Future of the Grid: AEP at OSU Makeathon

At The Ohio State University's recent MakeOHI/O makeathon, students tackled a critical challenge: keeping the electric grid safe, resilient and ready for a rapidly changing future. Through AEP's challenge, they explored how weather, technology and real-time data shape reliable power delivery.

In his keynote address, Jorge Barba, AEP's managing director of AI strategy, underscored the foundational role energy plays in the economy and in modern life.

"Five percent of the U.S. economy is about energy," he told students. "It is the first five percent."

If the grid fails, he said, everything else comes to a halt.

That mindset set the tone for a weekend focused on innovation, learning and real-world impact.

The AEP Challenge: Seeing Grid Stress Before It Becomes a Crisis

AEP's makeathon challenge centered on a growing industry need: dynamic line ratings. Traditionally, transmission line ratings are based on conservative, worst-case assumptions and updated manually. But as weather becomes more volatile and demand from AI and cloud computing continues to grow, static ratings are no longer enough.

Students were asked to design a prototype that could sense when a transmission line shifts from "safe" to "stressed" by monitoring changing conditions. The goal was to create a clear, actionable alert that would allow planners and operators to see risk developing before an overload occurs.

Winning Design: Team Zero Tolerance

Taking first place was Team 7 - Zero Tolerance, whose solution stood out for its strong hardware focus and full system integration. Their prototype successfully combined multiple sensor subsystems, including time-of-flight, sunlight, wind speed and temperature sensors, into a reliable, physically integrated demo with consistent data streams.

"Team 7 stood out by not just meeting the challenge but going above and beyond," said Matthew Shellenberger, mentor for the makeathon and consulting engineer. "They used all sensors provided, tested various scenarios and came up with a stretch goal of creating an anemometer to measure wind stream."

Their approach clearly illustrated how environmental signals can be connected to grid outcomes in real time, aligning closely with the core objectives of the AEP challenge.

Why It Matters - and Why AEP

Beyond the competition, the OSU Makeathon showed why AEP's work matters: keeping power reliable and affordable affects everyone. As Barba pointed out, the grid is a huge, complex system that must keep evolving as demand and technology change. AI and advanced analytics are giving us new ways to monitor, manage and harden the grid, and AEP is playing a key role in that shift.

The event also highlighted what makes AEP a great place to build a career: real problems, real impact and a culture that values curiosity and new ideas. By investing in students and handing them authentic engineering challenges, AEP is helping shape the next generation who will carry the grid - and the communities it serves - forward.