Decarbonizing with data

The history of the second half of the 21st century will be written before the first one is over – if we want to counteract the worst effects of climate change, we need to drive global emissions to net zero by 2050. Fossil fuels have gained huge geopolitical significance over the last months and many countries have turned to plan for an increase in renewable energy sources to support their energy security in the long term.

There’s no doubt today that our foreseeable future is electric and heavily dependent on dynamic, distributed power generation – like solar panels on the roofs of houses. Energy grids need to be ready to accommodate this new way of managing the distribution and tariffication of power. And I believe technology will be instrumental in making that happen. Energy companies need to adopt innovation, such as artificial intelligence, automation, together with edge and high capacity, ultra-low latency data traffic.

As renewables’ share in the overall energy mix increases, we need to consider the bigger geographical distribution of power generation as well as their intermittent nature – output peaks might not coincide with demand peaks. Managing real-time supply and demand, as well as distributed, power storage capacity will require sophisticated, data-driven, autonomous systems at the edge of our networks.

The complexity of the whole system increases as the number of users investing in micro-generation and power storage grows. Each of them might feed not more than a few kW of surplus energy back to the grid, but multiplying it by millions of users, we reach some serious capacity – especially when we note that this is the energy left after satisfying the household’s own power needs. In order to manage the supply and demand in a way that takes into account peak availability of energy, we need appliances controlled by an edge of smart “meters”. Devices such as dishwashers, washers, dryers or many others can be controlled to work at a time of highest energy supply – and it’s lowest cost!

This fundamental transformation of the energy infrastructure will enable more complex patterns of supply and demand. We’ll be able to understand the usage patterns at granular level, increase the energy supply and change users’ habits by incentivizing them to increase usage when energy is most available and cheapest. But in order for this to happen, energy grids will need the capacity to make autonomous, intelligent decisions at the age, based on loads of real-time data and many variables.

High-capacity and low latency communications networks will be a key element of this transformation – enabled by 5G. Needless to say, the security, reliability and resilience of these networks will need to be brought at a level of critical national infrastructure.

Reaching net zero by 2050 is one of the biggest challenges for the entire world now. It brings about a fundamental change in how we approach energy generation, distribution and usage. It will require a drastic increase in computational capacity at the edge, as gathering and analyzing data from billions of distributed devices will need to be followed by the capacity to turn insight into action in milliseconds. Good news is, the technologies needed for this transformation are available today.