Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

DeepMind in “very early stage” talks with National Grid to reduce UK energy use

arstechnica.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 115 posts

Re: DeepMind in “very early stage” talks with National Grid to reduce UK energy use

#41

Post by grey-area »

javiermaestro wrote: post #36
poooogles wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>crappy wooden I'm not sure where you got the gripe against wood from. It lasts longer than uPVC given maintenance every 5 years, looks better, is more environmentally friendly and has similar thermal properties. Oh and it doesn't go yellow.

Nothing against wood, really. But if you've been to the UK, you should agree that the unmaintained, not-properly-fitted, wooden frames that they use in most old windows are just crap. They let in huge amounts of wind, cold, etc, through the unsealed seams. Anything that improved that would be 10 times better, regardless of the yellowing, etc.

Most wooden sash (I assume you're talking about wooden sash) were properly fitted at the time, but are victorian or edwardian and therefore over 100 years old. They've done pretty well considering their heritage. New wooden sash with double glazing are better IMO than plastic windows - as the parent noted, plastic doesn't do well long term when exposed to light.

Re: DeepMind in “very early stage” talks with National Grid to reduce UK energy use

#42

Post by lostboys67 »

javiermaestro wrote: post #18
cjrp wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They kind of did that with the Green Deal (helping people finance home improvements which boosted their energy efficiency) - https://www.gov.uk/green-deal-energy-saving-measures/overvie...

I'd love to see the results... I've never been so baffled in my life, looking for a "normal" flat in London and looking at horrible prospects that cost a fortune with windows from a century ago. And when I asked about that, they were all saying "oh, but the house is listed! Can't change the windows unless X, Y, Z". Whatever. We can put people in a rocket and take them to the moon but we can't replace windows and make…

No You cant I looked at buying a grade2* listed property (mentioned in pevsner no less) 1800's alms house.

You even had to use authentic rubbish paint on the doors

Re: DeepMind in “very early stage” talks with National Grid to reduce UK energy use

#43

Post by lostboys67 »

londons_explore wrote: post #11
halflings wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a couple people working on using deep learning for financial timeseries. It can be beneficial even with relatively limited data (a couple of years with high granularity). I also think the 10% figure is quite ambitious; especially given that they are at an early stage of negotiations.

It might be reducing transmission losses by 10%. Ie. trying to prefer supply near users to reduce losses in long transmission cables. The whole thing seems rather tricky though, because the entire grid right now is run on a market based approach, where suppliers and users bid for the right to sell/use power every half hour. The ML in that case would have to be given to every company to make smarter bids.

And reducing the use of standby gensets which is very expensive not to mention polluting

Re: DeepMind in “very early stage” talks with National Grid to reduce UK energy use

#44

Post by phkahler »

fao_ wrote: post #25
wheelerwj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say, I feel like this could be done with excel and some historical data combined with weather forecasting. that being said, even if ML gets you a 0.5% advantage over spreadsheet math, that is a non-trivial amount of savings on a national scale.

On the other hand, if ML gives you a 0.5% disadvantage, that too is a non-trival amount of losses on a national scale. Because they compared against baseline rather than against another data science team (or both), it's difficult to know if ML actually brings an advantage here.

Can't we assume they already have a data science team? Optimizing the grid is their job already right?

From what I've seen in several places though is companies tend not to listen to their own people, but are willing to make changes based on the advice of hired "experts". So the experts will come in and ask everyone what the challenges are and what they might do to improve. Then the "experts" will pick several low hanging fruit and find a few things that cross internal boundaries (the harder things to change) and make recommendations. Upper management will go with it and improvements will be made. I suppose the way to sum it up is that they bring objectivity to the table.

Re: DeepMind in “very early stage” talks with National Grid to reduce UK energy use

#45

Post by e3b0c »

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #5

The DeepMind datacenter project was very interesting, but a lot of the ML people I spoke to were quite dubious about how much of it was genuinely down to new AI/neural networks, and how much of it was Google PR to justify how much they spent on DeepMind. > DeepMind trained a neural network to more accurately predict future cooling requirements, in turn reducing the power usage of the cooling system by 40 percent. But…

Not an expert but I expect that what AI/machine learning/NN shines is the ability to produce very high quality solutions (or approximations) for large-scale NP-hard problems. With regard to the "NP-hard" part, I don't think regular data science can be a sufficient substitute.

Re: DeepMind in “very early stage” talks with National Grid to reduce UK energy use

#46

Post by startupdiscuss »

wheelerwj wrote: post #9
sweezyjeezy wrote: post #5

The DeepMind datacenter project was very interesting, but a lot of the ML people I spoke to were quite dubious about how much of it was genuinely down to new AI/neural networks, and how much of it was Google PR to justify how much they spent on DeepMind. > DeepMind trained a neural network to more accurately predict future cooling requirements, in turn reducing the power usage of the cooling system by 40 percent. But…

I was going to say, I feel like this could be done with excel and some historical data combined with weather forecasting. that being said, even if ML gets you a 0.5% advantage over spreadsheet math, that is a non-trivial amount of savings on a national scale.

Yes, and there are two other points to follow up this one:

If one ML solution is better than the other one by only 0.01%, in this context it is worth a lot. It is a winner-take-all type of situation.

Edit: the second point was this: If one ML algorithm gives us a 1% saving and the other one gives us a 0.9% saving, you could say that is a 0.1% improvement or you could say that is a 10% (of 1% saving) solution. A percentage sign without context is not that meaningful.

Re: DeepMind in “very early stage” talks with National Grid to reduce UK energy use

#48

Post by grandalf »

Predicting peaks in supply and demand for energy is essentially turning the utility into a hedge fund.

I think it's worth considering the overall characteristics of the "improved" algorithm, since the ML optimizations are likely analogous to leveraging based on an overfitted predictive model, and the objective of a power grid is resilience as well as efficiency.

Also, depending on how you define efficiency, it may be considered beneficial to shut down a coal plant and spin up a few hundred windmills, even if the resulting price per kilowatt hour increases by 5%.

Re: DeepMind in “very early stage” talks with National Grid to reduce UK energy use

#49

Post by anothercomment »

javiermaestro wrote: post #13

Heh. If only they mandate to replace a majority of the crappy wooden + single-pane windows they have in most houses, that let all of the heat out and wind and noise in, with normal, double-glaze windows with good insulation, they would cut the energy footprint in HALF, I'm sure...

I suppose you are joking, as double-glazing seems to be a popular meme in the UK (with people being convinced they don't need it and scammy vendors pushing it)? Must admit I never completely understood it, coming from a country where double glazing is the norm.

Re: DeepMind in “very early stage” talks with National Grid to reduce UK energy use

#50

Post by yunolisten »

poooogles wrote: post #24

On a similar note, for anyone that hasn't seen it you can get live grid metrics from http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/ .

what is this, a website for ants? It needs to be at least twice as big!

Seriously thought, that's quite an unreadable interface.

Post reply on HN