Dairyland Power Introduces AI as a Service for Rural Electrics

Dairyland Power Cooperative, LaCrosse, WI, today announced the availability of its VoltWrite private generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform to fellow rural electric cooperatives. Nate Melby, Dairyland’s VP and chief information officer, announced the new service during a Tuesday morning session at NRECA’s TechAdvantage Conference in Atlanta.

“We at Dairyland have had so many inquiries and questions from other cooperatives about what we’re doing with artificial intelligence,” Melby said. “Here at TechAdvantage, we wanted to share that with our cooperative world. If you want to talk about VoltWrite as a way to level up your co ops like we’ve leveled up ours, we want to help you with that.”

Dairyland developed VoltWrite as a tool for its staff to complete several tasks throughout the G&T co-op’s various departments. Once staffers got their hands on the system two years ago, it set off a burst of creativity. Many employees looked at the sundry, often-repetitive tasks they carried out regularly and began using the technology to invent new and faster routines, from the office tasks projects to technical and field projects.

VoltWrite was the topic of a November 2024 article in RE Magazine, where Melby described use-case development following the system’s pilot and February 2023 introduction to the staff as “wildfire.” At its peak in Summer 2024, Dairyland was integrating new AI-based use cases on a weekly basis.

“I come from corporate IT business applications. We’re used to maybe six months to a year,” said Vladimir Tsoy, Dairyland IT enterprise solutions architect, during the TechAdvantage session. In some cases development was moving so quickly that new models were becoming obsolete before their pilot periods had finished, he said.

Melby played a video to the TechAdvantage audience demonstrating one of the new functions. A field inspector arrived at the site of an equipment check wearing augmented reality (AR) glasses. The AI system linked the inspector and his AR view to a Microsoft Teams meeting, providing real-time collaboration for the task.

“Our theory is that we can use that to support configuration and management of remote sites,” Melby said. “So, we can have an engineer that’s back in the office and collaborating with a technician in the field, or maybe multiple technicians at multiple sites, rapidly in augmented reality.”

VoltWrite materials describe it as a “private” AI platform. “VoltWrite is internal for us. It’s not an open model. It uses a pretrained transformer,” Melby said. “The advantage of VoltWrite is that everything that we do in that environment is protected from the outside and it’s controlled, and that’s very important for us in our industry.”

Dairyland says that it decided to announce the new service at TechAdvantage very recently and set pricing, based on co-op size, only a week ago. The system is easy to share quickly with a co-ops through the SharePoint platform, Tsoy said.

But the company already has some experience with VoltWrite outside the organization. In May 2024 it began sharing it with its distribution cooperative members. The results have been similar, Tsoy said. Those cooperative employees were just as willing to test and innovate as Dairyland’s.

Those interested in more information may contact voltwrite@dairylandpower.com.