AiDASH: Making infrastructure more sustainable

California startup AiDASH uses satellite data and artificial intelligence to help utilities and other core industries keep their assets running.  After making a name for themselves with an AI and satellite-based Intelligent Vegetation Management System (IVMS) the company has turned its attention to helping businesses evaluate their natural capital, biodiversity, carbon sequestration and GHG emissions data to help them efficiently become more environmentally responsible.

At the 2021 COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, AiDASH launched the Intelligent Sustainability Management System (ISMS), an environmental stewardship product developed with National Grid and National Grid Partners' Innovation team. The tool lets businesses evaluate their biodiversity across National Grid’s UK land holdings and to help make the process substantially easier to quantify.

“Politicians and industry leaders are agreeing to meeting certain targets by 2030 and 2050…” said Abhishek Vinod Singh, CEO of AiDASH. “If someone has to do a 10 percent improvement in biodiversity, someone has to measure what their biodiversity is today and take mitigating actions and constantly monitor the improvement to see that, yes, they’re on the right path to meet those numbers. This is the problem we are trying to solve.”

The ISMS represents a natural progression from a previous project between AiDASH and National Grid Partners, which utilized AI and satellite data to help address vegetation issues that could threaten infrastructure.

“At National Grid, we are committed to improving the Environmental Value across our sites” said Prem Gabbi, Director of UK Land & Property. “Collaborating with AiDASH ISMS could enable us to make environmental surveys and audits, relatively seamless, while saving weeks of manual field work. This means we could efficiently leverage satellite data to design optimal strategies for enhancing the biodiversity across c.3500 hectares of non-operational National Grid land in the UK and regularly monitor improvements while reallocating internal resources.”

For businesses with power cables, pipelines, and other infrastructure spanning vast distances, the ISMS can replace conventional review, which is comparatively time-consuming and expensive. By not having to send out staff to manually assess their networks, companies using the ISMS can more readily address their sustainability needs.

“For example, let’s say a utility has to lay out new lines from an offshore location to the center of the country,” Singh said. “They’ll do an ecological or environmental survey, which will tell how much damage is likely to happen, how many trees are going to be cut, how the biodiversity is going to get impacted, how carbon absorption is going to get impacted. And then they’ll prepare a mitigating plan on how to reverse that change in the next few years.”

Singh said that while this is traditionally a costly and laborious manual exercise, the ISMS uses satellite data and AI modeling, which results in a significantly less expensive, less time-consuming, and more sustainable process.

“We can see the score in a couple of days, and 10-20 times cheaper,” Singh said. ISMS is already deployed in over 1,000 National Grid UK land sites and over 3,000 U.S. oil well pads for another customer. With upcoming legislations on Environment and Biodiversity in the UK and EU, AiDASH is set to expand the offering globally.

In addition, its ISMS technology will be in play to leverage the increasing popularity of ESG reporting on corporate annual reports. The single, unified platform is designed to help businesses measure, enhance, track, report and offset various environmental sustainability metrics for land, air and water.