AI energy development solution launched for global south
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A new energy solution powered by AI will identify the needs for communities in developing regions has been developed by IBM and Sustainable Energy for All.
The new solution, which was released at COP29, is aimed to support more sustainable urban development for cities and communities around the world, and particularly in Africa and India.
The solution is the ‘Open building insights’ platform, which is designed to display in an interactive map information from models created by the German Aerospace Centre estimating buildings’ heights, by Open Energy Maps providing information about electricity status and consumption and by IBM to identify building usage.
Together these are to determine the energy needs of a defined area.
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“We believe that integrating AI in the energy sector planning and evidence – especially for developing countries – will go a long way in designing comprehensive solutions for many of the developmental challenges currently facing the global south and its people,” commented Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO and Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL).
“The ‘Open building insights’ tool will help energy planners overcome critical data gap challenges to inform energy access and energy transition interventions, and better deliver results for those most in need.”
John Matogo, Corporate Social Responsibility Leader for Africa & the Middle East at IBM, adds: “Collaborating with organisations such as SEforALL through our IBM Sustainability Accelerator programme helps us unlock innovation and work more closely in communities to tackle some of our biggest challenges, especially around energy and sustainable urban development.”
Open building insights: A new AI energy solution
The ‘Open building insights’ platform runs on IBM Cloud to visually consolidate multiple datasets in a map, providing information such as building location, height, footprint area and usage type.
A key feature is the use of AI on building-specific data, including its footprint, number of floors, roof image, location and other map data, to determine whether the building is residential or non-residential.
The platform is available for free to the public, containing information across all of Kenya, where it is being used for energy planning. Initial data indicates the insights gained should lead to measures that are projected to benefit over 1.1 million citizens by 2030.
A second open source solution from IBM released alongside the buildings insights platform, ‘Modeling urban growth’, is aimed to predict where cities will grow in these countries, based on historical data from satellite images, geographic data such as slope and elevation, demographic data and structural data such as road layout.
The model, which is publicly available on GitHub, is currently trained on data from Africa, including Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, Cameroon, Uganda, Kenya, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Malawi, but is designed to be re-trained by users for any country in the world using publicly accessible data.
With the potential of these models for city planning and development, IBM and SEforALL are extending their collaboration with an initial focus on expanding the ‘Open building insights’ platform in India.
They also intend to explore integrating the ‘Modeling urban growth’ AI model into the platform.
