With today’s energy extremity at hand, it’s important to look forward to ulterior renewable and eco-friendly energy forms. With the Internet of Things (IoT), AI can reduce utility bills in smart homes or help save costs by foreseeing industrial-level problems. A new trend in renewable energy includes combining solar and storage, which delivers cost savings to both solar providers and users. However, setting up a solar project can be costly, given the volatility of subsidies for renewable energy investments.
The renewable energy industry is a highly data-rich environment. The advantages of applying artificial intelligence in this industry are only as farfetched as a mind can stretch. There are remote inspection robots that troubleshoot and help with maintenance, robot crawlers that can get close to a structure’s surface that uses ultrasonic or microwave transmitters, which penetrate structures to recognize material faults. Autonomous robots utilized in supply chain optimization can create entire solar and wind farms—transporting parts of a wind turbine and solar array from factories by driverless vehicles and finally gathered by drones and sets of robots. This mitigates the time invested in planning and analysis, which could take a group of human hours.
Renewable Energy Solution Providers
The utility industry has the potential to embrace artificial intelligence. Machine learning could forecast demand and supply in real-time and optimize economic load dispatch. Power suppliers optimize generation efficiency with real-time adjustments across their assets with AI. Predictive maintenance can be strengthened with drones for asset inspections, thus replacing manual inspection. The drones are trained using deep learning algorithms to automatically predict failures and identify defects without automatically interrupting the operations. Demand management can be made smarter and automated with machine learning. Energy theft is a significant issue in some developing countries, where theft accounts for up to 40 percent of the electricity distributed. AI can be used to detect the payment history and usage pattern to signal any aberrant behavior.
The combination of renewable energy and AI seems to be a perfect bond of emerging technology. Until producing cheap and limitless nuclear power is feasible, conserving resources and making renewable energy affordable is the only option.
