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

arstechnica.co.uk

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

#91

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

anothercomment wrote: post #66
javiermaestro wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't understand your comment. You are agreeing with me that, in most other parts of the world, double-glazing (aka a glass that won't break if you elbow it by mistake!) is the norm. But in the UK, it's sadly the opposite. So we agree that they should replace their crappy windows with double-glazed, properly insulated, ones...

I meant I never understood why people in the UK dislike double glazing and think of it as a kind of joke. Don't know much about the story of double glazing in the UK, though. The only thing that comes to mind is that climate is supposed to be mild in the UK, so maybe double glazing makes less sense than in colder countries? But it can get pretty cold in the UK... My comment wasn't meant as a criticism of your comment…

Double-glazing is popular in the UK - but it was a late-adoption: I didn't see it become popular until the early-1990s (I note this would be shortly after the privatization of British Gas, hmmm!)

A contributing factor is the popularity of rented accommodation, including council-owned houses, where the pressure to invest in double-glazing is less (as tenants are responsible for gas/elec bills, but landlords are responsible for capital-expenditures and improvements) - so there's not much incentive to upgrade windows in that case.

But all new houses I've seen built since the late-80s all tend to have double-gazed windows, the majority have white PVC framing, but I see wooden ones occasionally too. I've never seen white PVC window framing turn yellow - my parents had their windows converted around 1994 - now 23 years later the frames are still pristine white - and I'm not aware of any special treatment or care they require.

That said, public perception of double-glazing salesmen isn't the best - they were the butt of many a joke in the 80s and 90s, including Blur's Parklife video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSuHrTfcikU - though I never understood myself, perhaps because they were a commonplace sighting?

That... and even today they seem to capitalize on their public perception with intentionally gauche TV ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgqJPd_YJtE

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

#92

Post by pjc50 »

anothercomment wrote: post #66
javiermaestro wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't understand your comment. You are agreeing with me that, in most other parts of the world, double-glazing (aka a glass that won't break if you elbow it by mistake!) is the norm. But in the UK, it's sadly the opposite. So we agree that they should replace their crappy windows with double-glazed, properly insulated, ones...

I meant I never understood why people in the UK dislike double glazing and think of it as a kind of joke. Don't know much about the story of double glazing in the UK, though. The only thing that comes to mind is that climate is supposed to be mild in the UK, so maybe double glazing makes less sense than in colder countries? But it can get pretty cold in the UK... My comment wasn't meant as a criticism of your comment…

I think this is itself a "legacy joke"; I would say it was the 80s-90s when door to door double glazing salesmen were rife. The only real objection was the sheer cost of retrofitting it, plus a bit of stiff upper lip about not caring about being cold.

A friend of mine lives in a single-glazed 13-storey 1960s apartment block. It can be quite drafty. There's no way it will ever be refitted and I'd give it a couple of decades until its demolition.

The UK's housing stock is very old on average and some of it is in very poor condition.

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

#93

Post by backpropaganda »

samblr wrote: post #7
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…

>> Google PR to justify how much they spent on DeepMind - why would google try justifying for Deep mind and not to other tens-to-hundreds of companies it acquires in a year ?

DeepMind's expenditure is probably upwards of $1bn/year.

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

#94

Post by jgamman »

“We think there’s no reason why you can't think of a whole national grid of a country in the same way as you can the data centres." means that you haven't thought about it at all.

A grid has all sorts of actors involved, a whole bunch of whom are there purely to make money (manage risk, gamble... tom-a-to/tom-ar-to) - bolting an AI onto a complex system and then letting people !#$!@# with it to get their hedge contracts into the money is practically a guaranteed scenario.

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

#95

Post by ascorbic »

javiermaestro wrote: post #53
lostboys67 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So that's what I'm saying. Instead of useless laws like that one, the Government should put a lot of weight and money and refurbish all of those windows, making them modern while using all those "original materials" or whatever they want. Instead, I'm sure half the energy footprint goes to waste through those windows...

I'm not sure many people would agree with you that laws to prevent the destruction of historic buildings are "useless".

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

#96

Post by moeadham »

iagovar wrote: post #74
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.

What I'm wondering is why I can't find anything about ML applied to finding and curating data, which is the most tedious part of data science. That would be an interesting way of using ML without fuzzy stuff.

Would you pay for it?

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

#97

Post by DataDisciple »

kaino128 wrote: post #8

I don't know much about electric grid engineering - are there opportunities for a ML approach to increase efficiency in ways other than the sort of better supply forecasting implied by this article. The article does mention the losses involved in long distance transmission, but surely traditional approaches can already yield fairly well optimised planning for improving this sort of efficiency? (Finally, this article…

DM is far from the first company to provide ML solutions to revolutionize utilities.

There are so many opportunities to increase the efficiency of our electric networks. Forecasting demand is not something they do well, but more importantly they could improve Demand Response and Energy Efficiency programs. Oh, and most of the techniques they use to prevent and stop theft are a joke (that's a $6B/yr problem in the US).

The utilities have not been forced to innovate. They won't innovate on their own because there are no customers at risk - no competition. (Aside from smart meters and the main benefit from that was that they no longer had to pay for meter readers.)

There is a WORLD of opportunity for utilities to become more efficient, but they will not do it on their own. Our regulators need to force them to innovate.

Kudos to DM for this work, but I will be more impressed if they can actually get a major utility to implement these solutions.

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

#98

Post by cercatrova »

backpropaganda wrote: post #93
samblr wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Google PR to justify how much they spent on DeepMind - why would google try justifying for Deep mind and not to other tens-to-hundreds of companies it acquires in a year ?

DeepMind's expenditure is probably upwards of $1bn/year.

What costs do they have that would be one billion a year? I can understand servers and salary for the researchers but not to the scale of 9 figures a year.

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

#99

Post by flylib »

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…

DeepMind will go down as one of the best acquisitions ever

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

#100

Post by joshvm »

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…

Some streets, particularly in London, are very picky about modifications to houses. Even if it's not a listed property, you might need to get planning permission to put double glazing in - if it'll make your house look out of place with the neighbourhood the council can disallow it.
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