
Germany enlists machine learning to boost renewables revolution - vezycash
http://www.nature.com/news/germany-enlists-machine-learning-to-boost-renewables-revolution-1.20251
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shoyer
This article in Nature, which the Popular Mechanics article appears to be
based on, is much more informative: [http://www.nature.com/news/germany-
enlists-machine-learning-...](http://www.nature.com/news/germany-enlists-
machine-learning-to-boost-renewables-revolution-1.20251)

It's a little misleading to say they're using AI. Most of this work (and all
the specific examples listed on the project webpage) is more appropriately
called statistics.

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amit_m
Nowadays there's no clear difference between statistics and machine learning.
But the latter gets you more grant money. :-/

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visarga
> no clear difference between statistics and machine learning

Yes, there is. When your model has thousands/millions of parameters, or when
your model has many more parameters than the number of examples in your
training set, it's called Machine Learning.

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Houshalter
That's not true. Linear and logistic regression are like the first things you
learn in a machine learning class. Many popular ML models do not have millions
of parameters, including decision trees and shallow neural networks.

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DasIch
> Since wind and PV-power forecasts do not follow exact theoretical error
> distributions, the probabilistic power forecasts will be based on quantile
> regression coupled to artificial intelligence or data-mining methods.
> Additionally, methods such as kernel density estimation, ensemble dressing,
> or Bayesian model averaging, which have proved useful in meteorological
> applications, will be evaluated in this subproject.

Source: [http://www.projekt-
eweline.de/en/subproject2.html](http://www.projekt-
eweline.de/en/subproject2.html)

AI is only mentioned as a possibility in the context of one subproject of
three subprojects. Based on titles alone they've made only a single
publication[1] involving AI and they've been publishing for a few years
already. Saying that AI is used here may be technically correct but seems like
a massive overstatement.

[1]: [http://www.projekt-eweline.de/en/publications.html](http://www.projekt-
eweline.de/en/publications.html)

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sevenless
Great. Can we start doing this for the economy, already?

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Jtsummers
This does happen, but in the US (and most(?) countries) we don't have command
economies. Consequently, this sort of model-based approach to economics
(logistics) is done by businesses. The big, successful ones are very good at
it. Walmart knows how much of what good to send to what region on what day.
They've been collecting and correlating data for decades now.

Where it's done by the government it's applied at the level of bonds and
currency production and such. More abstract levels than directing purchase or
production of specific items (generally, more direct intervention does still
happen of course, but usually masked).

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Udo
Germany doesn't have a command economy either, it's a combination of
government incentives, private enterprise, and (semi-)public utilities all
going in this direction.

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dirtyaura
A tangential question related to carbon-free energy production:

Are there companies that do software for nuclear power plant construction?
Like modern project management software for nuclear power plants? It seems
that a few bigger nuclear projects in Europe (namely in Finland and France)
are in trouble mainly due to project management reasons.

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king_phil
Siemens. They are building the plants, too.

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asavinov
Renewable energy supply strongly depends on weather forecast so essentially
one needs a good algorithm for weather forecast. Yet, forecasting energy
supply is much easier if all generators are integrated into one power grid
because it is necessary to predict average supply for a (large) reagion.

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ap22213
Why is this news? We've been doing the same thing at deregulated US RTOs for
at least 6 years.

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SixSigma
AI is the new Nanotechnology

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flukus
I thought it was the new carbon nano tubes?

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SixSigma
I also considered graphene as a candidate. Or "biofuel made from X" (with very
rare and expensive catalyst).

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th0br0
That name yields some rather unfortunate Google image results.

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elcapitan
Looks like a product of German engineering, so what?

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soheil
More like Swedish.

