Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

Buzz Solutions was launched from a course at Stanford University in the spring of 2017. This launchpad course is where co-founders, Kaitlyn Albertoli and Vik Chaudhry met for the first time. Through the course, the two founders identified a real need in the power utilities space for a means to automate the process of data management and analysis of inspection data. Utilities were collecting 5x-10x the data in recent years given mandates for more frequent inspections, in addition to drone inspections becoming more prevalent. The need for an analytics solution was a natural progression, given that the process is currently being done manually by linemen and field technicians. Buzz Solutions launched from the course, but the founders spent the first two years building the commercially deployable technology and collecting proprietary datasets to train the algorithms with the highest level of accuracy. Buzz officially launched into the commercial market in the summer of 2019, gaining substantial market traction since that time. Since the 2017 time frame, wildfires, forced shutdowns, and outages have only driven the need for a solution such as Buzz in the market.

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Best Estimate of GHG Avoidance/Reduction of This Project (Tonnes CO2 Equivalent/Year):

Impact on Underrepresented Groups:

Both founding members of Buzz Solutions are traditionally underrepresented individuals in the space. Kaitlyn is a woman in the space, while Vikhyat is a person of color. Further, Buzz Solutions' technology helps support the most vulnerable climate communities given that wildfires disproportionately impact rural areas and low income towns. Several studies have shown how low-income communities are more directly impacted by wildfires sparked by failed grid infrastructure. Buzz leverages our AI algorithms to provide early fault identification before these issues lead to wildfire sparking and potentially catastrophic events from failed grid infrastructures. The following study provides useful insight into this particular issue: https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/18/8/3921. Our mission at Buzz is to safeguard the world's energy infrastructure to reduce issues such as wildfires, forced shutdowns, and outages as a result of failed grid infrastructure.

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