AI agents operating Britain s energy system?
Discussion
Anyone else seen this? Govt consulting with businesses at the moment.
Appreciate that I'm a sceptic of most new tech but it all sounds very Terminator 2 etc to me.
"Sophisticated AI tools that act autonomously could “largely run” Britain’s energy system in future, according to a “plausible” but “stretching scenario” explored by the UK government.
The scenario envisages advanced AI being “embedded across multiple energy system functions simultaneously”, with the government inviting views from industry and others on what it would mean for system design and governance – including for the rules by which such a system would be operated, the role of people in providing oversight, and for where accountability and liability should sit.
The government said the scenario is just “one of several plausible futures” that it is examining as it considers how AI might deliver “longer-term transformative change” to Britain’s energy system.
“In this future, the energy system largely runs itself,” the government said. “AI is embedded across forecasting, control, markets, planning and end-use, as well as innovation and system design, forming a continuously learning system. Rather than people making decisions in sequence to plan, build, operate, then trade, AI agents representing every asset on the system coordinate continuously, responding to changing conditions in real-time. A human operator today might manually curtail a wind farm during network congestion.”
“In this future, AI agents across generation, storage and demand would coordinate automatically to resolve the constraint before it occurs. Central to this is a fully autonomous optimisation layer drawing on live data from the grid, weather, assets and markets. By running simulations across timescales, from milliseconds to decades, it anticipates faults and continuously rebalances power across networks, storage, distributed energy resources and flexible demand,” it added."
TX.
Appreciate that I'm a sceptic of most new tech but it all sounds very Terminator 2 etc to me.
"Sophisticated AI tools that act autonomously could “largely run” Britain’s energy system in future, according to a “plausible” but “stretching scenario” explored by the UK government.
The scenario envisages advanced AI being “embedded across multiple energy system functions simultaneously”, with the government inviting views from industry and others on what it would mean for system design and governance – including for the rules by which such a system would be operated, the role of people in providing oversight, and for where accountability and liability should sit.
The government said the scenario is just “one of several plausible futures” that it is examining as it considers how AI might deliver “longer-term transformative change” to Britain’s energy system.
“In this future, the energy system largely runs itself,” the government said. “AI is embedded across forecasting, control, markets, planning and end-use, as well as innovation and system design, forming a continuously learning system. Rather than people making decisions in sequence to plan, build, operate, then trade, AI agents representing every asset on the system coordinate continuously, responding to changing conditions in real-time. A human operator today might manually curtail a wind farm during network congestion.”
“In this future, AI agents across generation, storage and demand would coordinate automatically to resolve the constraint before it occurs. Central to this is a fully autonomous optimisation layer drawing on live data from the grid, weather, assets and markets. By running simulations across timescales, from milliseconds to decades, it anticipates faults and continuously rebalances power across networks, storage, distributed energy resources and flexible demand,” it added."
TX.
I actually wrote a simple Expert System that learnt from results to do this about 30 years ago as an undergraduate project so I'm fairly confident that the progress in computing power would make this a relatively simple project today.
It would need some comprehensive safeguards in place though ....
It would need some comprehensive safeguards in place though ....
Replace 'AI' with 'software' and that whole procurement statement becomes a lot less scary.
There's already bunch of active projects using AI across various bits of government, mostly to do 'interesting' things with data, not to replace people, but to enable people to do things that they would find very difficult to do today.
There's already bunch of active projects using AI across various bits of government, mostly to do 'interesting' things with data, not to replace people, but to enable people to do things that they would find very difficult to do today.
Halmyre said:
Does this mean we don't need overpaid CEOs and the like? Bring it on.
They'll still required to hold a press conference to say "they" are working hard to restore power and lessons will be learned, the government (any) have a marvellous track record of delivering IT/tech projects, they are always delivered on time and perform seamlessly, I'm sure this one will be fine!Gassing Station | News, Politics & Economics | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff