AI will be a critical piece of the clean energy economy, according to a new report by the Department of Energy and its six national laboratories. Last year, President Joe Biden issued an executive order calling for the agency to produce a public report “describing the potential for AI to improve planning, permitting, investment, and operations for electric grid infrastructure and to enable the provision of clean, affordable, reliable, resilient, and secure electric power to all Americans.”
Researchers identified four priority use cases to organize their findings: grid planning, permitting and siting, operations and reliability, and resilience. They identified three specific challenge areas where AI/ML can surpass the performance of human teams: (1) streamlining the licensing and regulatory process; (2) accelerating deployment; and (3) facilitating unattended operation.
“Artificial intelligence can help crack the code on our toughest challenges from combating the climate crisis to uncovering cures for cancer,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm. “DOE, under President Biden’s leadership, is accelerating its AI work on multiple fronts to not only keep the U.S. globally competitive, but also to manage AI’s increasing energy demand so we can maintain our goal of a reliable, affordable, and clean energy future.”
DOE also established a platform to showcase DOE-developed AI tools, which address medium-range weather forecasting, wildfire analysis, grid modernization, and more.
Streamlining the design, deployment, and licensing of new energy capacity presents one of the clearest opportunities for AI tools, DOE said. By 2050, the agency estimates the onboarding of 1.6 TW of new solar capacity and 200 GW of new nuclear capacity, while enabling hydrogen, geothermal, critical minerals, and other clean energy resources.
The new VoltAIc Initiative to use AI to help streamline siting and permitting at the Federal, state, and local level: DOE is investing $13 million in the initiative to build AI-powered tools to improve siting and permitting of clean energy infrastructure and has partnered with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to develop PolicyAI, a policy-specific Large Language Model test bed that will be used to develop software to augment National Environmental Policy Act and related reviews.
