Tech Talk | Enlit’s The Guide 2024 technology highlights
‘The Guide 2024′, Enlit Media’s flagship annual publication launched at Enlit Europe, features a ‘who’s who’ and what’s what’ in Europe’s and the global energy sector.
In its over 100 pages, we meet ‘the gamechanger on a mission for Ukraine’, ‘the gritty, green Grimbarian’, ‘the CEO who is challenging perceptions of leadership’ and ‘Markus, who works for a 130-year-old startup’ among other personalities.
We find out why Europe can’t go green without citizen buy-in, about Italy’s renewable energy paradox, how Portugal is riding the wave of its marine energy potential and why the UK needs to rethink its CCUS policy.
And we learn about projects such as the greening of Malpensa airport, DECODIT’s efforts to simplify the energy transition for homeowners, the transformation of Greece’s Hellenic Public Power Corporation and Green Springs’ approach to producing green hydrogen in Australia’s Northern Territory.
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Some highlights are as follows.
AI centre stage
With the current focus on AI, both for its rapidly expanding use in the analytics and for its energy consumption, the ‘rocket man of AI’, Stuart Brown, a senior managing director at Accenture, comments that AI is the new frontier to which we should “boldly go”, full of untapped and unimaginable potential.
“It’s going to change the way we work, how we educate, how we automate, how we augment.”
And for him generative AI is the biggest change that’s going to come to organisations and the way we work since Y2K.
“The reason I use the example of Y2K is, it’s the last thing that impacted an entire organisation. … Other technology waves – the cloud, blockchain and the Metaverse – were not as ubiquitous across an organisation”.
This growing energy use of AI is reviewed in another feature, highlighting the challenges for data centres with their annual demand growth currently around 10%.
A whole range of solutions is being implemented to manage this data centre energy demand, in particular power purchase agreements, with nuclear and geothermal energies now emerging as increasingly popular options alongside the traditional renewables, solar and wind.
But important as these are for sustainability, they are insufficient and must be accompanied by efficiency improvements, including the use of AI itself.
Two key areas reviewed are data management and data manipulation, with emerging technologies for the former including DNA storage expected to offer petabyte and even exabyte levels in the next few years, and for the latter new innovative processing units optimised to speeding up generative AI models.
The transformer evolution
What might the transformer of the future look like in a world of increased power demands and more resilient energy communities?
Enlit Media colleague Yusuf Latief reviews a technical framework from Bangladeshi researchers with features including automatic condition monitoring, intelligent inverters, edge computing, automatic controlling and intelligent management.
Going a step further, the European project STRATA is focussed on the concept of replacing traditional distribution transformers with a ‘smart digital node’ that can act as a service centre for local energy communities and provide new distribution grid services and increased resilience, together with support for flexibility markets.
The prototype development is based on MSc Electronics’ Hybrid Energy Supply System, which has been applied for local off-grid communities, with the next steps to pilot the overall solution with energy communities among other use cases.
Says Kari Mäki, a research professor of smart energy systems with the VTT Technical
Research Centre of Finland: “It’s actually pretty interesting to think about it.
“Would it be a system in the future where we have a ‘transformer as a service’, where the grid operator is not owning but they are paying a monthly fee, and whoever is providing the service will also be able to sell the service to the community and to reserve markets?”
The quantum future
Quantum computing is fast growing for use to address computational challenges in an increasingly complex world, not least the energy sector with a decentralised energy system with multiple distributed resources.
E.ON has been pioneering the use of quantum computing for three broad areas – scheduling scenario modelling and quantum machine learning and AI – and has been using two different types of quantum computers that are designed for different types of problems.
It’s necessary to be clear from the outset about the problem one wants to solve, which can then be written mathematically for encoding into the quantum computer, E.ON Digital Technology’s Dr Giorgio Cortiana, who has led this effort, explains in an interview.
So far the areas of work have been small-scale proofs of concept, in line with the limits of the current quantum computers, but the intention is to run some larger-scale use cases as the technology matures.
“As the current generation of quantum computers is limited in size we do not yet have the enhanced applications integrated into the business flow, but that will soon change as quantum hardware becomes more powerful and more stable.”
And that is happening at speed. Cybersecurity has been coming increasingly under the spotlight as a quantum computing topic, with its potential to break current encryption techniques.
Traditional wisdom has been that would take around five years but recent press reports have indicated that Chinese researchers have claimed to have executed the first successful quantum attack on widely used encryption algorithms in sectors such as banking and the military.
While quantum computing is in sufficiently early stages that there is unlikely to be an immediate risk to modern cryptographic systems, it is nevertheless indicative of the pace of current technological advance.
To read these and other stories from ‘The Guide 2024’, find them as they appear on www.enlit.world.
Jonathan Spencer Jones
Specialist writer
Smart Energy International
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