January opened with strong momentum as industry leaders convened at PowerGen International to discuss how AI is transforming power generation and the global energy system. The session included leaders from NVIDIA, Microsoft, Accenture, SLB, NYPA, Duke Energy, and LFE to explore the accelerating role of AI in transforming the global energy system, demonstrating that AI is now a core enabler for improving reliability, efficiency, and resilience across generation assets.
Only days later, a significant winter storm caused widespread outages across several regions of the United States, underscoring the challenges facing energy systems. Together, these events highlight the importance of our mission: accelerating safe, transparent, reliable, and ethical AI solutions to strengthen generation and grid resilience.
If you will be attending DTECH next week, please join us and share your ideas and insights either at the EPRI booth, partner booths, or in the Open Power AI Consortium session on harnessing co-innovation to drive AI deployment Thursday, February 5th at 9:00 a.m. This session will bring together many organizations from the consortium to address developing, deploying, and scaling AI technologies for the power grid.
Finally, make your voice heard and take our two-question Open Power AI Consortium survey (link at the bottom of this page).
New Website Launched!
We are excited to announce the launch of our new website: www.openpowerai.org. The site includes a growing collection of resources designed to support and accelerate collaboration, transparency, and innovation across the OPAI Consortium. Members can now access past Member Representative Committee meetings and Work Group presentations/recordings, curated links to open/public and other relevant data sources, open-source models relevant to the energy sector, and recently published Open Power AI Consortium and EPRI deliverables.
Use Case Survey Results
Under the leadership of the Use Case work group, we are pleased to share the preliminary results of the ongoing Use Case Survey. Early responses highlight the top emerging AI applications identified by industry members, including:
Outage Management System Log Data Knowledge Retrieval
Asset Image Analysis
And more…
The survey remains open to continue collecting input, and we encourage all members to participate to help continue refining and prioritizing the highest-value applications across the sector. There are two versions of the survey, one for utilities to identify and prioritize use cases and one for vendors to identify available models to address identified use cases. You can access the surveys here:
Members are invited to explore Allarma.epri.com, a public-facing demonstration environment of an AI-enabled alarm management tool that enables real-time interaction with example datasets and AI-driven insights. This resource is designed to improve worker productivity, accuracy, and effectiveness while support responsible AI methodologies, benchmark exploration, and knowledge sharing across utilities. Try it out today!
Meetings and Events
The Open Power AI Consortium continues to actively engage in key industry events globally. Following our collaboration with PowerGen International last week, we look forward to participating in upcoming events such as DTECH, NVIDIA GTC, and DTECH Data Centers – among others. We welcome opportunities to collaborate or present at additional member-hosted events.
At DTECH, please join us in the Open Power AI Consortium session on harnessing co-innovation to drive AI deployment Thursday, February 5th at 9:00 a.m. This session will bring together many organizations from the consortium to address developing, deploying, and scaling AI technologies for the power grid. Alternatively, please visit us either at the EPRI booth, partner booths, or in other sessions to share your ideas and insights.
Following the event, bring your insights from DTECH into one of our upcoming Member Representative Committee or Work Group meetings. Please reach out to us with additional opportunities to collaborate!
OPAI Sandbox Environments
EPRI continues to collaborate with external partners to provide members with access to dedicated sandbox environments for AI experimentation and validation. These environments will support accelerated model evaluation, domain-specific LLM development, and interoperability testing. Stay tuned for upcoming partnership announcements coming in Q1 on our website.
Benchmarking AI for the Power Industry Report Published
Have you ever wondered how well AI models work to address complex, energy-industry specific questions? A new benchmarking study provides the first rigorous, domain‑specific evaluation of large language models tailored to the electric power sector. Built on more than 2,100 expert‑developed questions spanning 35 power‑system topics, the work establishes a statistically grounded framework for assessing how AI models handle real utility challenges. The findings show that while models perform strongly on multiple‑choice questions, relying solely on these question formats can significantly overstate true capability; open‑ended responses reveal a more realistic picture of how these systems behave in complex, real‑world problem‑solving.
This benchmark represents one of the broadest technical collaborations undertaken in the power sector and lays a foundation for evaluating future AI tools, including retrieval‑augmented systems, knowledge‑graph‑enhanced approaches, and emerging agentic workflows. The release marks an important step in helping utilities, vendors, regulators, and researchers understand the maturity of current AI solutions and provides a consistent way to track improvements as next‑generation models and methods evolve. Download the report here: Benchmarking Large Language Models for the Electric Power Sector.
Member Satisfaction Survey
As you can see from the items above, it’s been a busy year for the consortium. The consortium has organized into several workstreams that have produced results for consortium members, such as:
Released a websitethat connects consortium members to open-source AI models and data for power industry applications.
Publishing reports and white papers, like our report benchmarking LLMs for power industry applications, a white paper to prepare data to be AI ready, and others that can be found on our website,
Hosted a survey to collect and prioritize use cases for the power industry that will help define future directions for the consortium, and
Provided early access to tools being developed, likeaLLarMa, and more.
Now, we want your feedback to help guide our priorities for the future! We have a short 2-question survey that we are asking all OPAI members to take to provide feedback on the value you have received from engaging with OPAI and how we can provide more value to you in the coming years. Please fill out the survey here: Open Power AI Consortium - 2026 Priorities Survey. The survey will be open until the end of February.
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