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Episode 147
Today, we're excited to present a special cross-over episode with the Podcast "Preparing for AI" hosted by Matt Cartwright and Jimmy Rhodes.
The guest for this episode is Anders Hove, long-time host of the Environment China podcast, and Beijing-based Matt Cartwright interviews him about the impact of AI on the clean energy transition. Anders ‘references several points related to China, such as efforts to locate data centers in colder regions, and the results of experiments seeking to make data centers respond to the output of renewables. We hope you enjoy it!
The Guest
播客嘉宾
Transcript
文字版内容
Matt Cartwright:
Welcome to Preparing for AI with Matt Cartwright and Jimmy Rhodes, the podcast that investigates the effect of AI on jobs, one industry at a time. We dig deep into barriers to change the coming backlash and ideas for solutions and actions that individuals and groups can take. We're making it our mission to help you prepare for the human social impacts of AI. We're making it our mission to help you prepare for the human social impacts of AI. Hello and welcome back to what is a very special episode of Preparing for AI. So today I have with us Anders Hovey, who is the Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies of what I hope is a kind of ongoing sub-series of preparing for AI on sustainability, where we will look at how potentially AI can be both an enabler and a barrier to climate solutions. So I'm going to start off by letting Anders introduce himself. Anders.
Anders Hove:
Yeah, thank you very much and I'm really glad to be here and this is a topic which is very interesting and it's sort of a new topic for me personally. I have been working in research-related roles connected to the energy sector for more than 20 years, both on Wall Street initially and then for the last decade or so in China, looking at policies on renewable energy, electric vehicles, low-carbon energy, transition topics like this, and it includes a little bit of work related to the data center industry and the connection between the data centers and renewables, as well as corporate procurement of renewable energy for matching against the electricity consumption of data centers, for example. So it's a new topic for me, but I do have a little bit of surface knowledge and I'm looking forward to the exchange today.
Matt Cartwright:
So I thought maybe we'd start off, and partly because I you know, I sort of have a, I guess, a reputation of being the pessimistic one on this podcast, as opposed to Jimmy being more optimistic. So, although in the last week, uh, not necessarily feeling any more optimistic about the world in general, but in terms of AI I've, I've been through a bit of a journey of starting to see a lot more positivity, certainly in the medium term sense, in, you know, taking out the existential threats, but seeing how a lot of the tools that are coming in, if we look past the gimmicks and actually look at some of the useful ways in which I think AI tools can be used. So, in a long-winded way, I thought maybe we could start off by looking at AI as a potential enabler of climate solutions and obviously, with yourself here there's a focus on energy. So I'm going to read out a few examples which I got from chat, gpt and maybe Anders, you would kind of respond by critiquing these examples.
Matt Cartwright:
So the first one is energy sorry, efficiency improvement. So, for example, enhancing the efficiency of renewable energy sources like wind and solar, optimizing grid operations, forecasting energy production and demand. The second one is innovation in energy technology, so AI actually assisting in the development of new materials and demand. The second one is innovation in energy technology, so AI actually assisting in the development of new materials and technology. I think the big one there would obviously be, you know, advancing battery storage and carbon capture systems, and not just in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions but also advancing the kind of overall sustainability of energy systems, so advancing the kind of overall sustainability of energy systems. The third one is exploration of renewable resources, so using AI to help map and predict the viability of renewable energy and then therefore kind of adding, aiding in the exploration and utilisation.
Matt Cartwright:
And finally, I think I'm giving you four things in a row here, but advanced energy storage, so machine learning and predictive models being used to improve and innovate energy storage technologies, which, of course, are going to be absolutely critical for the kind of you know, the nature of renewable energy that we need. So you know I've reeled off four things in a row there. I know that's quite a lot for you to critique, but do you agree on? Some of those things are potentially positive at least?
Anders Hove:
Yeah, I think it's basically a fairly plausible list, and I would just note that that's almost exactly the same list that I came up with from a Google search and I turned up a report this is a report from last year by David Rolnick, university of Pennsylvania, as well as some top AI researchers and executives from Google, microsoft, deepmind, other award-winning scientists involved in the AI sector, and basically that's the that perhaps AI could help with. Precision agriculture, and agriculture is a part of the sustainability dilemma of carbon globally, even though the energy sector, which you mentioned pretty prominently, I would say, is by far number one in terms of importance to the climate sector-wise, by far number one in terms of importance to the climate sector-wise. So I think that AI will make a contribution in each one of those areas, and AI is already widely enough available that it's probably going to be very difficult to disentangle what the contribution of AI tools will be. I mean, how could we estimate the importance of Google? What's the importance of Google searching on the efficiency of research and development? I don't know if we could ever figure that out, and probably it will be the same with AI, but I do think that I am going to come down a little bit more on the negative side, as you forecast as well, which is to say that a lot of the low-carbon things that we as a society need to do are primarily dependent on having policies and incentives in place, and the reason why we don't have those policies and incentives in place is not generally due to the absence of technologies, for example, the absence of breakthrough materials.
Anders Hove:
Now, it's true, of course, that as these technologies have become more cost effective and you know, for solar and batteries and might be cost competitive with the incumbent industries, that helps policymakers adopt the policies that will enable them to scale up and become more widely available. I think that most of those changes have already happened as a result more of manufacturing scale up and not so much as a result of discovery of new materials. And I base that on actually direct experience, and not as a scientist but as a market analyst and watcher of the solar industry, where for many years and including I on Wall Street we're looking to invest in new materials for solar that could somehow surpass the dominant materials, which were deemed never likely to become competitive back 15, 20 years ago, and what happened ultimately was just scaling up. The technologies from basically the 1950s was what was necessary in order to achieve the cost reductions, not the development of an amazing new process, an amazing new material. Thin films that were the great hope back then are essentially still the same share of the solar industry, and the same thing, I think, would be the case, generally speaking, for batteries. It's the 1970s 1990s technology. It's not something where we need a totally different chemistry or manufacturing process. In fact, it is the relative ease of manufacturing these technologies that has enabled them to scale up and reduce costs so effectively. That's the technology breakthrough side.
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Full transcript
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Environment China is a bilingual podcast featuring conversations with advocates, entrepreneurs, and experts working in the sustainability field in China for both Chinese and international audiences. So far, we have released 147 episodes already. You can listen to them on Environment China's official website, BEN's WeChat Account, or Google/Apple/Spotify Podcast.
「环境中国」是在2017年成立的中英双语播客栏目，至今已发布147集。在每一期节目中，我们将邀请到中外环境和能源领域的研究学者、创新创业者以及行业专家与大家分享他们的独到见解和经历。您可在环境中国官网、北京能源网络公众号、以及谷歌/苹果/Spotify播客收听到我们的节目。
