Swissgrid Deploys Optimizer Autopilot to Activate Control Energy Fully Automatically with AI

Between January and May 2025, Swissgrid brought its Optimizer Autopilot into productive operation at record-breaking speed. Today, control energy is deployed completely automatically by AI, and the System Operator maintains an overview of the grid situation at all times. The AI tool decides for itself which control energy is currently required, always selects the most economical tenders, recognises at an early stage how much control energy is about to be needed, and takes over routine work. Swissgrid must keep electricity generation and consumption balanced to hold the system frequency stable at 50 Hertz, and uses control energy to compensate whenever actual feed-in or consumption deviates from the planned schedule. The main difficulty lies in predicting the extent of the imbalance early and activating the necessary control energy in the most favourable market. Specialists have the data but often lack the time to analyse it in full during busy operations, the complexity in real time exceeds human analysis capacity, and consistently cost-optimised decisions cannot be guaranteed. Jacob Tran, Head of Development, said: "When we look at the current success, it's easy to forget how long the journey has been. It started with several Master's theses that identified the potential. But developing a product from a Master's thesis - that was the real challenge." An internal platform for data processing became the foundation of the project, built by a team of specialists from Technology, Market and System Operations. The initial prototype was met with scepticism in the grid control room. Because the tool was hardly used in operations, partly because it was so time-consuming, a team of interns was brought in to help raise the usage rate of the Optimizer until the automated solution was introduced. After the teams decided to simply give it a try, the previous decision support tool became a fully automated autopilot that integrates its recommendations directly into operating processes. Operators continue to regularly check and categorise the results. Following its use as a pilot application, the Optimizer is enhanced on an ongoing basis. Swissgrid is expanding it into a modular product family that represents the basis for further automation steps, with the aim of extending the efficiency gains to all the relevant challenges in the control energy process.