Germany enlists machine learning to boost renewables revolution

http://www.nature.com/news/germany-enlists-machine-learning-to-boost-renewables-revolution-1.20251

by vezycash • 10 years ago

99 25 10 years ago

nature.com

th0br0• 10 years ago

That name yields some rather unfortunate Google image results.

elcapitan• 10 years ago

Looks like a product of German engineering, so what?

soheil• 10 years ago

More like Swedish.

asavinov• 10 years ago

Renewable energy supply strongly depends on weather forecast so essentially one needs a good algorithm for weather forecast. Yet, forecasting energy supply is much easier if all generators are integrated into one power grid because it is necessary to predict average supply for a (large) reagion.

sevenless• 10 years ago

Great. Can we start doing this for the economy, already?

Jtsummers• 10 years ago

This does happen, but in the US (and most(?) countries) we don't have command economies. Consequently, this sort of model-based approach to economics (logistics) is done by businesses. The big, successful ones are very good at it. Walmart knows how much of what good to send to what region on what day. They've been collecting and correlating data for decades now.

Where it's done by the government it's applied at the level of bonds and currency production and such. More abstract levels than directing purchase or production of specific items (generally, more direct intervention does still happen of course, but usually masked).

Udo• 10 years ago

Germany doesn't have a command economy either, it's a combination of government incentives, private enterprise, and (semi-)public utilities all going in this direction.

pjc50• 10 years ago

Has been tried with previous generations of decisionmaking technology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

alexhawdon• 10 years ago

Anyone not familiar with this, do go to the link and check out the Control Room. Beautifully retro-futuristic, looks like a '70s sci-fi film set, but they were actually using the thing.

ap22213• 10 years ago

Why is this news? We've been doing the same thing at deregulated US RTOs for at least 6 years.

untilHellbanned• 10 years ago

There's no such thing as new news.

SixSigma2• 10 years ago

AI is the new Nanotechnology

flukus• 10 years ago

I thought it was the new carbon nano tubes?

DasIch• 10 years ago

Since wind and PV-power forecasts do not follow exact theoretical error distributions, the probabilistic power forecasts will be based on quantile regression coupled to artificial intelligence or data-mining methods. Additionally, methods such as kernel density estimation, ensemble dressing, or Bayesian model averaging, which have proved useful in meteorological applications, will be evaluated in this subproject.

Source: http://www.projekt-eweline.de/en/subproject2.html

AI is only mentioned as a possibility in the context of one subproject of three subprojects. Based on titles alone they've made only a single publication[1] involving AI and they've been publishing for a few years already. Saying that AI is used here may be technically correct but seems like a massive overstatement.

[1] http://www.projekt-eweline.de/en/publications.html

shoyer• 10 years ago

This article in Nature, which the Popular Mechanics article appears to be based on, is much more informative: http://www.nature.com/news/germany-enlists-machine-learning-...

It's a little misleading to say they're using AI. Most of this work (and all the specific examples listed on the project webpage) is more appropriately called statistics.

sctb• 10 years ago

Thanks, we updated the link from http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a2..., which does point to this.

amit_m• 10 years ago

Nowadays there's no clear difference between statistics and machine learning. But the latter gets you more grant money. :-/

artifaxx• 10 years ago

Machine learning is setting it up to find the correlations for you these days :p It is annoying when people choose things due to a more exciting name/buzzword rather than actual merit...

visarga• 10 years ago

no clear difference between statistics and machine learning

Yes, there is. When your model has thousands/millions of parameters, or when your model has many more parameters than the number of examples in your training set, it's called Machine Learning.

aphextron• 10 years ago

Popular Mechanics has become nothing but vapid clickbait nonsense these days. Thanks for the source.

dirtyaura• 10 years ago

A tangential question related to carbon-free energy production:

Are there companies that do software for nuclear power plant construction? Like modern project management software for nuclear power plants? It seems that a few bigger nuclear projects in Europe (namely in Finland and France) are in trouble mainly due to project management reasons.

king_phil• 10 years ago

Siemens. They are building the plants, too.

Germany enlists machine learning to boost renewables revolution

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