment by using a wider range of asset data than any single operator could provide alone. This is important because some defects are rare, making it difficult for individual operators to train reliable models independently.
Keen AI will act as the technical steward, developing, maintaining and hosting the models in the UK. The system is expected to support domestic capability for critical infrastructure, with data controlled within each operator’s environment.
If adopted across all participating operators, the shared approach is projected to save around $30.2 M (£22.6 M) over five years from 2027. It could also help prevent around 85,000 consumer interruptions and 5.2 million minutes of power loss each year once fully adopted.
Source: National Grid
