Texas-based SparkCognition has acquired Californian firm Ensemble Energy to accelerate renewable energy growth using artificial intelligence (AI).

AI company SparkCognition has acquired Ensemble Energy, a provider of software products and services for the renewable energy industry. Through this acquisition, SparkCognition is offering an AI-enabled asset management platform for clean energy, supporting the industry in its transition towards renewables by reducing costs and increasing energy production.

SparkCognition has long focused on improving sustainability for the energy sector by using AI technology to improve operational and productional efficiency, along with reducing downtime and unexpected failures. Ensemble Energy combines deep renewable energy domain expertise with the latest in cloud computing and data analytics. By leveraging Ensemble Energy’s technology and domain expertise with SparkCognition’s AI platform, SparkCognition says it offers a way to help energy companies reduce environmental impact.

“SparkCognition was founded with the vision of building scalable AI to solve the problems that matter most and, in our estimation, there is no bigger problem than building a more sustainable future,” said Amir Husain, CEO of SparkCognition. “Major energy companies have already been making great strides to adopt more renewable practices and technologies and, through the acquisition of Ensemble Energy, we look forward to continuing collaboration with energy organisations to help them reduce environmental impact, ultimately creating a better, smarter and more sustainable world.”

Sandeep Gupta, CEO of Ensemble Energy, added: “Our mission at Ensemble Energy has always been to accelerate the clean energy revolution and we recognised this as a shared mission with SparkCognition. We’re excited to join the SparkCognition team, where we can continue to build upon our existing platform and SparkCognition’s unmatched AI technology, offering the energy industry valuable AI and ultimately accelerating the adoption of renewable energy.”

Enabling sustainability through the production, storage and use of renewable energy has become the key to solving the problem of climate change in every facet of our society. According to Bloomberg NEF, businesses and governments across the world have invested over $2tn in renewable energy capacity development over the past decade, resulting in the addition of over 1200GW of capacity. Over 90% of that capacity was attributed to solar and wind energy.

Over the coming decades, as evidenced by the national commitments recently made at the US led Leaders Summit for Climate, massive additional investments will be needed to achieve a net zero carbon global energy portfolio. The global renewable energy market is expected to surpass $1.5tn by 2025, registering a CAGR of over 6% from 2018 to 2025, according to Allied Market Research.

“Addressing global climate change requires the world to deploy engineering at scale, in order to make it cheaper and more effective,” said John Browne of Madingley, SparkCognition board member and former CEO of BP. “SparkCognition’s acquisition of Ensemble Energy will enable us to do just that, helping customers to transform their businesses faster and more cost effectively than before by applying cutting edge AI technology.”

The acquisition could accelerate the adoption of AI within the energy industry by offering differentiated domain expertise and an asset management platform using data- and physics-based proprietary algorithms. As optimisation of operations and maintenance costs becomes an increasingly important component of increasing project bankability, SparkCognition’s renewable energy asset management can help producers increase revenue and reduce avoidable cost. This can be used by operators of all sizes and at all stages of digital transformation. The company will initially focus on serving wind and solar energy producers and expand into energy storage, hydro and green hydrogen.