Cape Town - With widespread concerns around the rise and growing use of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the 21st edition of the Western Cape government’s Energy Digicon looked at the positive role AI could have in the energy sector.
During this week’s digicon, Premier Alan Winde was joined by AI Sweden co-director of Operations Martin Svensson.
Western Cape government special adviser on energy Alwie Lester said the opportunity for AI to play a bigger role in the energy space was massive and the industry should be encouraged to look at this more holistically, seeing it as part of the industry going forward.
“With the advent of AI, I think the important thing here is that you can have a very dynamic system that is managed with information and data that’s readily available and processed quite quickly.
“So typically, you could have a system operator that responds to things very differently based on AI, as opposed to the conventional way that we are responding to the system at the moment,” Lester said.
“In the general energy space, I think we will see that AI starts to play a lot more of a critical role because you’re sitting with millions and millions of terabytes of information, especially energy information, but also economic and consumer information, and if you have the ability to link these, your decisions around what energy, at what point, at what price, becomes a rather easier decision when you have a system that’s able to do this for you.”
Based on research by think tank RethinkX, Svensson said a 100% solar, wind and battery energy system was possible.
“And this system will not be like the ones we have today, this will be fully decentralised, meaning that organisations, companies, individuals will be the producers of this energy.”
He said it was not replacing the current system but, to a large degree, was a completely new system.
Svensson said to do this, individuals and companies should be incentivised to install their own energy production systems, typically solar ones. One also needs to enable the ability to sell energy produced into the grid.
“Over time, one needs to look into how this system could be transformed into the new one, taking into account technical and economical and social aspects. This is more difficult, but absolutely doable. But the important thing is to trigger the community to get going, then the rest will follow.”
shakirah.thebus@inl.co.za