Collaboration key to advancing AI in energy sector say WEC panelists

Artificial intelligence was a central theme of the discussion among participants in the ‘transformative technologies’ panel at the World Energy Council’s 26th Congress in Rotterdam.

Jason Li, Global President of Huawei’s Electric Power Digitalisation Business Unit, now in its third year, opened the proceedings.

He pointed to the need for automation and control at the heart of the company’s approach to its solution development and with the complexity of the energy system with growing numbers of connected devices the need for AI to drive it.

”Automatic control technology alone cannot solve the problem… we need to complement the advantages [of different technologies] with digital such as cloud and big data and we need to adopt AI technologies so we can shift to an architecture supported digitalisation that integrates multiple technologies.”

This then enables the professionals to concentrate on their tasks and to better tackle the industry challenges, he added.

Have you read?
How AI and advanced analytics will be key for the grid of tomorrow
How predictive AI is helping smooth the path to net zero

Looking ahead to some of the challenges and citing China as an example, Li said the installed capacity of renewables is set to double to 1,530GW by 2025 from the 760GW in 2022, while the number of EVs is set to increase from 17 million to 45 million in that time, accompanied with an almost four-fold increase in the number of charging piles.

AI and the energy transition

Drilling down to how AI could help the energy transition and the climate crisis Darryl Willis, Corporate VP of Microsoft Worldwide Energy and Resources Industry, described it as an “enabler”, while also pointing to its pace of uptake, particularly generative AI, which is underlying lying much of his company’s developments.

“There’s an urgency around what’s happening that I want everyone to appreciate,” he said, putting into context that it took about 16 years for there to be 100 million users of mobile phones, seven years for 100 million users of the internet, over four years for 100 million users of Facebook but just two months for 100 million users of chat GPT.

As an example of an emerging application, he cited Microsoft’s use of Copilot in the area of permitting and licencing of small modular reactors with the potential to reduce an over $100 million, multi-year process in time by 70 to 90%, while another is using the generative AI to tackle fugitive methane emissions.

AI models

Within IBM, AI is used around its energy efficiency and focuses on how it, and generative AI in particular, can support the grid, Christina Shim, Global Head of Product Management and Strategy, explained.

“We are building a lot of foundational models that one trains once and that can have applications and use cases built on top and with that their energy usage can be constrained quite a bit,” she said, citing as an example a partnership with NASA on geospatial foundational models for areas of climate disruption such as supply chains and energy grids to better understand the impacts.

“It’s a huge investment we are putting in with partners but we have to do this with partners in the space in order to make some impacts.”

Technology partnerships

Mike Lamont, Director for Accelerators and Technology at CERN, noted that while the organisation has the mission of fundamental research, it also has a duty to address societal impacts such as sustainability.

He said CERN is working on several fronts such as fusion and small modular reactors for energy generation and then transport using for example its technical expertise on superconductivity for low footprint high power grids.

“It’s all well talking about smart grids, but one needs the grid there in the first place and we’re looking actively to tap into industry to transmit our expertise to drive these forward.”

Daniel Neuenschwander, Director of Human and Robotic Exploration at the European Space Agency, also pointed to the requirement for sustainability in its operations in space and the need for partnerships.

Commenting on the demand to expand the rollout of currently available technologies, he stressed the need to continue to push the frontiers of technology, which is further challenged in the harsh environment of space.

“We have to take both challenges. If one wants to de-risk and have investors’ money coming in then one must show the pace of implementation. But we also have to explore it at all times in order to stand at the front line and it’s what we as the ESA see as our role towards the space and other communities with which we work.

“There’s a lot to overcome and that is why I say we never stop pushing the frontiers.”

Originally published on Enlit World.