“We are moving from a system that has been determined by big stuff [such as commodity assets] to a system that requires a lot of brain, digital skills, new thinking and new technologies,” said Laura Sandys, chair of the government’s Energy Digitalisation Taskforce during today’s (27 April) Current± Briefings AMP X discusses the flexibility opportunities AI unlocks webinar.
As rising power prices draw the UK public towards sustainable technologies such as electric vehicles (EVs), solar photovoltaics (PV) systems and domestic battery storage systems, the nation’s power system must adapt to support numerous capital assets rather than a number of larger commodity assets.
“The future is here,” continued Sandys. “We really need to lean in and modernise the energy sector.
“And that’s why data and digitalisation taskforces and all the innovators looking at digital solutions are so important.”
One such technology developer is the energy transition platform, Amp X, which is harnessing Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to build technologies that can help create a modernised energy system.
This is showcased within Amp X’s home energy management system, ALICE (Agents for Lifestyle-Based Intelligent Control of Energy) which enables behind-the-meter dynamic shaping.
“The user-centric approach is crucial to the more consumer-involved system that is required to create a grid of the future,” commented Dr Irene Di Martino, CEO of AMP X.
“The role that the consumer needs to have is to be regarded as a main stakeholder now, in what will be – in a few in a decades or so – a fully transactive grid,” added Martino.
Amp X is also working towards tackling grid instability through it’s Smart Tx smart transformer, which had it’s first deployment in the UK.
“Digitalisation is an essential requirement for a grid of the future. We have an unprecedented level of visibility, because we get data now from a multitude of different sources that are to do with energy consumption with energy usage,” continued Martino.
“But the problem is no longer how we gather data, because we got the opportunity to do so, but it’s how we make sense of that data, how we then process the data in order to enable informed decisions by the relevant stakeholders.”
In concurrence with Martino, Sandys added: “Digitalisation is not a nice to have. If we don’t digitalise our energy system, modernise it, we are going to have analog parameters, we won’t have the visibility that we need, we won’t understand the interactions and we will have to deal with much more dynamic bidirectional system needs.
“This will require a totally different form of infrastructure, a digital infrastructure that will deliver us visibility through instrumentation.”
Watch the full Current± Briefings: AMP X discusses the flexibility opportunities AI unlocks below: