The modernization of the electricity sector plays a crucial role in fighting climate change and many governments have developed strategic plans for a massive integration of renewable energy sources, outlining the deep global transformation we are already witnessing.

The world energy sector at large is facing profound changes and great challenges, and several international initiatives aimed at promoting the transition towards a cleaner energy system are working towards this goal, among which Mission Innovation stands out for importance.

Within this global initiative framework, and in particular as part of the Innovation Challenge 1 (IC1) on Smart Grids activity, RSE (Ricerca sul Sistema Energetico) on behalf of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development, conceived and coordinated the development of the Smart Grid Innovation Accelerator (SGIA) platform, a project that benefitted from MI members highly collaborative work.

SGIA is a cloud-based platform for sharing information relating to smart grids and the energy sector as a whole. Relying on a powerful semantic search engine, which is able to provide context to the users’ queries, seeking to understand the searching needs and the relationships between entities, the platform offers an advanced search experience on a database of 1000+ key documents, globally selected and shared by international experts from MI member countries. SGIA offers a unique entry point to documents that are not generally easily accessible such as energy strategies and scenarios of a number of countries and international organizations, to regulatory and financial aspects, to data and technical information.

The SGIA platform leverages IBM Watson technology, which provides multiple search capabilities based on Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically trained for the smart grids and energy sector domains. This enables the user to have a more fruitful experience and access deeper information, due to online suggestions during the search phase, but also thanks to automatic “hyperlinks” within the documents that enable searching against acronyms and entities definition such as people, organizations, projects and initiatives.

The platform has been released the first week of February 2021 as a ‘Beta-version’, in order to test all the functionalities from the user’s point of view. This initial phase, lasting three months, will extensively train the SGIA AI machine learning algorithms, allowing for improvements of the user’s experience and of the overall platform performance.

The development of the SGIA platform represented a major challenge due to the desire to deploy the most advanced technologies such as machine learning algorithms for document classification and natural language processing techniques for automatic document indexing. It should be underlined that the successful completion of this project is a clear evidence of the strong commitment of RSE-Italy and IC1 partners towards MI international cooperation and the development of modern, efficient and sustainable electricity systems.

SGIA was designed and developed to be a constantly growing platform, enriched by the participation of its users: start your experience at www.mi-sgiaplatform.net, sign in and discover the platform main functionalities by its video tutorials.