London- Currently, Google is concentrating on backing a climate change startup established by ex-DeepMind employees through its philanthropic arm that is Google.org.
Open Climate Fix is a non-profitable lab which is focused on the reducing greenhouse gas emission which is announced on Tuesday. It cleared that it has been awarded more than £500,000 ($686,350) by Google.org’s impact Challenge on Climate. This has committed 10million euros to fund new green technologies.
Currently, London-headquartered starts-up which is aiming for building online solar electricity highlighting the services for the U.K. and Europe.
However, the solution is aiming to predict the cloud cover which determines the quantity of electricity solar panels can now generate by the mean of a combination of Satellite images and new artificial intelligence software.
The co-founder of Open Climate Fix and a former research engineer at Alphabet-owned DeepMind, Jack Kelly informed the reporters of CNBC that on Tuesday they will now keep “lots of fossil fuel generators spinning at less than their full capacity” in case “a large cloud comes along and covers Cornwall.”
Kelly also mentioned that the generators are less effective when they are ramped down. He added, “It would be more fuel-efficient and more cost efficient to run a small number of generators at nearer to their max, but that requires that we have better forecasts because to do that you’re running the system with less headroom.”
Notably, Open Climate Fix is hoping that its solar forecasting solution will be provided with better forecast to electricity grid operators which is capable of making more accurate predictions.
Kelly mentioned that the company now speaks with National Grid which operates the infrastructure which serves electricity for homes and business around Britain.
National Grid spoke to DeepMinded at one stage which ultimately didn’t come to anything and the climatic change has now fallen down the agenda at DeepMind.
Moreover, the entrepreneur added that there are a lot of legacy energy companies that are not very good at innovation.
He said, “That’s not their fault, they have heritage, of 100 plus years, (of) building large bits of physical hardware and they haven’t historically been innovators in software and data. We hope that by taking cutting-edge research and modern approaches to building computer systems that it’s possible to massively improve the efficiency of the electricity system.”
Head of Google.org Rowan Barnett for EMEA and APAC mentioned in a statement, “Among the many applications we’ve received to our Google.org Impact Challenge on Climate, the expert jury was convinced by Open Climate Fix’s innovative and tech-driven approach. We know that artificial intelligence can have a transformative impact when applied to challenges in the climate change sector, and we’re excited to be supporting this work.”
Kelly mentioned that money from Google will be used for expanding the size of his team which now sits at the three people.
Moreover, Google has even backed a company called the Normative which helped the companies in automatically compiling carbon reports and Dark Matter Labs which is creating a financial platform for supporting investments in Urban forest management as well as restoration.
However, big tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon are now investing heavily in the technologies which have the capability for reducing the carbon emission.
