A wind farm equipped with Artificial Intelligence software successfully navigated a wave of negative wholesale energy prices in Australia. Tilt Renewables’ 100MW Snowtown 1 Wind Farm was enabled with AI software in July and self- executed a “precision trading” strategy that has already increased total revenue from the windfarm by precisely bidding its way through a wave of extreme volatility and negative prices in South Australia.
The AI software used by Tilt Renewables’ wind farm was developed by AMS, a San Francisco- based start-up founded by AMS’s chief executive officer, Susan Kennedy. AMS’s optimised bidding software is technology agnostic and is able to increase the revenues of storage, wind, solar and other generation assets in wholesale electricity markets. Kennedy founded AMS in 2014 bringing together energy market experts to develop a software platform that can help California cost effectively integrate the huge amounts of solar, wind, and distributed generation installed. In 2018, AMS expanded to Australia where high penetrations of solar and wind have stressed the electric grid, causing wild swings in wholesale energy prices. The Snowtown Wind Farm sits on the Barunga and Hummocks Ranges, 170km north of Adelaide, in South Australia. Stage 1 has been generating electricity since 2008.
