AI accelerating the energy transition

The energy transition is a critical challenge facing the world, and as discussions at this year's ADIPEC conference have highlighted, artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to play a pivotal role in driving this transformation.

In a captivating session, Andrew Smart, the senior managing director from Accenture, introduced the distinguished Dr. Anima Anandkumar, a Bren professor of Computing at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Anima's work at the forefront of physics-informed AI has yielded groundbreaking advancements in the energy sector.

As Dr. Anima explained, "One cannot exist without the other - the two-faceted energy for AI, AI for energy is really perfect."

Her research has focused on bridging the gap between the digital and physical worlds, leveraging AI to accelerate solutions in areas like weather forecasting, carbon sequestration, and nuclear fusion.

A holistic approach

"AI is clearly accelerating by a huge margin what could be done with traditional numerical methods," Dr. Anima noted, highlighting how her team's AI-based weather model is 10,000 times faster than conventional approaches. This enables more robust probabilistic forecasting of extreme weather events, a critical capability as the world grapples with the impacts of climate change.

Andrew Smart emphasised the importance of this work, stating, "When we think about the energy transition, two major works continue to come to mind: pace and scale. It's well established that science has many of the answers, but in order to accelerate and to scale, this is really where we're hoping and expecting AI to play this pivotal role."

Dr. Anima's vision extends beyond weather modelling, as she shared examples of using AI to optimise carbon sequestration and nuclear fusion reactor design - both essential components of the energy transition. "Thinking of both traditional energy sources, making all of those processes more efficient, and at the same time, thinking of renewables, where the prediction is so critical," she said, underscoring the holistic approach needed to harness AI's transformative potential.

As the energy sector continues its transition, the insights and innovations shared at ADIPEC underscore the crucial role that AI will play in accelerating the pace and scale of this transformation.