Power & Energy

Tutorials

Blog Posts

Discussion Seminars and Webinars

Innovation Grants

Talks

Workshop Papers

Venue Title
NeurIPS 2024 Time Series Viewmakers for Robust Disruption Prediction in Nuclear Fusion (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Tokamaks, as a leading technology in the quest for nuclear fusion energy, play a pivotal role in the fight against climate change. For tokamaks to become a viable solution for clean energy however, they must effectively detect and manage disruptions — plasma instabilities that can cause significant damages, impairing the reliability and efficiency required for their widespread adoption as a clean energy source. Machine learning (ML) models have shown promise in predicting disruptions for specific tokamaks, but they often struggle in generalizing to the diverse characteristics and dynamics of different machines. This limits the effectiveness of ML models across different tokamak designs and operating conditions, which is a critical barrier to scaling fusion technology. Given the success of data augmentation in improving model robustness and generalizability in other fields, this study explores the use of a novel time series viewmaker network to generate diverse augmentations or "views" of training data. Our results show that incorporating views during training improves AUC and F2 scores on DisruptionBench tasks compared to standard or no augmentations. This approach represents a promising step towards developing more broadly applicable ML models for disruption avoidance, which is essential for advancing fusion technology and, ultimately, addressing climate change through reliable and sustainable energy production.

Authors: Dhruva Chayapathy (Alpharetta High School); Tavis Siebert (UC Berkeley); Lucas Spangher (Google); Cristina Rea (MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center)
NeurIPS 2024 Explainable Meta Bayesian Optimization with Human Feedback for Scientific Applications like Fusion Energy (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: We introduce Meta Bayesian Optimization with Human Feedback (MBO-HF), which integrates Meta-Learning and expert preferences to enhance BO. MBO-HF employs Transformer Neural Processes (TNPs) to create a meta-learned surrogate model and a human-informed acquisition function (AF) to suggest and explain proposed candidate experiments. MBO-HF outperforms current methods in optimizing various scientific experiments and benchmarks in simulation, including the energy yield of the inertial confinement fusion (ICF), practical molecular optimization (PMO), and critical temperature maximization for superconducting materials.

Authors: Ricardo Luna Gutierrez (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Sahand Ghorbanpour (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Vineet Gundecha (Hewlett Packard Enterpise); Rahman Ejaz (University of Rochester); Varchas Gopalaswamy (University of Rochester); Riccardo Betti (University of Rochester); Avisek Naug (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Desik Rengarajan (Hewlett Packard Labs); Ashwin Ramesh Babu (Hewlett Packard Enterprise Labs); Paolo Faraboschi (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Soumyendu Sarkar (Hewlett Packard Enterprise)
NeurIPS 2024 Enhancing Reinforcement Learning-Based Control of Wave Energy Converters Using Predictive Wave Modeling (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Ocean wave energy is a reliable form of clean, renewable energy that has been under-explored compared to solar and wind. Wave Energy Converters (WEC) are devices that convert wave energy to electricity. To achieve a competitive Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE), WECs require complex controllers to maximize the absorbed energy. Traditional engineering controllers, like spring-damper, cannot anticipate incoming waves, missing vital information that could lead to higher energy capture. Reinforcement Learning (RL) based controllers can instead optimize for long-term gains by being informed about the future waves. Prior works have utilized incoming wave information, achieving significant gains in energy capture. However, this has only been done via simulated waves (perfect prediction), making them impractical in real-life deployment. In this work, we develop a neural network based model for wave prediction. While prior works use auto-regressive techniques, we predict waves using information available on-device like position, acceleration, etc. We show that replacing the simulated waves with the wave predictor model can still maintain the gain in energy capture achieved by the RL controller in simulations.

Authors: Vineet Gundecha (Hewlett Packard Enterpise); Arie Paap (Carnegie Clean Energy); mathieu Cocho (Carnegie Clean Energy); Sahand Ghorbanpour (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Alexandre Pichard (Carnegie Clean Energy); Ashwin Ramesh Babu (Hewlett Packard Enterprise Labs); Soumyendu Sarkar (Hewlett Packard Enterprise)
NeurIPS 2024 Satellite Sunroof: High-res Digital Surface Models and Roof Segmentation for Global Solar Mapping (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The transition to renewable energy, particularly solar, is key to mitigating climate change. Google's Solar API aids this transition by estimating solar potential from aerial imagery, but its impact is constrained by geographical coverage. This paper proposes expanding the API's reach using satellite imagery, enabling global solar potential assessment. We tackle challenges involved in building a Digital Surface Model (DSM) and roof instance segmentation from lower resolution and single oblique views using deep learning models. Our models, trained on aligned satellite and aerial datasets, produce 25cm DSMs and roof segments. With ~1m DSM MAE on buildings, ~5deg roof pitch error and ~56% IOU on roof segmentation, they significantly enhance the Solar API's potential to promote solar adoption.

Authors: Vishal Batchu (Google Research); Alex Wilson (Google); Betty Peng (Google); Carl Elkin (Google); Umangi Jain (University of Toronto); Christopher Arsdale (Google Research); Ross Goroshin (Google); Varun Gulshan (Google Research)
NeurIPS 2024 Carbon-Aware Spatio-Temporal Workload Distribution in Cloud Data Center Clusters Using Reinforcement Learning (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Reducing the environmental impact of cloud computing requires efficient workload distribution across geographically dispersed Data Center Clusters (DCCs). In this paper, we introduce Green-DCC, which proposes Reinforcement Learning-based hierarchical controller techniques to dynamically optimize temporal and geographical workload distribution between data centers that belong to the same DCC. The environment models non-uniform external weather, carbon intensity, computing resources, cooling capabilities, and dynamic bandwidth costs, which provide constraints and interdependencies. We adapted and evaluated various reinforcement learning approaches, comparing their aggregate carbon emissions across the DCC, demonstrating Green-DCC's effectiveness for controlling and testing advanced data center control algorithms for sustainability.

Authors: Soumyendu Sarkar (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Antonio Guillen-Perez (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Vineet Gundecha (Hewlett Packard Enterpise); Avisek Naug (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Ricardo Luna Gutierrez (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Sajad Mousavi (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Paolo Faraboschi (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Cullen Bash (Hewlett Packard Enterprise)
NeurIPS 2024 Feasibility of Forecasting Highly Resolved Power Grid Frequency Utilizing Temporal Fusion Transformers (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: As our society moves toward a decarbonized energy system, we need to improve our ability to model, predict, and understand power system behavior and dynamics. The balance between generation and demand on short time scales is reflected by the power grid frequency, making it central to the control of power grids. Hence, an accurate understanding and forecasting of power grid frequency could ease the planning of control actions and thus improve system stability and help save costs. Whether deep learning approaches can provide forecasts of the highly resolved and noisy time series, as they are present in the case of power grid frequency, remains an open question. In this paper, we find that the Temporal Fusion Transformer (TFT) is able to outperform baseline models, while a comparably simple multilayer perceptron is not. By reducing the time resolution of the frequency time series, we investigate and quantify the trade-off between the energy consumption and prediction performance % or forecasting accuracy? of the TFT. Furthermore, the inclusion of additional exogenous variables (e.g. calendar features, load, or generation) further improves the performance of the TFT. Utilizing the TFT's inherent interpretability, we identify the forecasted load ramp, the current hour, and the current month as the most relevant features.

Authors: Hadeer El Ashhab (KIT); Benjamin Schäfer (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology); Sebastian Pütz (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
NeurIPS 2024 End-to-End Conformal Calibration for Robust Grid-Scale Battery Storage Optimization (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The rapid proliferation of intermittent renewable electricity generation demands a corresponding growth in grid-scale energy storage systems to enable grid decarbonization. To encourage investment in energy storage infrastructure, storage operators rely on forecasts of electricity prices along with uncertainty estimates to maximize profit while managing risk. However, well-calibrated uncertainty estimates can be difficult to obtain in high-capacity prediction models such as deep neural networks. Moreover, in high-dimensional settings, there may be many valid uncertainty estimates with varied performance profiles—i.e., not all uncertainty is equally valuable for downstream decision-making. To address this challenge, this paper develops an end-to-end framework for conditional robust optimization, with robustness and calibration guarantees provided by conformal prediction. We represent arbitrary convex uncertainty sets with sublevel sets of partially input-convex neural networks, which are learned as part of our framework. We demonstrate the value of our approach for robust decision-making on a battery storage arbitrage application.

Authors: Christopher Yeh (California Institute of Technology); Nicolas Christianson (California Institute of Technology); Adam Wierman (California Institute of Technology); Yisong Yue (Caltech)
NeurIPS 2024 Towards Using Machine Learning to Generatively Simulate EV Charging in Urban Areas (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: This study addresses the challenge of predicting electric vehicle (EV) charging profiles in urban locations with limited data. Utilizing a neural network architecture, we aim to uncover latent charging profiles influenced by spatio-temporal factors. Our model focuses on peak power demand and daily load shapes, providing insights into charging behavior. Our results indicate significant impacts from the type of Basic Administrative Units on predicted load curves, which contributes to the understanding and optimization of EV charging infrastructure in urban settings and allows Distribution System Operators (DSO) to more efficiently plan EV charging infrastructure expansion.

Authors: Marek Miltner (Stanford University; Czech Technical University); Jakub Zíka (CTU); Daniel Vašata (Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Information Technology); Artem Bryksa (CTU); Magda Friedjungová (Czech Technical University in Prague, Faculty of Information Technology); Ondřej Štogl (CTU); Ram Rajagopal (Stanford University); Oldřich Starý (CTU)
NeurIPS 2024 Enhancing Sustainability in Liquid-Cooled Data Centers with Reinforcement Learning Control (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The growing energy demands of machine learning workloads require sustainable data centers with lower carbon footprints and reduced energy consumption. Supercomputing and many high-performance computing (HPC) data centers, which use liquid cooling for greater efficiency than traditional air cooling systems, can significantly benefit from advanced optimization techniques to control liquid cooling. We present RL-LC, a novel Reinforcement Learning (RL) based approach designed to enhance the efficiency of liquid cooling in these environments. RL-LC integrates a customizable analytical liquid cooling model suitable for simulations or digital twins of data centers, focusing on minimizing energy consumption and carbon emissions. Our method achieves an average reduction of approximately 4% compared to industry-standard ASHRAE guidelines, contributing to more sustainable data center management and offering valuable insights for reducing the environmental impact of HPC operations.

Authors: Avisek Naug (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Antonio Guillen-Perez (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Vineet Gundecha (Hewlett Packard Enterpise); Ricardo Luna Gutierrez (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Ashwin Ramesh Babu (Hewlett Packard Enterprise Labs); Sajad Mousavi (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Paolo Faraboschi (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Cullen Bash (HPE); Soumyendu Sarkar (Hewlett Packard Enterprise)
NeurIPS 2024 Towards turbine-location-aware multi-decadal wind power predictions with CMIP6 (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: With the increasing amount of renewable energy in the grid, long-term wind power forecasting for multiple decades becomes more critical. In these long-term forecasts, climate data is essential as it allows us to account for climate change. Yet the resolution of climate models is often very coarse. In this paper, we show that by including turbine locations when downscaling with Gaussian Processes, we can generate valuable aggregate wind power predictions despite the low resolution of the CMIP6 climate models. This work is a first step towards multi-decadal turbine-location-aware wind power forecasting using global climate model output.

Authors: Nina Effenberger (University of Tübingen); Nicole Ludwig (University of Tübingen)
NeurIPS 2024 Equity-Aware Spatial-Temporal Workload Shifting for Sustainable AI Data Centers (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The escalated demand for hyperscale data centers due to generative AI, has intensified the operational load, leading to increased energy consumption, water usage, and carbon emissions. We propose EquiShift, a novel equitable spatial-temporal workload balancing algorithm that shifts workloads spatially and temporarily across geographically different data centers to minimize the overall energy costs while ensuring fair distribution of water and carbon footprints. Concretely, EquiShift introduces a model predictive control (MPC) framework to solve the equitable load balancing problem, leveraging the predictive capabilities of MPC to optimize load distribution in real-time. Finally, we present comparative evaluations against state-of-the-art load-balancing algorithms to demonstrate the performance of EquiShift which underscores the potential of equitable load balancing as a key strategy for enhancing the sustainability of data centers while achieving fairness in the face of growing computational demands.

Authors: Mohammad Islam (University of California Riverside); Shaolei Ren (UC Riverside)
NeurIPS 2024 Meta-Learned Bayesian Optimization for Energy Yield in Inertial Confinement Fusion (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: With the growing demand for clean energy, fusion presents a promising path to sustainable power generation. Inertial confinement fusion (ICF) experiments trigger nuclear reactions by firing lasers at a fuel target, typically composed of deuterium and tritium. These experiments are costly and require complex optimization of the laser pulse shape across multiple shots to maximize energy yield. Even though Bayesian Optimization (BO) has been commonly used to optimize such expensive scientific experiments, vanilla BO methods do not leverage prior knowledge of the function from simulations or past experiments and fail to achieve high sample efficiency. In this work, we adapted and explored BO meta-learning techniques for ICF that either meta-learn the BO surrogate model, the acquisition function, or both from simulations. Our results demonstrate that the three meta-learning techniques we investigated, Meta-Learning Acquisition Functions for BO (MetaBO), Rank-Weighted Gaussian Process Ensemble (RGPE), and Neural Acquisition Processes (NAP), drastically reduce the number of experiments needed to achieve a satisfactory yield in ICF simulations.

Authors: Vineet Gundecha (Hewlett Packard Enterpise); Ricardo Luna Gutierrez (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Sahand Ghorbanpour (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Rahman Ejaz (University of Rochester); Varchas Gopalaswamy (University of Rochester); Riccardo Betti (University of Rochester); Avisek Naug (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Paolo Faraboschi (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Soumyendu Sarkar (Hewlett Packard Enterprise)
NeurIPS 2024 A Low-Complexity Data-Driven Algorithm for Residential PV-Storage Energy Management (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: This paper uses the principles of online convex learning to propose a momentum-optimized smart (MOS) controller for energy management of residential PV-storage systems. Using the self-consumption-maximization application and practical data, the method's performance is compared to classical rolling-horizon quadratic programming. Findings support online learning methods for residential applications given their low complexity and small computation, communication, and data footprint. Consequences include improved economics for residential PV-storage systems and mitigation of distribution systems' operational challenges associated with high PV penetration.

Authors: Mostafa Farrokhabadi (University of Calgary)
NeurIPS 2024 Safe Reinforcement Learning for Remote Microgrid Optimization with Industrial Constraints (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: In remote microgrids, the power must be autonomously dispatched between fuel generators, renewable energy sources, and batteries, to fulfill the demand. These decisions must aim to reduce the consumption of fossil fuel and battery degradation while accounting for the complex dynamics of generators, and uncertainty in the demand and renewable production forecasts. Such an optimization could significantly reduce fuel consumption, potentially saving millions of liters of diesel per year. Traditional optimization techniques struggle with scaling in problem complexity and handling uncertainty. On the other hand, reinforcement learning algorithms often lacks the industry constraints guarantees needed for real-world deployment. In this project, we provide a realistic shielded microgrid environment designed to ensure safe control given real-world industry standards. Then, we train a deep reinforcement learning agents to control fuel generators and batteries to minimize the fuel consumption and battery degradation. Our agents outperform heuristics baselines and exhibit a Pareto frontier pattern.

Authors: Hadi Nekoei (Mila); Alexandre Blondin Massé (Hydro-Quebec); Rachid Hassani (Hydro-quebec); Sarath Chandar (Mila / École Polytechnique de Montréal); Vincent Mai (Hydro-Québec)
NeurIPS 2024 Emulating the Global Change Analysis Model with Deep Learning (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The Global Change Analysis Model (GCAM) simulates complex interactions between the coupled Earth and human systems, providing valuable insights into the co-evolution of land, water, and energy sectors under different future scenarios. Understanding the sensitivities and drivers of this multisectoral system can lead to more robust understanding of the different pathways to particular outcomes. The interactions and complexity of the coupled human-Earth systems make GCAM simulations costly to run at scale - a requirement for large ensemble experiments which explore uncertainty in model parameters and outputs. A differentiable emulator with similar predictive power, but greater efficiency, could provide novel scenario discovery and analysis of GCAM and its outputs, requiring fewer runs of GCAM. As a first use case, we train a deep learning model on an existing large ensemble that explores a range of GCAM inputs related to different relative contributions of energy production sources, with a focus on wind and solar. We complement this existing ensemble with interpolated input values and a wider selection of outputs, predicting 22,528 GCAM outputs across time, sectors, and regions. We report a median R^2 score of 0.998 for the emulator's predictions and an R^2 score of 0.812 for its input-output sensitivity.

Authors: Andrew Holmes (Western Washington University); Matt Jensen (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory); Sarah Coffland (Western Washington University); Hidemi Mitani-Shen (Western Washington University); Logan Sizemore (Western Washington University); Seth Bassetti (Utah State University); Brenna Nieva (Western Washington University); Claudia Tebaldi (Joint Global Change Research Institute); Abigail Snyder (Joint Global Change Research Institute); Brian Hutchinson (Western Washington University)
NeurIPS 2024 Sliced-Wasserstein-based Anomaly Detection and Open Dataset for Localized Critical Peak Rebates (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: In this work, we present a new unsupervised anomaly (outlier) detection (AD) method using the sliced-Wasserstein metric. This filtering technique is conceptually interesting for MLOps pipelines deploying machine learning models in critical sectors, e.g., energy, as it offers a conservative data selection. Additionally, we open the first dataset showcasing localized critical peak rebate demand response in a northern climate. We demonstrate the capabilities of our method on synthetic datasets as well as standard AD datasets and use it in the making of a first benchmark for our open-source localized critical peak rebate dataset.

Authors: Julien Pallage (Polytechnique Montréal, Mila, GERAD); Bertrand Scherrer (Hydro-Québec); Salma Naccache (Hydro-Québec); Christophe Bélanger (Hydro-Québec); Antoine Lesage-Landry (Polytechnique Montréal & GERAD)
NeurIPS 2024 RL for Mitigating Cascading Failures: Targeted Exploration via Sensitivity Factors (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Electricity grid's resiliency and climate change strongly impact one another due to an array of technical and policy-related decisions that impact both. This paper introduces a physics-informed machine learning-based framework to enhance grid's resiliency. Specifically, when encountering disruptive events, this paper designs remedial control actions to prevent blackouts. The proposed~\textbf{P}hysics-\textbf{G}uided \textbf{R}einforcement \textbf{L}earning (PG-RL) framework determines effective real-time remedial line-switching actions, considering their impact on power balance, system security, and grid reliability. To identify an effective blackout mitigation policy, PG-RL leverages power-flow sensitivity factors to guide the RL exploration during agent training. Comprehensive evaluations using the Grid2Op platform demonstrate that incorporating physical signals into RL significantly improves resource utilization within electric grids and achieves better blackout mitigation policies -- both of which are critical in addressing climate change.

Authors: Anmol Dwivedi (RPI); Ali Tajer (RPI); Santiago Paternain (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute); Nurali Virani (GE Research)
NeurIPS 2024 Machine Learning Models for Predicting Solar Power Potential and Energy Efficiency in some underserved localities of the Congo Basin Region (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: This research proposal aims to develop machine learning models—specifically Linear Regression, Long Short-Term Memory, and Convolutional Neural Networks—to accurately predict solar power potential and energy efficiency in selected underserved localities within the Congo Basin. The Congo Basin, recognized for its ecological significance as the world's second-largest tropical rainforest, faces severe energy access challenges, especially in rural communities that rely on traditional biomass for heating and cooking. This dependency intensifies deforestation and contributes to climate change through increased greenhouse gas emissions. Despite substantial solar energy potential of the region, access to clean and renewable energy sources remains limited. The study will compare the models based on accuracy, reliability, training times, and memory usage, generating actionable insights for development agencies and local stakeholders. By enabling informed, data-driven decisions regarding sustainable energy solutions, this work intends to facilitate a transition from traditional biomass to renewable energy sources, ultimately contributing to both environmental conservation and improved quality of life for local populations.

Authors: Jean de Dieu NGUIMFACK NDONGMO (The University of Bamenda); Adelaide Nicole KENGNOU TELEM (University of Buea); Reeves MELI FOKENG (The University of Bamenda)
NeurIPS 2024 Unlocking the Potential of Green Virtual Bidding Strategies : A Pathway to a Low-Carbon Electricity Market (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The increasing importance of renewable energy in mitigating climate change has led to a critical examination of electricity market mechanisms that can support this transition. Virtual bidding, a financial tool used within electricity markets, allows market participants to capitalize on discrepancies between the Day-Ahead (DA) and Real-Time (RT) prices of electricity. The introduction of virtual bidding within electricity markets has introduced significant changes in market dynamics, with implications for environmental outcomes. It supports the transition towards a greener energy mix by favoring the dispatch of renewable resources and contributing to more efficient market conditions. This proposal seeks to explore the impact of virtual bidding and the development of green virtual bidding strategies by leveraging advanced machine learning models.

Authors: Aya Laajil (Centrale Supelec); Loubna Benabou (UQAR); Frédérique M. Gagnon (Videns Analytics); Laurent Barcelo (Videns Analytics); Ghait Boukachab (Videns Analytics & Mila)
NeurIPS 2024 Cross-Border Electricity Price Forecasting with Deep Learning (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Accurate electricity price forecasting (EPF) is critical for the efficient operation of energy markets, especially with the increasing integration of renewable energy sources. In this study, we explore the performance of advanced deep learning models, including Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), vanilla Transformers, Adaptive Fourier Neural Operator (AFNO), and Mamba, in forecasting electricity prices across 16 bidding zones in the European Union. By utilizing a comprehensive dataset that includes cross-border electricity prices and generation data, we compare the effectiveness of these models under different learning strategies, including zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot learning. We hope our results set a new benchmark for future EPF studies and offer valuable insights into the dynamics of electricity pricing in energy markets.

Authors: Hadeer El Ashhab (KIT); Benjamin Schäfer (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
NeurIPS 2024 Enhanced PINNs for high-order power grid dynamics (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: We develop improved physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for high-order and high-dimensional power system models described by nonlinear ordinary differential equations. We propose some novel enhancements to improve PINN training and accuracy and also implement several other recently proposed ideas from the literature. We successfully apply these to study the transient dynamics of synchronous generators. We also make progress towards applying PINNs to advanced inverter models. Such enhanced PINNs can allow us to accelerate high-fidelity simulations needed to ensure a stable and reliable renewables-rich future grid.

Authors: Vineet Jagadeesan Nair (MIT)
NeurIPS 2024 Multimodal AI framework for predicting candidate high temperature superconductors (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Materials science is at the forefront of addressing some of the most pressing challenges of our era, particularly in enhancing energy efficiency and sustainability. One of the most promising avenues in this field is the study of superconductors—materials that, when cooled below a critical temperature (Tc), exhibit zero electrical resistance. This unique property not only eliminates energy loss due to resistance but also enables a wide range of advanced technologies, such as MRI machines, magnetically levitating trains, and other high-efficiency systems. Superconductors can significantly reduce the carbon footprint of power transmission and other industrial applications. Given the complexity and importance of predicting candidate and practical high-temperature superconductors, we propose to develop a multimodal AI framework to predict new high-Tc superconducting materials. By integrating various material properties, including structural and compositional data, we seek to study patterns and relationships that could guide the discovery of new high-temperature superconductors. Success in this endeavor could significantly reduce energy losses in electrical systems, contributing to the fight against climate change.

Authors: Nidhish Sagar (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Eslam G. Al-Sakkari (Polytechnique Montréal); Ahmed Ragab (Polytechnique Montréal)
ICLR 2024 Using expired weather forecasts to supply 10 000y of data for accurate planning of a renewable European energy system (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Expanding renewable energy generation and electrifying heating to address climate change will heighten the exposure of our power systems to the variability of weather. Planning and assessing these future systems typically lean on past weather data. We spotlight the pitfalls of this approach---chiefly its reliance on what we claim is a limited weather record---and propose a novel approach: to evaluate these systems on two orders of magnitude more weather scenarios. By repurposing past ensemble weather predictions, we not only drastically expand the known weather distribution---notably its extreme tails---for traditional power system modeling but also unveil its potential to enable data-intensive self-supervised, diffusion-based and optimization ML techniques. Building on our methodology, we introduce a **dataset** collected from ECMWF ENS forecasts, encompassing power-system relevant variables over Europe, and detail the intricate process behind its assembly.

Authors: Petr Dolezal (AI4ER CDT, University of Cambridge); Emily Shuckburgh (University of Cambridge)
ICLR 2024 Time-Varying Constraint-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Energy Storage Control (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Energy storage devices, such as batteries, thermal energy storages, and hydrogen systems, can help mitigate climate change by ensuring a more stable and sustainable power supply. To maximize the effectiveness of such energy storage, determining the appropriate charging and discharging amounts for each time period is crucial. Reinforcement learning is preferred over traditional optimization for the control of energy storage due to its ability to adapt to dynamic and complex environments. However, the continuous nature of charging and discharging levels in energy storage poses limitations for discrete reinforcement learning, and time-varying feasible charge-discharge range based on state of charge (SoC) variability also limits the conventional continuous reinforcement learning. In this paper, we propose a continuous reinforcement learning approach that takes into account the time-varying feasible charge-discharge range. An additional objective function was introduced for learning the feasible action range for each time period, supplementing the objectives of training the actor for policy learning and the critic for value learning. This actively promotes the utilization of energy storage by preventing them from getting stuck in suboptimal states, such as continuous full charging or discharging. This is achieved through the enforcement of the charging and discharging levels into the feasible action range. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method further maximized the effectiveness of energy storage by actively enhancing its utilization.

Authors: Jaeik Jeong (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)); Tai-Yeon Ku (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI)); Wan-Ki Park (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI))
ICLR 2024 WindDragon: enhancing wind power forecasting with automated deep learning (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 requires the integration of increasing amounts of wind power into power grids. This energy source poses a challenge to system operators due to its variability and uncertainty. Therefore, accurate forecasting of wind power is critical for grid operation and system balancing. This paper presents an innovative approach to short-term (1 to 6 hour horizon) wind power forecasting at a national level. The method leverages Automated Deep Learning combined with Numerical Weather Predictions wind speed maps to accurately forecast wind power.

Authors: Julie Keisler (INRIA, EDF R&D); Etienne Le Naour (Sorbonne University, EDF R&D)
ICLR 2024 EU Climate Change News Index: Forecasting EU ETS prices with online news (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Carbon emission allowance prices have been rapidly increasing in the EU since 2018 and accurate forecasting of EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) prices has become essential. This paper proposes a novel method to generate alternative predictors for daily ETS price returns using relevant online news information. We devise the EU Climate Change News Index by calculating the term frequency–inverse document frequency (TF–IDF) feature for climate change-related keywords. The index is capable of tracking the ongoing debate about climate change in the EU. Finally, we show that incorporating the index in a simple predictive model significantly improves forecasts of ETS price returns.

Authors: Aron Pap (BGSE); Aron D Hartvig (Corvinus University of Budapest, Cambridge Econometrics); Péter Pálos (Budapest University of Technology and Economics)
ICLR 2024 Forecasting regional PV power in Great Britain with a multi-modal late fusion network (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The ability to forecast solar photovoltaic (PV) power is important for grid balancing and reducing the CO2 intensity of electricity globally. The use of multi-modal data such as numerical weather predictions (NWPs) and satellite imagery can be harnessed to make more accurate PV forecasts. In this work, we propose a late fusion model which integrates two different NWP sources alongside satellite images to make 0-8 hour lead time forecasts for grid regions across Great Britain. We limit the model inputs to be reflective of those available in a live production system. We show how the different input data sources contribute to average error at each time horizon and compare against a simple baseline.

Authors: James Fulton (Open Climate Fix); Jacob Bieker (Open Climate Fix); Peter Dudfield (Open Climate Fix); Solomon Cotton (Open Climate Fix); Zakari Watts (Open Climate Fix); Jack Kelly (Open Climate Fix)
ICLR 2024 CausalPrompt: Enhancing LLMs with Weakly Supervised Causal Reasoning for Robust Performance in Non-Language Tasks (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: In confronting the pressing issue of climate change, we introduce "CausalPrompt", an innovative prompting strategy that adapts large language models (LLMs) for classification and regression tasks through the application of weakly supervised causal reasoning. We delve into the complexities of data shifts within energy systems, often resulting from the dynamic evolution of sensor networks, leading to discrepancies between training and test data distributions or feature inconsistencies. By embedding domain-specific reasoning in the finetuning process, CausalPrompt significantly bolsters the adaptability and resilience of energy systems to these shifts. We show that CausalPrompt significantly enhances predictions in scenarios characterized by feature shifts, including electricity demand, solar power generation, and cybersecurity within energy infrastructures. This approach underlines the crucial role of CausalPrompt in enhancing the reliability and precision of predictions in energy systems amid feature shifts, highlighting its significance and potential for real-world applications in energy management and cybersecurity, contributing effectively to climate change mitigation efforts.

Authors: Tung-Wei Lin (University of California, Berkeley); Vanshaj Khattar (Virginia Tech); Yuxuan Huang (University College London); Junho Hong (University of Michigan); Ruoxi Jia (Virginia Tech); Chen-Ching Liu (Virginia Tech); Alberto L Sangiovanni-Vincentelli (University of California, Berkeley); Ming Jin (Virginia Tech)
ICLR 2024 Probabilistic electricity price forecasting through conformalized deep ensembles (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Probabilistic electricity price forecasting (PEPF) is subject of an increasing interest, following the demand for proper prediction uncertainty quantification, to support the operation in complex power markets with increasing share of renewable generation. Distributional neural networks ensembles (DE) have been recently shown to outperform state of the art PEPF benchmarks. Still, they require reliability improvements, as fail to pass the coverage tests at various steps on the prediction horizon. In this work, we tackle this issue by extending the DE framework with the introduction of a Conformal Prediction based technique. Experiments have been conducted on multiple market regions, achieving day-ahead probabilistic forecasts with better hourly coverage.

Authors: Alessandro Brusaferri (National Research Council of Italy); Andrea Ballarino (National Research Council of Italy); Luigi Grossi (University of Parma); Fabrizio Laurini (University of Parma)
ICLR 2024 Interpretable Machine Learning for power systems: Establishing Confidence in SHapley Additive exPlanationS (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Interpretable Machine Learning (IML) is expected to remove significant barriers for the application of Machine Learning (ML) algorithms in power systems. This work first seeks to showcase the benefits of SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) for understanding the outcomes of ML models, which are increasingly being used to optimise power systems with increasing share of Renewable Energy (RE), to support worldwide calls for decarbonisation and climate change. To do so, we demonstrate that the Power Transfer Distribution Factors (PTDF)—a power system physics-based linear sensitivity index—can be derived from the SHAP values. To do so, we take the derivatives of SHAP values from a ML model trained to learn line-flows from generator power-injections, using a DC power-flow case in a benchmark test network. In demonstrating that SHAP values can be related back to the physics that underpin the power system, we build confidence in the explanations SHAP can offer.

Authors: Tabia Ahmad (University of Strathclyde); Robert Hamilton (Shell); Panagiotis Papadopoulos (University of Manchester); Samuel Chevalier (University of Vermont); Ilgiz Murzakhanov (Technical University of Denmark); Rahul Nellikkath (Technical University of Denmark); Jochen Bernhard Stiasny (Technical University of Denmark); Spyros Chatzivasileiadis (Technical University of Denmark)
ICLR 2024 Identifying Complex Dynamics of Power Grid Frequency (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The energy system is undergoing rapid changes to integrate a growing number of intermittent renewable generators and facilitate the broader transition toward sustainability. As millions of consumers and thousands of (volatile) generators are connected to the same synchronous grid, no straightforward bottom-up models describing the dynamics are available on a continental scale comprising all of these necessary details. Hence, to identify this unknown power grid dynamics, we propose to leverage the Sparse Identification of Nonlinear Dynamics (SINDy) method. Thereby, we unveil the governing equations underlying the dynamical system directly from data measurements. Investigating the power grids of Iceland, Ireland and the Balearic islands as sample systems, we observe structurally similar dynamics with remarkable differences in both quantitative and qualitative behavior. Overall, we demonstrate how complex, i.e. non-linear, noisy, and time-dependent, dynamics can be identified straightforwardly.

Authors: Xinyi Wen (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology); Ulrich Oberhofer (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology); Leonardo Rydin Gorjão (Norwegian University of Life Sciences); G.Cigdem YALCIN (Istanbul University); Veit Hagenmeyer (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)); Benjamin Schäfer (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
ICLR 2024 Generalized Policy Learning for Smart Grids: FL TRPO Approach (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The smart grid domain requires bolstering the capabilities of existing energy management systems; Federated Learning (FL) aligns with this goal as it demonstrates a remarkable ability to train models on heterogeneous datasets while maintaining data privacy, making it suitable for smart grid applications, which often involve disparate data distributions and interdependencies among features that hinder the suitability of linear models. This paper introduces a framework that combines FL with a Trust Region Policy Optimization (FL TRPO) aiming to reduce energy-associated emissions and costs. Our approach reveals latent interconnections and employs personalized encoding methods to capture unique insights, understanding the relationships between features and optimal strategies, allowing our model to generalize to previously unseen data. Experimental results validate the robustness of our approach, affirming its proficiency in effectively learning policy models for smart grid challenges.

Authors: Yunxiang LI (MBZUAI); Nicolas M Cuadrado (MBZUAI); Samuel Horváth (MBZUAI); Martin Takac (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence)
ICLR 2024 An Adaptive Hydropower Management Approach for Downstream Ecosystem Preservation (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Hydropower plants play a pivotal role in advancing clean and sustainable energy production, contributing significantly to the global transition towards renewable energy sources. However, hydropower plants are currently perceived both positively as sources of renewable energy and negatively as disruptors of ecosystems. In this work, we highlight the overlooked potential of using hydropower plant as protectors of ecosystems by using adaptive ecological discharges. To advocate for this perspective, we propose using a neural network to predict the minimum ecological discharge value at each desired time. Additionally, we present a novel framework that seamlessly integrates it into hydropower management software, taking advantage of the well-established approach of using traditional constrained optimisation algorithms. This novel approach not only protects the ecosystems from climate change but also contributes to potentially increase the electricity production.

Authors: Cecília Coelho (University of Minho); Ming Jin (Virginia Tech); M. Fernanda P. Costa (Dep. Mathematics, University of Minho); Luís L. Ferrás (University of Porto)
ICLR 2024 A Benchmark Dataset for Meteorological Downscaling (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: High spatial resolution in atmospheric representations is crucial across Earth science domains, but global reanalysis datasets like ERA5 often lack the detail to capture local phenomena due to their coarse resolution. Recent efforts have leveraged deep neural networks from computer vision to enhance the spatial resolution of meteorological data, showing promise for statistical downscaling. However, methodological diversity and insufficient comparisons with traditional downscaling techniques challenge these advancements. Our study introduces a benchmark dataset for statistical downscaling, utilizing ERA5 and the finer-resolution COSMO-REA6, to facilitate direct comparisons of downscaling methods for 2m temperature, global (solar) irradiance and 100m wind fields. Accompanying U-Net, GAN, and transformer models with a suite of evaluation metrics aim to standardize assessments and promote transparency and confidence in applying deep learning to meteorological downscaling.

Authors: Michael Langguth (Juelich Supercomputing Centre - Forschungszentrum Juelich); Paula Harder (Mila); Irene Schicker (Geos); Ankit Patnala (Juelich Supercomputing Centre - Forschungszentrum Juelich); Sebastian Lehner (GeoSphere Austria); Konrad Mayer (GeoSphere Austria); Markus Dabernig (GeoSphere Austria)
ICLR 2024 Severe Wind Event Prediction with Multivariate Physics-Informed Deep Learning (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Wind turbines play a crucial role in combating climate change by harnessing the force of the wind to generate clean and renewable energy. One key factor in ensuring the long-term effectiveness of wind turbines is the reduction of operating costs due to maintenance. Severe weather events, such as extreme changes in wind, can damage turbines, resulting in costly maintenance and economic losses in power production. We propose a preliminary physics-informed deep learning model to improve predictions of severe wind events and a multivariate time series extension for this work.

Authors: Willa Potosnak (Carnegie Mellon University); Cristian I Challu (Carnegie Mellon University); Kin G. Olivares (Carnegie Mellon University); James K Miller (Carnegie Mellon University); Artur Dubrawski (Carnegie Mellon University)
NeurIPS 2023 Ocean Wave Energy: Optimizing Reinforcement Learning Agents for Effective Deployment (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Fossil fuel energy production is a leading cause of climate change. While wind and solar energy have made advancements, ocean waves, a more consistent clean energy source, remain underutilized. Wave Energy Converters (WEC) transform wave power into electric energy. To be economically viable, modern WECs need sophisticated real-time controllers that boost energy output and minimize mechanical stress, thus lowering the overall cost of energy (LCOE). This paper presents how a Reinforcement Learning (RL) controller can outperform the default spring damper controller for complex spread waves in the sea, enhancing wave energy's viability. Using the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) algorithm with Transformer variants as function approximators, the RL controllers optimize multi-generator Wave Energy Converters (WEC), leveraging wave sensor data for multiple cost-efficiency goals. After successful tests in the EuropeWave\footnote{EuropeWave: https://www.europewave.eu/} project's emulator tank, the platform is planned to deploy. We discuss the challenges of deployment at the BiMEP site and how we had to tune the RL controller to address that. The RL controller outperforms the default Spring Damper controller in the BiMEP\footnote{BiMEP: https://www.bimep.com/en/} conditions by 22.8% on energy capture. Enhancing wave energy's economic viability will expedite the transition to clean energy, reducing carbon emissions and fostering a healthier climate.

Authors: Vineet Gundecha (Hewlett Packard Enterpise); Sahand Ghorbanpour (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Ashwin Ramesh Babu (Hewlett Packard Enterprise Labs); Avisek Naug (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Alexandre Pichard (Carnegie Clean Energy); mathieu Cocho (Carnegie Clean Energy); Soumyendu Sarkar (Hewlett Packard Enterprise)
NeurIPS 2023 Price-Aware Deep Learning for Electricity Markets (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: While deep learning gradually penetrates operational planning of power systems, its inherent prediction errors may significantly affect electricity prices. This paper examines how prediction errors propagate into electricity prices, revealing notable pricing errors and their spatial disparity in congested power systems. To improve fairness, we propose to embed electricity market-clearing optimization as a deep learning layer. Differentiating through this layer allows for balancing between prediction and pricing errors, as oppose to minimizing prediction errors alone. This layer implicitly optimizes fairness and controls the spatial distribution of price errors across the system. We showcase the price-aware deep learning in the nexus of wind power forecasting and short-term electricity market clearing.

Authors: Vladimir Dvorkin (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Ferdinando Fioretto (University of Virginia)
NeurIPS 2023 Reinforcement Learning control for Airborne Wind Energy production (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Airborne Wind Energy (AWE) is an emerging technology that promises to be able to harvest energy from strong high-altitude winds, while addressing some of the key critical issues of current wind turbines. AWE is based on flying devices (usually gliders or kites) that, tethered to a ground station, fly driven by the wind and convert the mechanical energy of wind into electrical energy by means of a generator. Such systems are usually controlled by adjusting the trajectory of the kite using optimal control techniques, such as model-predictive control. These methods are based upon a mathematical model of the system to control, and they produce results that are strongly dependent on the specific model at use and difficult to generalize. Our aim is to replace these classical techniques with an approach based on Reinforcement Learning (RL), which can be used even in absence of a known model. Experimental results prove that RL is a viable method to control AWE systems in complex simulated environments, including turbulent flows.

Authors: Lorenzo Basile (University of Trieste); Maria Grazia Berni (University of Trieste); Antonio Celani (ICTP)
NeurIPS 2023 Scaling Sodium-ion Battery Development with NLP (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Sodium-ion batteries (SIBs) have been gaining attention for applications like grid-scale energy storage, largely owing to the abundance of sodium and an expected favorable $/kWh figure. SIBs can leverage the well-established manufacturing knowledge of Lithium-ion Batteries (LIBs), but several materials synthesis and performance challenges for electrode materials need to be addressed. This work extracts a large database of challenges restricting the performance and synthesis of SIB cathode active materials (CAMs) and pairs them with corresponding mitigation strategies from the SIB literature by employing custom natural language processing (NLP) tools. The derived insights enable scientists in research and industry to navigate a large number of proposed strategies and focus on impactful scalability-informed mitigation strategies to accelerate the transition from lab to commercialization.

Authors: Mrigi Munjal (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Thorben Pein (TU Munich); Vineeth Venugopal (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Kevin Huang (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Elsa Olivetti (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
NeurIPS 2023 Contextual Reinforcement Learning for Offshore Wind Farm Bidding (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: We propose a framework for applying reinforcement learning to contextual two-stage stochastic optimization and apply this framework to the problem of energy market bidding of an off-shore wind farm. Reinforcement learning could potentially be used to learn close to optimal solutions for first stage variables of a two-stage stochastic program under different contexts. Under the proposed framework, these solutions would be learned without having to solve the full two-stage stochastic program. We present initial results of training using the DDPG algorithm and present intended future steps to improve performance.

Authors: David Cole (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Himanshu Sharma (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory); Wei Wang (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory)
NeurIPS 2023 A Scalable Network-Aware Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Framework for Distributed Converter-based Microgrid Voltage Control (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Renewable energy plays a crucial role in mitigating climate change. With the rising use of distributed energy resources (DERs), microgrids (MGs) have emerged as a solution to accommodate high DER penetration. However, controlling MGs' voltage during islanded operation is challenging due to system's nonlinearity and stochasticity. Although multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) methods have been applied to distributed MG voltage control, they suffer from bad scalability and are found difficult to control the MG with a large number of DGs due to the well-known curse of dimensionality. To address this, we propose a scalable network-aware reinforcement learning framework which exploits network structure to truncate the critic's Q-function to achieve scalability. Our experiments show effective control of a MG with up to 84 DGs, surpassing the existing maximum of 40 agents in the existing literature. We also compare our framework with state-of-the-art MARL algorithms to show the superior scalability of our framework.

Authors: Han Xu (Tsinghua University); Guannan Qu (Carnegie Mellon University)
NeurIPS 2023 Asset Bundling for Wind Power Forecasting (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The growing penetration of intermittent, renewable generation in US power grids results in increased operational uncertainty. In that context, accurate forecasts are critical, especially for wind generation, which exhibits large variability and is historically harder to predict. To overcome this challenge, this work proposes a novel Bundle-Predict-Reconcile (BPR) framework that integrates asset bundling, machine learning, and forecast reconciliation techniques to accurately predict wind power at the asset, bundle, and fleet level. Notably, our approach effectively introduces an auxiliary learning task (predicting the bundle-level time series) to help the main learning tasks (fleet-level time series) and proposes new asset-bundling criteria to capture the spatio-temporal dynamics of wind power time series. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted on an industry-size dataset of wind farms, demonstrating the benefits of BPR, which consistently and significantly improves forecast accuracy over the baseline approach, especially at the fleet level.

Authors: Hanyu Zhang (Georgia Institute of Technology); Mathieu Tanneau (Georgia Institute of Technology); Chaofan Huang (Georgia Institute of Technology); Roshan Joseph (Georgia Institute of Technology); Shangkun Wang (Georgia Institute of Technology); Pascal Van Hentenryck (Georgia Institute of Technology)
NeurIPS 2023 Unlocking the Potential of Renewable Energy Through Curtailment Prediction (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: A significant fraction (5-15%) of renewable energy generated goes into waste in the grids around the world today due to oversupply issues and transmission constraints. Being able to predict when and where renewable curtailment occurs would improve renewable utilization. The core of this work is to enable the machine learning community to help decarbonize electricity grids by unlocking the potential of renewable energy through curtailment prediction.

Authors: Bilge Acun (Meta / FAIR); Brent Morgan (Meta); Henry Richardson (WattTime); Nat Steinsultz (WattTime); Carole-Jean Wu (Meta / FAIR)
NeurIPS 2023 Physics-informed DeepONet for battery state prediction (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Electrification has emerged as a pivotal trend in the energy transition to address climate change, leading to a substantial surge in the demand for batteries. Accurately predicting the internal states and performance of batteries assumes paramount significance, as it ensures the safe and stable operation of batteries and informs decision-making processes, such as optimizing battery operation for arbitrage opportunities. However, current models struggle to strike a balance between precision and computational efficiency or are limited in their applicability to specific scenarios. We aim to adopt a physics-informed deep operator network (PI-DeepONet) for internal battery state estimation based on the rigorous P2D model, which can simultaneously achieve high precision and computational efficiency. Furthermore, it exhibits promising prospects for extension beyond lithium-ion batteries to encompass various battery technologies.

Authors: Keyan Guo (Peking University)
ICLR 2023 CityLearn: A Tutorial on Reinforcement Learning Control for Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings and Communities (Tutorials Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Buildings are responsible for up to 75% of electricity consumption in the United States. Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings can provide flexibility to solve the issue of power supply-demand mismatch, particularly brought about by renewables. Their high energy efficiency and self-generating capabilities can reduce demand without affecting the building function. Additionally, load shedding and shifting through smart control of storage systems can further flatten the load curve and reduce grid ramping cost in response to rapid decrease in renewable power supply. The model-free nature of reinforcement learning control makes it a promising approach for smart control in grid-interactive efficient buildings, as it can adapt to unique building needs and functions. However, a major challenge for the adoption of reinforcement learning in buildings is the ability to benchmark different control algorithms to accelerate their deployment on live systems. CityLearn is an open source OpenAI Gym environment for the implementation and benchmarking of simple and advanced control algorithms, e.g., rule-based control, model predictive control or deep reinforcement learning control thus, provides solutions to this challenge. This tutorial leverages CityLearn to demonstrate different control strategies in grid-interactive efficient buildings. Participants will learn how to design three controllers of varying complexity for battery management using a real-world residential neighborhood dataset to provide load shifting flexibility. The algorithms will be evaluated using six energy flexibility, environmental and economic key performance indicators, and their benefits and shortcomings will be identified. By the end of the tutorial, participants will acquire enough familiarity with the CityLearn environment for extended use in new datasets or personal projects.

Authors: Kingsley E Nweye (The University of Texas at Austin); Allen Wu (The University of Texas at Austin); Hyun Park (The University of Texas at Austin); Yara Almilaify (The University of Texas at Austin); Zoltan Nagy (The University of Texas at Austin)
ICLR 2023 Smart Meter Data Analytics: Practical Use-Cases and Best Practices of Machine Learning Applications for Energy Data in the Residential Sector (Tutorials Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: To cope with climate change, the energy system is undergoing a massive transformation. With the electrification of all sectors, the power grid is facing high additional demand. As a result, the digitization of the grid is becoming more of a focus. The smart grid relies heavily on the increasing deployment of smart electricity meters around the world. The corresponding smart meter data is typically a time series of power or energy measurements with a resolution of 1s to 60 min. This data provides valuable insights and opportunities for monitoring and controlling activities in the power grid. In this tutorial, we therefore provide an overview of best practices for analyzing smart meter data. We focus on machine learning applications and low resolution (15-60 minutes) energy data in a residential setting. We only use real-world datasets and cover use-cases that are highly relevant for practical applications. Although this tutorial is specifically tailored to an audience from the energy domain, we believe that anyone from the data analytics and machine learning community can benefit from it, as many techniques are applicable to any time series data. Through our tutorial, we hope to foster new ideas, contribute to an interdisciplinary exchange between different research fields, and educate people about energy use.

Authors: Tobias Brudermueller (ETH Zurich); Markus Kreft (ETH Zurich)
ICLR 2023 Estimating Residential Solar Potential using Aerial Data (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Project Sunroof estimates the solar potential of residential buildings using high quality aerial data. That is, it estimates the potential solar energy (and associated financial savings) that can be captured by buildings if solar panels were to be installed on their roofs. Unfortunately its coverage is limited by the lack of high resolution digital surface map (DSM) data. We present a deep learning approach that bridges this gap by enhancing widely available low-resolution data, thereby dramatically increasing the coverage of Sunroof. We also present some ongoing efforts to potentially improve accuracy even further by replacing certain algorithmic components of Sunroof’s processing pipeline with deep learning.

Authors: Ross Goroshin (Google); Carl Elkin (Google)
ICLR 2023 Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Price-Based Demand Response (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Price-based demand response (DR) enables households to provide the flexibility required in power grids with a high share of volatile renewable energy sources. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) offers a powerful, decentralized decision-making tool for autonomous agents participating in DR programs. Unfortunately, MARL algorithms do not naturally allow one to incorporate safety guarantees, preventing their real-world deployment. To meet safety constraints, we propose a safety layer that minimally adjusts each agent's decisions. We investigate the influence of using a reward function that reflects these safety adjustments. Results show that considering safety aspects in the reward during training improves both convergence speed and performance of the MARL agents in the investigated numerical experiments.

Authors: Hannah Markgraf (Technical University of Munich); Matthias Althoff (Technical University of Munich)
ICLR 2023 MAHTM: A Multi-Agent Framework for Hierarchical Transactive Microgrids (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Integration of variable renewable energy into the grid has posed challenges to system operators in achieving optimal trade-offs among energy availability, cost affordability, and pollution controllability. This paper proposes a multi-agent reinforcement learning framework for managing energy transactions in microgrids. The framework addresses the challenges above: it seeks to optimize the usage of available resources by minimizing the carbon footprint while benefiting all stakeholders. The proposed architecture consists of three layers of agents, each pursuing different objectives. The first layer, comprised of prosumers and consumers, minimizes the total energy cost. The other two layers control the energy price to decrease the carbon impact while balancing the consumption and production of both renewable and conventional energy. This framework also takes into account fluctuations in energy demand and supply.

Authors: Nicolas M Cuadrado (MBZUAI); Roberto Alejandro Gutierrez Guillen (MBZUAI); Yongli Zhu (Texas A&M University); Martin Takac (Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence)
ICLR 2023 Global-Local Policy Search and Its Application in Grid-Interactive Building Control (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: As the buildings sector represents over 70% of the total U.S. electricity consumption, it offers a great amount of untapped demand-side resources to tackle many critical grid-side problems and improve the overall energy system's efficiency. To help make buildings grid-interactive, this paper proposes a global-local policy search method to train a reinforcement learning (RL) based controller which optimizes building operation during both normal hours and demand response (DR) events. Experiments on a simulated five-zone commercial building demonstrate that by adding a local fine-tuning stage to the evolution strategy policy training process, the control costs can be further reduced by 7.55% in unseen testing scenarios. Baseline comparison also indicates that the learned RL controller outperforms a pragmatic linear model predictive controller (MPC), while not requiring intensive online computation.

Authors: Xiangyu Zhang (National Renewable Energy Laboratory); Yue Chen (National Renewable Energy Laboratory); Andrey Bernstein (NREL)
ICLR 2023 Accuracy is not the only Metric that matters: Estimating the Energy Consumption of Deep Learning Models (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Modern machine learning models have started to consume incredible amounts of energy, thus incurring large carbon footprints (Strubell et al., 2019). To address this issue, we have created an energy estimation pipeline, which allows practitioners to estimate the energy needs of their models in advance, without actually running or training them. We accomplished this, by collecting high-quality energy data and building a first baseline model, capable of predicting the energy consumption of DL models by accumulating their estimated layer-wise energies.

Authors: Johannes Getzner (Technical University of Munich); Bertrand Charpentier (Technical University of Munich); Stephan Günnemann (Technical University of Munich)
ICLR 2023 Activity-Based Recommendations for the Reduction of CO2 Emissions in Private Households (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: This paper proposes an activity prediction framework for a multi-agent recommendation system to tackle the energy-efficiency problem in residential buildings. Our system generates an activity-shifting schedule based on the social practices from the users’ domestic life. We further provide a utility option for the recommender system to focus on saving CO2 emissions or energy costs, or both. The empirical results show that while focusing on the reduction of CO2 emissions, the system provides an average of 12% of emission savings and 7% of electricity cost savings. When concentrating on energy costs, 6% of emission savings and 20% of electricity cost savings are possible for the studied households.

Authors: Alona Zharova (Humboldt University of Berlin); Laura Löschmann (Humboldt University of Berlin)
ICLR 2023 Data-driven mean-variability optimization of PV portfolios with automatic differentiation (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Increasing PV capacities has a crucial role to reach carbon-neutral energy systems. To promote PV expansion, policy designs have been developed which rely on energy yield maximization to increase the total PV energy supply in energy systems. Focusing on yield maximization, however, ignores negative side-effects such as an increased variability due to similar-orientated PV systems at clustered regions. This can lead to costly ancillary services and thereby reduces the acceptance of renewable energy. This paper suggests to rethink PV portfolio designs by deriving mean-variability hedged PV portfolios with smartly orientated tilt and azimuth angles. Based on a data-driven method inspired from modern portfolio theory, we formulate the problem as a biobjective, non-convex optimization problem which is solved based on automatically differentiating the physical PV conversion model subject to individual tilt and azimuth angles. To illustrate the performance of the proposed method, a case study is designed to derive efficient frontiers in the mean-variability spectrum of Germany's PV portfolio based on representative grid points. The proposed method allows decision-makers to hedge between variability and yield in PV portfolio design decisions. This is the first study highlighting the problem of ignoring variability in PV portfolio expansion schemes and introduces a way to tackle this issue using modern methods inspired by Machine Learning.

Authors: Matthias Zech (German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Networked Energy Systems); Lueder von Bremen (German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Networked Energy Systems)
ICLR 2023 Emission-Constrained Optimization of Gas Systems with Input-Convex Neural Networks (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Planning optimization of gas networks under emission constraints prioritizes gas supply with the smallest emission footprint. As this problem includes complex gas flow physical laws, standard optimization solvers cannot guarantee convergence to a feasible solution, especially under strict emission constraints. To address this issue, we develop an input-convex neural network (ICNN) aided optimization routine which incorporates a set of trained ICNNs approximating the gas flow equations with high precision. Numerical tests on the Belgium gas network demonstrate that the ICNN-aided optimization dominates non-convex and relaxation-based solvers, with larger optimality gains pertaining to stricter emission targets.

Authors: Vladimir Dvorkin (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Samuel C Chevalier (Technical University of Denmark); Spyros Chatzivasileiadis (Technical University of Denmark)
ICLR 2023 Distributed Reinforcement Learning for DC Open Energy Systems (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The direct current open energy system (DCOES) enables the production, storage, and exchange of renewable energy within local communities, which is helpful, especially in isolated villages and islands where centralized power supply is unavailable or unstable. As solar and wind energy production varies in time and space depending on the weather and the energy usage patterns differ for different households, how to store and exchange energy is an important research issue. In this work, we explore the use of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) for adaptive control of energy storage in local batteries and energy sharing through DC grids. We extend the Autonomous Power Interchange System (APIS) emulator from SonyCSL to combine it with reinforcement learning algorithms in each house. We implemented deep Q-network (DQN) and prioritized DQN to dynamically set the parameters of the real-time energy exchange protocol of APIS and tested it using the actual data collected from the DCOES in the faculty houses of Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST). The simulation results showed that RL agents outperformed the hand-tuned control strategy. Sharing average energy production, storage, and usage within the local community further improved efficiency. The implementation of DRL methods for adaptive energy storage and exchange can help reducing carbon emission and positively impact the climate.

Authors: Qiong Huang (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology Graduate University); Kenji Doya (Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology)
ICLR 2023 Uncovering the Spatial and Temporal Variability of Wind Resources in Europe: A Web-Based Data-Mining Tool (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: We introduce REmap-eu.app, a web-based data-mining visualization tool of the spatial and temporal variability of wind resources. It uses the latest open-access dataset of the daily wind capacity factor in 28 European countries between 1979 and 2019 and proposes several user-configurable visualizations of the temporal and spatial variations of the wind power capacity factor. The platform allows for a deep analysis of the distribution, the cross-country correlation, and the drivers of low wind power events. It offers an easy-to-use interface that makes it suitable for the needs of researchers and stakeholders. The tool is expected to be useful in identifying areas of high wind potential and possible challenges that may impact the large-scale deployment of wind turbines in Europe. Particular importance is given to the visualization of low wind power events and to the potential of cross-border cooperations in mitigating the variability of wind in the context of increasing reliance on weather-sensitive renewable energy sources.

Authors: Alban Puech (École Polytechnique); Jesse Read (Ecole Polytechnique)
ICLR 2023 XAI for transparent wind turbine power curve models (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Accurate wind turbine power curve models, which translate ambient conditions into turbine power output, are crucial for wind energy to scale and fulfill its proposed role in the global energy transition. While machine learning (ML) methods have shown significant advantages over parametric, physics-informed approaches, they are often criticized for being opaque "black boxes", which hinders their application in practice. We apply Shapley values, a popular explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) method, and the latest findings from XAI for regression models, to uncover the strategies ML models have learned from operational wind turbine data. Our findings reveal that the trend towards ever larger model architectures, driven by a focus on test set performance, can result in physically implausible model strategies. Therefore, we call for a more prominent role of XAI methods in model selection. Moreover, we propose a practical approach to utilize explanations for root cause analysis in the context of wind turbine performance monitoring. This can help to reduce downtime and increase the utilization of turbines in the field.

Authors: Simon Letzgus (Technische Universität Berlin)
ICLR 2023 Decision-aware uncertainty-calibrated deep learning for robust energy system operation (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Decision-making under uncertainty is an important problem that arises in many domains. Achieving robustness guarantees requires well-calibrated uncertainties, which can be difficult to achieve in high-capacity prediction models such as deep neural networks. This paper proposes an end-to-end approach for learning uncertainty-calibrated deep learning models that directly optimizes a downstream decision-making objective with provable robustness. We also propose two concrete applications in energy system operations, including a grid scheduling task as well as an energy storage arbitrage task. As renewable wind and solar generation increasingly proliferate and their variability penetrates the energy grid, learning uncertainty-aware predictive models becomes increasingly crucial for maintaining efficient and reliable grid operation.

Authors: Christopher Yeh (California Institute of Technology); Nicolas Christianson (California Institute of Technology); Steven Low (California Institute of Technology); Adam Wierman (California Institute of Technology); Yisong Yue (Caltech)
ICLR 2023 Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning for Solar-Battery System to Mitigate Solar Curtailment in Real-Time Electricity Market (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The increased uptake of solar energy in the energy transition towards decarbonization has caused the issue of solar photovoltaic (PV) curtailments, resulting in significant economic losses and hindering the energy transition. To overcome this issue, battery energy storage systems (BESS) can serve as onsite backup sources for solar farms. However, the backup role of the BESS significantly limits its economic value, disincentivizing the BESS deployment due to high investment costs. Hence, it is essential to effectively reduce solar curtailment while ensuring viable operations of the BESS.

Authors: Jinhao Li (Monash University); Changlong Wang (Monash University); Hao Wang (Monash University)
NeurIPS 2022 Function Approximations for Reinforcement Learning Controller for Wave Energy Converters (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Waves are a more consistent form of clean energy than wind and solar and the latest Wave Energy Converters (WEC) platforms like CETO 6 have evolved into complex multi-generator designs with a high energy capture potential for financial viability. Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) controller can handle these complexities and control the WEC optimally unlike the default engineering controllers like Spring Damper which suffer from lower energy capture and mechanical stress from the spinning yaw motion. In this paper, we look beyond the normal hyper-parameter and MARL agent tuning and explored the most suitable architecture for the neural network function approximators for the policy and critic networks of MARL which act as its brain. We found that unlike the commonly used fully connected network (FCN) for MARL, the sequential models like transformers and LSTMs can model the WEC system dynamics better. Our novel transformer architecture, Skip Transformer-XL (STrXL), with several gated residual connections in and around the transformer block performed better than the state-of-the-art with faster training convergence. STrXL boosts energy efficiency by an average of 25% to 28% over the existing spring damper (SD) controller for waves at different angles and almost eliminated the mechanical stress from the rotational yaw motion, saving costly maintenance on open seas, and thus reducing the Levelized Cost of wave energy (LCOE). Demo: https://tinyurl.com/4s4mmb9v

Authors: Soumyendu Sarkar (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Vineet Gundecha (Hewlett Packard Enterpise); Alexander Shmakov (UC Irvine); Sahand Ghorbanpour (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Ashwin Ramesh Babu (Hewlett Packard Enterprise Labs); Alexandre Pichard (Carnegie Clean Energy); Mathieu Cocho (Carnegie Clean Energy)
NeurIPS 2022 SolarDK: A high-resolution urban solar panel image classification and localization dataset (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The body of research on classification of solar panel arrays from aerial imagery is increasing, yet there are still not many public benchmark datasets. This paper introduces two novel benchmark datasets for classifying and localizing solar panel arrays in Denmark: A human annotated dataset for classification and segmentation, as well as a classification dataset acquired using self-reported data from the Danish national building registry. We explore the performance of prior works on the new benchmark dataset, and present results after fine-tuning models using a similar approach as recent works. Furthermore, we train models of newer architectures and provide benchmark baselines to our datasets in several scenarios. We believe the release of these datasets may improve future research in both local and global geospatial domains for identifying and mapping of solar panel arrays from aerial imagery. The data is accessible at https://osf.io/aj539/.

Authors: Maxim MK Khomiakov (DTU); Julius Radzikowski (DTU); Carl Schmidt (DTU); Mathias Sørensen (DTU); Mads Andersen (DTU); Michael Andersen (Technical University of Denmark); Jes Frellsen (Technical University of Denmark)
NeurIPS 2022 Short-term Prediction and Filtering of Solar Power Using State-Space Gaussian Processes (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Short-term forecasting of solar photovoltaic energy (PV) production is important for powerplant management. Ideally these forecasts are equipped with error bars, so that downstream decisions can account for uncertainty. To produce predictions with error bars in this setting, we consider Gaussian processes (GPs) for modelling and predicting solar photovoltaic energy production in the UK. A standard application of GP regression on the PV timeseries data is infeasible due to the large data size and non-Gaussianity of PV readings. However, this is made possible by leveraging recent advances in scalable GP inference, in particular, by using the state-space form of GPs, combined with modern variational inference techniques. The resulting model is not only scalable to large datasets but can also handle continuous data streams via Kalman filtering.

Authors: So Takao (UCL); Sean Nassimiha (UCL); Peter Dudfield (Open Climate Fix); Jack Kelly (Open Climate Fix); Marc Deisenroth (University College London)
NeurIPS 2022 Towards dynamical stability analysis of sustainable power grids using Graph Neural Networks (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: To mitigate climate change, the share of renewable needs to be increased. Renewable energies introduce new challenges to power grids due to decentralization, reduced inertia and volatility in production. The operation of sustainable power grids with a high penetration of renewable energies requires new methods to analyze the dynamical stability. We provide new datasets of dynamical stability of synthetic power grids, and find that graph neural networks (GNNs) are surprisingly effective at predicting the highly non-linear target from topological information only. To illustrate the potential to scale to real-sized power grids, we demonstrate the successful prediction on a Texan power grid model.

Authors: Christian Nauck (PIK); Michael Lindner (PIK); Konstantin Schürholt (University of St. Gallen); Frank Hellmann (PIK)
NeurIPS 2022 Probabilistic forecasting of regional photovoltaic power production based on satellite-derived cloud motion (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Solar energy generation drastically increased in the last years, and it is expected to grow even more in the next decades. So, accurate intra-day forecasts are needed to improve the predictability of the photovoltaic power production and associated balancing measures to increase the shares of renewable energy in the power grid. Most forecasting methods require numerical weather predictions, which are slow to compute, or long-term datasets to run the forecast. These issues make the models difficult to implement in an operational setting. To overcome these problems, we propose a novel regional intraday probabilistic PV power forecasting model able to exploit only 2 hours of satellite-derived cloudiness maps to produce the ensemble forecast. The model is easy to implement in an operational setting as it is based on Pysteps, an already-operational Python library for precipitation nowcasting. With few adaptations of the Steps algorithm, we reached state-of-the-art performance, reaching a 71% lower RMSE than the Persistence model and a 50% lower CRPS than the Persistence Ensemble model for forecast lead times up to 4 hours.

Authors: Alberto Carpentieri (Bern University of Applied Science); Doris Folini (Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich); Martin Wild (Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich); Angela Meyer (Bern University of Applied Science)
NeurIPS 2022 Robustifying machine-learned algorithms for efficient grid operation (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: We propose a learning-augmented algorithm, RobustML, for operation of dispatchable generation that exploits the good performance of a machine-learned algorithm while providing worst-case guarantees on cost. We evaluate the algorithm on a realistic two-generator system, where it exhibits robustness to distribution shift while enabling improved efficiency as renewable penetration increases.

Authors: Nicolas Christianson (California Institute of Technology); Christopher Yeh (California Institute of Technology); Tongxin Li (The Chinese University of Hong Kong (Shenzhen)); Mahdi Torabi Rad (Beyond Limits); Azarang Golmohammadi (Beyond Limits, Inc.); Adam Wierman (California Institute of Technology)
NeurIPS 2022 Data-Driven Optimal Solver for Coordinating a Sustainable and Stable Power Grid (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: With today's pressing climate change concerns, the widespread integration of low-carbon technologies such as sustainable generation systems (e.g. photovoltaics, wind turbines, etc.) and flexible consumer devices (e.g. storage, electric vehicles, smart appliances, etc.) into the electric grid is vital. Although these power entities can be deployed at large, these are highly variable in nature and must interact with the existing grid infrastructure without violating electrical limits so that the system continues to operate in a stable manner at all times. In order to ensure the integrity of grid operations while also being economical, system operators will need to rapidly solve the optimal power flow (OPF) problem in order to adapt to these fluctuations. Inherent non-convexities in the OPF problem do not allow traditional model-based optimization techniques to offer guarantees on optimality, feasibility and convergence. In this paper, we propose a data-driven OPF solver built on information-theoretic and semi-supervised machine learning constructs. We show that this solver is able to rapidly compute solutions (i.e. in sub-second range) that are within 3\% of optimality with guarantees on feasibility on a benchmark IEEE 118-bus system.

Authors: Junfei Wang (York University); Pirathayini Srikantha (York University)
NeurIPS 2022 Explainable Multi-Agent Recommendation System for Energy-Efficient Decision Support in Smart Homes (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Transparent, understandable, and persuasive recommendations support the electricity consumers’ behavioral change to tackle the energy efficiency problem. This paper proposes an explainable multi-agent recommendation system for load shifting for household appliances. First, we extend a novel multi-agent approach by designing an Explainability Agent that provides explainable recommendations for optimal appliance scheduling in a textual and visual manner. Second, we enhance the predictive capacity of other agents by including weather data and applying state-of-the-art models (i.e., k-nearest-neighbours, extreme gradient boosting, adaptive boosting, random forest, logistic regression, and explainable boosting machines). Since we want to help the user understand a single recommendation, we focus on local explainability approaches. In particular, we apply post-model approaches LIME (local, interpretable, model-agnostic explanation) and SHAP (Shapley additive explanations) as model-agnostic tools that can explain the predictions of the chosen classifiers. We further provide an overview of the predictive and explainability performance. Our results show a substantial improvement in the performance of the multi-agent system while at the same time opening up the “black box” of recommendations. To show the pathway to positive impact regarding climate change, we provide a discussion on the potential impact of the suggested approach.

Authors: Alona Zharova (Humboldt University of Berlin); Annika Boer (Humboldt University of Berlin); Julia Knoblauch (Humboldt University of Berlin); Kai Ingo Schewina (Humboldt University of Berlin); Jana Vihs (Humboldt University of Berlin)
NeurIPS 2022 Stability Constrained Reinforcement Learning for Real-Time Voltage Control (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: This paper is a summary of a recently submitted work. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been recognized as a promising tool to address the challenges in real-time control of power systems. However, its deployment in real-world power systems has been hindered by a lack of explicit stability and safety guarantees. In this paper, we propose a stability constrained reinforcement learning method for real-time voltage control in both single-phase and three-phase distribution grids. The key idea underlying our approach is an explicitly constructed Lyapunov function that certifies stability. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach with IEEE test feeders, where the proposed method achieves the best overall performance, while always achieving voltage stability. In contrast, standard RL methods often fail to achieve voltage stability.

Authors: Jie Feng (UCSD); Yuanyuan Shi (University of California San Diego); Guannan Qu (Carnegie Mellon University); Steven Low (California Institute of Technology); Animashree Anandkumar (Caltech); Adam Wierman (California Institute of Technology)
NeurIPS 2022 SustainGym: A Benchmark Suite of Reinforcement Learning for Sustainability Applications (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The lack of standardized benchmarks for reinforcement learning (RL) in sustainability applications has made it difficult to both track progress on specific domains and identify bottlenecks for researchers to focus their efforts on. In this paper, we present SustainGym, a suite of two environments designed to test the performance of RL algorithms on realistic sustainability tasks. The first environment simulates the problem of scheduling decisions for a fleet of electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, and the second environment simulates decisions for a battery storage system bidding in an electricity market. We describe the structure and features of the environments and show that standard RL algorithms have significant room for improving performance. We discuss current challenges in introducing RL to real-world sustainability tasks, including physical constraints and distribution shift.

Authors: Christopher Yeh (California Institute of Technology); Victor Li (California Institute of Technology); Rajeev Datta (California Institute of Technology); Yisong Yue (Caltech); Adam Wierman (California Institute of Technology)
NeurIPS 2022 AutoML for Climate Change: A Call to Action (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The challenge that climate change poses to humanity has spurred a rapidly developing field of artificial intelligence research focused on climate change applications. The climate change ML (CCML) community works on a diverse, challenging set of problems which often involve physics-constrained ML or heterogeneous spatiotemporal data. It would be desirable to use automated machine learning (AutoML) techniques to automatically find high-performing architectures and hyperparameters for a given dataset. In this work, we benchmark popular Auto ML libraries on three high-leverage CCML applications: climate modeling, wind power forecasting, and catalyst discovery. We find that out-of-the-box AutoML libraries currently fail to meaningfully surpass the performance of human-designed CCML models. However, we also identify a few key weaknesses, which stem from the fact that most AutoML techniques are tailored to computer vision and NLP applications. For example, while dozens of search spaces have been designed for image and language data, none have been designed for spatiotemporal data. Addressing these key weaknesses can lead to the discovery of novel architectures that yield substantial performance gains across numerous CCML applications. Therefore, we present a call to action to the AutoML community, since there are a number of concrete, promising directions for future work in the space of AutoML for CCML. We release our code and a list of resources at https://github.com/climate-change-automl/climate-change-automl.

Authors: Renbo Tu (University of Toronto); Nicholas Roberts (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Vishak Prasad C (Indian Institute Of Technology, Bombay); Sibasis Nayak (Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay); Paarth Jain (Indian Institute of Technology Bombay); Frederic Sala (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Ganesh Ramakrishnan (IIT Bombay); Ameet Talwalkar (CMU); Willie Neiswanger (Stanford University); Colin White (Abacus.AI)
NeurIPS 2022 Heat Demand Forecasting with Multi-Resolutional Representation of Heterogeneous Temporal Ensemble (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: One of the primal challenges faced by utility companies is ensuring efficient supply with minimal greenhouse gas emissions. The advent of smart meters and smart grids provide an unprecedented advantage in realizing an optimised supply of thermal energies through proactive techniques such as load forecasting. In this paper, we propose a forecasting framework for heat demand based on neural networks where the time series are encoded as scalograms equipped with the capacity of embedding exogenous variables such as weather, and holiday/non-holiday. Subsequently, CNNs are utilized to predict the heat load multi-step ahead. Finally, the proposed framework is compared with other state-of-the-art methods, such as SARIMAX and LSTM. The quantitative results from retrospective experiments show that the proposed framework consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline method with real-world data acquired from Denmark. A minimal mean error of 7.54% for MAPE and 417kW for RMSE is achieved with the proposed framework in comparison to all other methods.

Authors: Satyaki Chatterjee (Pattern Recognition Lab, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg); Adithya Ramachandran (Pattern Recognition Lab, Friedrich Alexander University, Erlangen); Thorkil Flensmark Neergaard (Brønderslev Forsyning A/S); Andreas K Maier (Pattern Recognition Lab, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg); Siming Bayer (Pattern Recognition Lab, Friedrich-Alexander University)
NeurIPS 2022 Generalized Ice Detection on Wind Turbine Rotor Blades with Neural Style Transfer (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Wind energy’s ability to liberate the world of conventional sources of energy relies on lowering the significant costs associated with the maintenance of wind turbines. Since icing events on turbine rotor blades are a leading cause of operational failures, identifying icing in advance is critical. Some recent studies focus on specific wind parks and fail to generalize to unseen scenarios (e.g. new rotor blade designs). We propose the utilisation of synthetic data augmentation via neural style transfer to improve the generalization of existing ice prediction models. We show that training models with augmented data that captures domain-invariant icing characteristics can help improve predictive performance across multiple wind parks. Through efficient identification of icing, this study can support preventive maintenance of wind energy sources by making them more reliable towards tackling climate change.

Authors: Joyjit Chatterjee (University of Hull); Maria Teresa Alvela Nieto (University of Bremen); Hannes Gelbhardt (University of Bremen); Nina Dethlefs (University of Hull); Jan Ohlendorf (University of Bremen); Klaus-Dieter Thoben (University of Bremen)
NeurIPS 2022 Analyzing Micro-Level Rebound Effects of Energy Efficient Technologies (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Energy preservation is central to prevent resource depletion, climate change and environment degradation. Investment in raising efficiency of appliances is among the most significant attempts to save energy. Ironically, introduction of many such energy saving appliances increased the total energy consumption instead of reducing it. This effect in literature is attributed to the inherent Jevons paradox (JP) and optimism bias (OB) in consumer behavior. However, the magnitude of these instincts vary among different people. Identification of this magnitude for each household can enable the development of appropriate policies that induce desired energy saving behaviour. Using the RECS 2015 dataset, the paper uses machine learning for each electrical appliance to determine the dependence of their total energy consumption on their energy star rating. This shows that only substitutable appliances register increase in energy demand upon boosted efficiency. Lastly, an index is noted to indicate the varying influence of JP and OB on different households.

Authors: Mayank Jain (University College Dublin); Mukta Jain (Delhi School of Economics); Tarek T. Alskaif (Wageningen University); Soumyabrata Dev (University College Dublin)
NeurIPS 2022 Learn to Bid: Deep Reinforcement Learning with Transformer for Energy Storage Bidding in Energy and Contingency Reserve Markets (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: As part of efforts to tackle climate change, grid-scale battery energy storage systems (BESS) play an essential role in facilitating reliable and secure power system operation with variable renewable energy (VRE). BESS can balance time-varying electricity demand and supply in the spot market through energy arbitrage and in the frequency control ancillary services (FCAS) market through service enablement or delivery. Effective algorithms are needed for the optimal participation of BESS in multiple markets. Using deep reinforcement learning (DRL), we present a BESS bidding strategy in the joint spot and contingency FCAS markets, leveraging a transformer-based temporal feature extractor to exploit the temporal trends of volatile energy prices. We validate our strategy on real-world historical energy prices in the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM). We demonstrate that the novel DRL-based bidding strategy significantly outperforms benchmarks. The simulation also reveals that the joint bidding in both the spot and contingency FCAS markets can yield a much higher profit than in individual markets. Our work provides a viable use case for the BESS, contributing to the power system operation with high penetration of renewables.

Authors: Jinhao Li (Monash University); Changlong Wang (Monash University); Yanru Zhang (University of Electronic Science and Technology of China); Hao Wang (Monash University)
NeurIPS 2022 Curriculum Based Reinforcement Learning to Avert Cascading Failures in the Electric Grid (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: We present an approach to integrate the domain knowledge of the electric power grid operations into reinforcement learning (RL) frameworks for effectively learning RL agents to prevent cascading failures. A curriculum-based approach with reward tuning is incorporated into the training procedure by modifying the environment using the network physics. Our procedure is tested on an actor-critic-based agent on the IEEE 14-bus test system using the RL environment developed by RTE, the French transmission system operator (TSO). We observed that naively training the RL agent without the curriculum approach failed to prevent cascading for most test scenarios, while the curriculum based RL agents succeeded in most test scenarios, illustrating the importance of properly integrating domain knowledge of physical systems for real-world RL applications.

Authors: Amarsagar Reddy Ramapuram Matavalam (Arizona State University); Kishan Guddanti (Pacific Northwest National Lab); Yang Weng (Arizona State University)
NeurIPS 2022 EnhancedSD: Downscaling Solar Irradiance from Climate Model Projections (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Renewable energy-based electricity systems are seen as a keystone of future decarbonization efforts. However, power system planning does not currently consider the impacts of climate change on renewable energy resources such as solar energy, chiefly due to a paucity of climate-impacted high-resolution solar power data. Existing statistical downscaling (SD) methods that learn to map coarse-resolution versions of historical reanalysis data to generate finer resolution outputs are of limited use when applied to future climate model projections due to the domain gap between climate models and reanalysis data. In contrast, we present EnhancedSD, a deep learning-based framework for downscaling coarse-scale climate model outputs to high-resolution observational (reanalysis) data. Our proposed ML based downscaling allows for future reanalysis projections, which can be pivotal for mitigating climate change’s impacts on power systems planning.

Authors: Nidhin Harilal (University of Colorado, Boulder); Bri-Mathias S Hodge (University of Colorado Boulder); Claire Monteleoni (University of Colorado Boulder); Aneesh Subramanian (University of California, San Diego)
NeurIPS 2022 Synthesis of Realistic Load Data: Adversarial Networks for Learning and Generating Residential Load Patterns (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Responsible energy consumption plays a key role in reducing carbon footprint and CO2 emissions to tackle climate change. A better understanding of the residential consumption behavior using smart meter data is at the heart of the mission, which can inform residential demand flexibility, appliance scheduling, and home energy management. However, access to high-quality residential load data is still limited due to the cost-intensive data collection process and privacy concerns of data shar- ing. In this paper, we develop a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based method to model the complex and diverse residential load patterns and generate synthetic yet realistic load data. We adopt a generation-focused weight selection method to select model weights to address the mode collapse problem and generate diverse load patterns. We evaluate our method using real-world data and demon- strate that it outperforms three representative state-of-the-art benchmark models in better preserving the sequence level temporal dependencies and aggregated level distributions of load patterns.

Authors: Xinyu Liang (Monash University); Hao Wang (Monash University)
NeurIPS 2022 Identification of medical devices using machine learning on distribution feeder data for informing power outage response (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Power outages caused by extreme weather events due to climate change have doubled in the United States in the last two decades. Outages pose severe health risks to over 4.4 million individuals dependent on in-home medical devices. Data on the number of such individuals residing in a given area is limited. This study proposes a load disaggregation model to predict the number of medical devices behind an electric distribution feeder. This data can be used to inform planning and response to power outages and other emergencies. The proposed solution serves as a measure for climate change adaptation.

Authors: Paraskevi Kourtza (University of Edinburgh); Maitreyee Marathe (University of Wisconsin-Madison); Anuj Shetty (Stanford University); Diego Kiedanski (Yale University)
NeurIPS 2022 Improving accuracy and convergence of federated learning edge computing methods for generalized DER forecasting applications in power grid (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: This proposal aims to develop more accurate federated learning (FL) methods with faster convergence properties and lower communication requirements, specifically for forecasting distributed energy resources (DER) such as renewables, energy storage, and loads in modern, low-carbon power grids. This will be achieved by (i) leveraging recently developed extensions of FL such as hierarchical and iterative clustering to improve performance with non-IID data, (ii) experimenting with different types of FL global models well-suited to time-series data, and (iii) incorporating domain-specific knowledge from power systems to build more general FL frameworks and architectures that can be applied to diverse types of DERs beyond just load forecasting, and with heterogeneous clients.

Authors: Vineet Jagadeesan Nair (MIT)
AAAI FSS 2022 Graph Representation Learning for Energy Demand Data: Application to Joint Energy System Planning under Emissions Constraints
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: To meet the mid-century goal of CO2 emissions reduction requires a rapid transformation of current electric power and natural gas (NG) infrastructure. This necessitates a long-term planning of the joint power-NG system under representative demand patterns, operational constraints, and policy considerations. Our work is motivated by the computational and practical challenges associated with solving the generation and transmission expansion problem (GTEP) for joint planning of power-NG systems. Specifically, we focus on efficiently extracting a set of representative days from power and NG demand data in respective networks and using this set to reduce the computational burden required to solve the GTEP. We propose a Graph Autoencoder for Multiple time resolution Energy Systems (GAMES) to capture the spatio-temporal demand patterns in interdependent networks and account for differences in the temporal resolution of available data. The resulting embeddings are used in a clustering algorithm to select representative days. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach in solving a GTEP formulation calibrated for the joint power-NG system in New England. This formulation accounts for the physical interdependencies between power and NG systems, including the joint emissions constraint. Our results show that the set of representative days obtained from GAMES not only allows us to tractably solve the GTEP formulation, but also achieves a lower cost of implementing the joint planning decisions.

Authors: Aron Brenner (MIT), Rahman Khorramfar (MIT), Dharik Mallapragada (MIT) and Saurabh Amin (MIT)
NeurIPS 2021 Short-term Solar Irradiance Prediction from Sky Images (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Solar irradiance forecasting is essential for the integration of the solar power into the power grid system while maintaining its stability. This paper focuses on short-term solar irradiance forecasting (upto 4-hour ahead-of-time prediction) from a past sky image sequence. Most existing work aims for the prediction of the most likely future of the solar irradiance. While it is likely deterministic for intra-hourly prediction, the future solar irradiance is naturally diverse over a relatively long-term horizon (>1h). We therefore introduce approaches to deterministic and stochastic predictions to capture the most likely as well as the diverse future of the solar irradiance. To enable the autoregressive prediction capability of the model, we proposed deep neural networks to predict the future sky images in a deterministic as well as stochastic manner. We evaluate our approaches on benchmark datasets and demonstrate that our approaches achieve superior performance.

Authors: Hoang Chuong Nguyen (Australia National University); Miaomiao Liu (The Australian National University)
NeurIPS 2021 WiSoSuper: Benchmarking Super-Resolution Methods on Wind and Solar Data (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The transition to green energy grids depends on detailed wind and solar forecasts to optimize the siting and scheduling of renewable energy generation. Operational forecasts from numerical weather prediction models, however, only have a spatial resolution of 10 to 20-km, which leads to sub-optimal usage and development of renewable energy farms. Weather scientists have been developing super-resolution methods to increase the resolution, but often rely on simple interpolation techniques or computationally expensive differential equation-based models. Recently, machine learning-based models, specifically the physics-informed resolution-enhancing generative adversarial network (PhIREGAN), have outperformed traditional downscaling methods. We provide a thorough and extensible benchmark of leading deep learning-based super-resolution techniques, including the enhanced super-resolution generative adversarial network (ESRGAN) and an enhanced deep super-resolution (EDSR) network, on wind and solar data. We accompany the benchmark with a novel public, processed, and machine learning-ready dataset for benchmarking super-resolution methods on wind and solar data.

Authors: Rupa Kurinchi-Vendhan (Caltech); Björn Lütjens (MIT); Ritwik Gupta (University of California, Berkeley); Lucien D Werner (California Institute of Technology); Dava Newman (MIT); Steven Low (California Institute of Technology)
NeurIPS 2021 SunCast: Solar Irradiance Nowcasting from Geosynchronous Satellite Data (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: When cloud layers cover photovoltaic (PV) panels, the amount of power the panels produce fluctuates rapidly. Therefore, to maintain enough energy on a power grid to match demand, utilities companies rely on reserve power sources that typically come from fossil fuels and therefore pollute the environment. Accurate short-term PV power prediction enables operators to maximize the amount of power obtained from PV panels and safely reduce the reserve energy needed from fossil fuel sources. While several studies have developed machine learning models to predict solar irradiance at specific PV generation facilities, little work has been done to model short-term solar irradiance on a global scale. Furthermore, models that have been developed are proprietary and have architectures that are not publicly available or rely on computationally demanding Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models. Here, we propose a Convolutional Long Short-Term Memory Network model that treats solar nowcasting as a next frame prediction problem, is more efficient than NWP models and has a straightforward, reproducible architecture. Our models can predict solar irradiance for entire North America for up to 3 hours in under 60 seconds on a single machine without a GPU and has a RMSE of 120 W/m^2 when evaluated on 2 months of data.

Authors: Dhileeban Kumaresan (UC Berkeley); Richard Wang (UC Berkeley); Ernesto A Martinez (UC Berkeley); Richard Cziva (UC Berkeley); Alberto Todeschini (UC Berkeley); Colorado J Reed (University of California, Berkeley); Puya Vahabi (UC Berkeley)
NeurIPS 2021 Synthetic Imagery Aided Geographic Domain Adaptation for Rare Energy Infrastructure Detection in Remotely Sensed Imagery (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Object detection in remotely sensed data is frequently stymied by applications in geographies that are different from that of the training data. When objects are rare, the problem is exacerbated further. This is true of assessments of energy infrastructure such as generation, transmission, and end-use consumption; key to electrification planning as well as for effective assessment of natural disaster impacts which are varying in frequency and intensity due to climate change. We propose an approach to domain adaptation that requires only unlabeled samples from the target domain and generates synthetic data to augment training data for targeted domain adaptation. This approach is shown to work consistently across four geographically diverse domains, improving object detection average precision by 15.5\% on average for small sample sizes.

Authors: Wei Hu (Duke University); Tyler Feldman (Duke University); Eddy Lin (Duke University); Jose Luis Moscoso (Duke); Yanchen J Ou (Duke University); Natalie Tarn (Duke University); Baoyan Ye (Duke University); Wendy Zhang (Duke University); Jordan Malof (Duke University); Kyle Bradbury (Duke University)
NeurIPS 2021 Subseasonal Solar Power Forecasting via Deep Sequence Learning (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: To help mitigate climate change, power systems need to integrate renewable energy sources, such as solar, at a rapid pace. Widespread integration of solar energy into the power system requires major improvements in solar irradiance forecasting, in order to reduce the uncertainty associated with solar power output. While recent works have addressed short lead-time forecasting (minutes to hours ahead), week(s)-ahead and longer forecasts, coupled with uncertainty estimates, will be extremely important for storage applications in future power systems. In this work, we propose machine learning approaches for these longer lead-times as an important new application area in the energy domain. We demonstrate the potential of several deep sequence learning techniques for both point predictions and probabilistic predictions at these longer lead-times. We compare their performance for subseasonal forecasting (forecast lead-times of roughly two weeks) using the SURFRAD data set for 7 stations across the U.S. in 2018. The results are encouraging; the deep sequence learning methods outperform the current benchmark for machine learning-based probabilistic predictions (previously applied at short lead-times in this domain), along with relevant baselines.

Authors: Saumya Sinha (University of Colorado, Boulder); Bri-Mathias S Hodge (University of Colorado Boulder); Claire Monteleoni (University of Colorado Boulder)
NeurIPS 2021 Multitask Learning for Estimating Power Plant Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Satellite Imagery (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The burning of fossil fuels produces large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2), a major Greenhouse Gas (GHG) and a main driver of Climate Change. Quantifying GHG emissions is crucial for accurate predictions of climate effects and to enforce emission trading schemes. The reporting of such emissions is only required in some countries, resulting in insufficient global coverage. In this work, we propose an end-to-end method to predict power generation rates for fossil fuel power plants from satellite images based on which we estimate GHG emission rates. We present a multitask deep learning approach able to simultaneously predict: (i) the pixel-area covered by plumes from a single satellite image of a power plant, (ii) the type of fired fuel, and (iii) the power generation rate. We then convert the predicted power generation rate into estimates for the rate at which CO2 is being emitted. Experimental results show that our model approach allows us to estimate the power generation rate of a power plant to within 139 MW (MAE, for a mean sample power plant capacity of 1177 MW) from a single satellite image and CO2 emission rates to within 311 t/h. This multitask learning approach improves the power generation estimation MAE by 39 % compared to a single-task network trained on the same dataset.

Authors: Joëlle Hanna (University of St. Gallen); Michael Mommert (University of St. Gallen); Linus M. Scheibenreif (University of St. Gallen); Damian Borth (University of St. Gallen)
NeurIPS 2021 Emissions-aware electricity network expansion planning via implicit differentiation (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: We consider a variant of the classical problem of designing or expanding an electricity network. Instead of minimizing only investment and production costs, however, we seek to minimize some mixture of cost and greenhouse gas emissions, even if the underlying dispatch model does not tax emissions. This enables grid planners to directly minimize consumption-based emissions, when expanding or modifying the grid, regardless of whether or not the carbon market incorporates a carbon tax. We solve this problem using gradient descent with implicit differentiation, a technique recently popularized in machine learning. To demonstrate the method, we optimize transmission and storage resources on the IEEE 14-bus test network and compare our solution to one generated by standard planning with a carbon tax. Our solution significantly reduces emissions for the same levelized cost of electricity.

Authors: Anthony Degleris (Stanford University); Lucas Fuentes (Stanford); Abbas El Gamal (Stanford University); Ram Rajagopal (Stanford University)
NeurIPS 2021 Learning to identify cracks on wind turbine blade surfaces using drone-based inspection images (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Wind energy is expected to be one of the leading ways to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement but it in turn heavily depends on effective management of its operations and maintenance (O&M) costs. Blade failures account for one-third of all O&M costs thus making accurate detection of blade damages, especially cracks, very important for sustained operations and cost savings. Traditionally, damage inspection has been a completely manual process thus making it subjective, error-prone, and time-consuming. Hence in this work, we bring more objectivity, scalability, and repeatability in our damage inspection process, using deep learning, to miss fewer cracks. We build a deep learning model trained on a large dataset of blade damages, collected by our drone-based inspection, to correctly detect cracks. Our model is already in production and has processed more than a million damages with a recall of 0.96. We also focus on model interpretability using class activation maps to get a peek into the model workings. The model not only performs as good as human experts but also better in certain tricky cases. Thus, in this work, we aim to increase wind energy adoption by decreasing one of its major hurdles - the O&M costs resulting from missing blade failures like cracks.

Authors: Akshay B Iyer (SkySpecs, Inc.); Linh V Nguyen (SkySpecs Inc); Shweta Khushu (SkySpecs Inc.)
NeurIPS 2021 Predicting Power System Dynamics and Transients: A Frequency Domain Approach (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: With the ambition of reducing carbon emissions and mitigating climate change, many regions have set up the goal to generate electricity with close to 100% renewables. However, actual renewable generations are often curtailed by operators because it is too hard to check the dynamic stability of the electric grid under the high uncertainties introduced by the renewables. The dynamics of a power grid are governed by a large number of nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs). To safely operate the system, operators need to check that the states described by this set of ODEs stay within prescribed limits after various potential faults. Limited by the size and stiffness of the ODEs, current numerical integration techniques are often too slow to be useful in real-time or large-scale resource allocation problems. In addition, detailed system parameters are often not exactly known. Machine learning approaches have been proposed to reduce the computational efforts, but existing methods generally suffer from overfitting and failures to predict unstable behaviors. This paper proposes a novel framework for power system dynamic predictions by learning in the frequency domain. The intuition is that although the system behavior is complex in the time domain, there are relatively few dominate modes in the frequency domain. Therefore, we learn to predict by constructing neural networks with Fourier transform and filtering layers. System topology and fault information are encoded by taking a multi-dimensional Fourier transform, allowing us to leverage the fact that the trajectories are sparse both in time and spatial (across different buses) frequencies. We show that the proposed approach does not need detailed system parameters, speeds up prediction computations by orders of magnitude and is highly accurate for different fault types.

Authors: Wenqi Cui (University of Washington); Weiwei Yang (Microsoft Research); Baosen Zhang (University of Washington)
NeurIPS 2021 HyperionSolarNet: Solar Panel Detection from Aerial Images (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: With the effects of global climate change impacting the world, collective efforts are needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The energy sector is the single largest contributor to climate change and many efforts are focused on reducing dependence on carbon-emitting power plants and moving to renewable energy sources, such as solar power. A comprehensive database of the location of solar panels is important to assist analysts and policymakers in defining strategies for further expansion of solar energy. In this paper we focus on creating a world map of solar panels. We identify locations and total surface area of solar panels within a given geographic area. We use deep learning methods for automated detection of solar panel locations and their surface area using aerial imagery. The framework, which consists of a two-branch model using an image classifier in tandem with a semantic segmentation model, is trained on our created dataset of satellite images. Our work provides an efficient and scalable method for detecting solar panels, achieving an accuracy of 0.96 for classification and an IoU score of 0.82 for segmentation performance.

Authors: Poonam Parhar (UCBerkeley); Ryan Sawasaki (UCBerkeley); Alberto Todeschini (UC Berkeley); Colorado Reed (UC Berkeley); Hossein Vahabi (University California Berkeley); Nathan Nusaputra (UC Berkeley); Felipe Vergara (UC Berkeley)
NeurIPS 2021 Prediction of Household-level Heat-Consumption using PSO enhanced SVR Model (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: In combating climate change, an effective demand-based energy supply operation of the district energy system (DES) for heating or cooling is indispensable. As a consequence, an accurate forecast of heat consumption on the consumer side poses an important first step towards an optimal energy supply. However, due to the non-linearity and non-stationarity of heat consumption data, the prediction of the thermal energy demand of DES remains challenging. In this work, we propose a forecasting framework for thermal energy consumption within a district heating system (DHS) based on kernel Support Vector Regression (kSVR) using real-world smart meter data. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is employed to find the optimal hyper-parameter for the kSVR model which leads to the superiority of the proposed methods when compared to a state-of-the-art ARIMA model. The average MAPE is reduced to 2.07% and 2.64% for the individual meter-specific forecasting and for forecasting of societal consumption, respectively.

Authors: Satyaki Chatterjee (Pattern Recognition Lab, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg); Siming Bayer (Pattern Recognition Lab, Friedrich-Alexander University); Andreas K Maier (Pattern Recognition Lab, FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg)
NeurIPS 2021 EcoLight: Reward Shaping in Deep Reinforcement Learning for Ergonomic Traffic Signal Control (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Mobility, the environment, and human health are all harmed by sub-optimal control policies in transportation systems. Intersection traffic signal controllers are a crucial part of today's transportation infrastructure, as sub-optimal policies may lead to traffic jams and as a result increased levels of air pollution and wasted time. Many adaptive traffic signal controllers have been proposed in the literature, but research on their relative performance differences is limited. On the other hand, to the best of our knowledge there has been no work that directly targets CO2 emission reduction, even though pollution is currently a critical issue. In this paper, we propose a reward shaping scheme for various RL algorithms that not only produces lowers CO2 emissions, but also produces respectable outcomes in terms of other metrics such as travel time. We compare multiple RL algorithms --- sarsa, and A2C --- as well as diverse scenarios with a mix of different road users emitting varied amounts of pollution.

Authors: Pedram Agand (Simon Fraser University); Alexey Iskrov (Breeze Labs Inc.); Mo Chen (Simon Fraser University)
NeurIPS 2021 Decentralized Safe Reinforcement Learning for Voltage Control (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Inverter-based distributed energy resources provide the possibility for fast time-scale voltage control by quickly adjusting their reactive power. The power-electronic interfaces allow these resources to realize almost arbitrary control law, but designing these decentralized controllers is nontrivial. Reinforcement learning (RL) approaches are becoming increasingly popular to search for policy parameterized by neural networks. It is difficult, however, to enforce that the learned controllers are safe, in the sense that they may introduce instabilities into the system. This paper proposes a safe learning approach for voltage control. We prove that the system is guaranteed to be exponentially stable if each controller satisfies certain Lipschitz constraints. The set of Lipschitz bound is optimized to enlarge the search space for neural network controllers. We explicitly engineer the structure of neural network controllers such that they satisfy the Lipschitz constraints by design. A decentralized RL framework is constructed to train local neural network controller at each bus in a model-free setting.

Authors: Wenqi Cui (University of Washington); Jiayi Li (University of Washington); Baosen Zhang (University of Washington)
NeurIPS 2021 Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning Controller for Multi-Generator Industrial Wave Energy Converter (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Waves are one of the greatest sources of renewable energy and are a promising resource to tackle climate challenges by decarbonizing energy generation. Lowering the Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) for wave energy converters is key to competitiveness with other forms of clean energy like wind and solar. Also, the complexity of control has gone up significantly with the state-of-the-art multi-generator multi-legged industrial Wave Energy Converters (WEC). This paper introduces a Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning controller (MARL) architecture that can handle these multiple objectives for LCOE, helping the increase in energy capture efficiency, boosting revenue, reducing structural stress to limit maintenance and operating cost, and adaptively and proactively protect the wave energy converter from catastrophic weather events, preserving investments and lowering effective capital cost. We use a MARL implementing proximal policy optimization (PPO) with various optimizations to help sustain the training convergence in the complex hyperplane. The MARL is able to better control the reactive forces of the generators on multiple tethers (legs) of WEC than the commonly deployed spring damper controller. The design for trust is implemented to assure the operation of WEC within a safe zone of mechanical compliance and guarantee mechanical integrity. This is achieved through reward shaping for multiple objectives of energy capture and penalty for harmful motions to minimize stress and lower the cost of maintenance. We achieved double-digit gains in energy capture efficiency across the waves of different principal frequencies over the baseline Spring Damper controller with the proposed MARL controllers.

Authors: Soumyendu Sarkar (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Vineet Gundecha (Hewlett Packard Enterpise); Alexander Shmakov (UC Irvine); Sahand Ghorbanpour (Hewlett Packard Enterprise); Ashwin Ramesh Babu (Hewlett Packard Enterprise Labs); Paolo Faraboschi (HPE); mathieu Cocho (Carnegie Clean Energy); Alexandre Pichard (Carnegie Clean Energy); Jonathan Fievez (Carnegie Clean Energy)
NeurIPS 2021 A Risk Model for Predicting Powerline-induced Wildfires in Distribution System (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The power grid is one of the most common causes of wildfires that result in tremendous economic loss and significant life risk. In this study, we propose to use machine learning techniques to build a risk model for predicting powerline-induced wildfires in distribution system. We collect weather, vegetation, and infrastructure data for all feeders in Pacific Gas & Electricity territory. This study will contribute to a deeper understanding of powerline-induced wildfire prediction and provide valuable suggestions for wildfire mitigation planning.

Authors: Mengqi Yao (University of California Berkeley)
NeurIPS 2021 Detecting Abandoned Oil And Gas Wells Using Machine Learning And Semantic Segmentation (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Around the world, there are millions of unplugged abandoned oil and gas wells, leaking methane into the atmosphere. The locations of many of these wells, as well as their greenhouse gas emissions impacts, are unknown. Machine learning methods in computer vision and remote sensing, such as semantic segmentation, have made it possible to quickly analyze large amounts of satellite imagery to detect salient information. This project aims to automatically identify undocumented oil and gas wells in the province of Alberta, Canada to aid in documentation, estimation of emissions and maintenance of high-emitting wells.

Authors: Michelle Lin (McGill University); David Rolnick (McGill University, Mila)
NeurIPS 2021 Hybrid physics-based and data-driven modeling with calibrated uncertainty for lithium-ion battery degradation diagnosis and prognosis (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Advancing lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) in both design and usage is key to promoting electrification in the coming decades to mitigate human-caused climate change. Inadequate understanding of LIB degradation is an important bottleneck that limits battery durability and safety. Here, we propose hybrid physics-based and data-driven modeling for online diagnosis and prognosis of battery degradation. Compared to existing battery modeling efforts, we aim to build a model with physics as its backbone and statistical learning techniques as enhancements. Such a hybrid model has better generalizability and interpretability together with a well-calibrated uncertainty associated with its prediction, rendering it more valuable and relevant to safety-critical applications under realistic usage scenarios.

Authors: Jing Lin (Institute for Infocomm Research); Yu Zhang (I2R); Edwin Khoo (Institute for Infocomm Research)
NeurIPS 2021 Multi-agent reinforcement learning for renewable integration in the electric power grid (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: As part of the fight against climate change, the electric power system is transitioning from fuel-burning generators to renewable sources of power like wind and solar. To allow for the grid to rely heavily on renewables, important operational changes must be done. For example, novel approaches for frequency regulation, i.e., for balancing in real-time demand and generation, are required to ensure the stability of a renewable electric system. Demand response programs in which loads adjust in part their power consumption for the grid's benefit, can be used to provide frequency regulation. In this proposal, we present and motivate a collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning approach to meet the algorithmic requirements for providing real-time power balancing with demand response.

Authors: Vincent Mai (Mila, Université de Montréal); Tianyu Zhang (Mila, Université de Montréal); Antoine Lesage-Landry (Polytechnique Montréal & GERAD)
NeurIPS 2021 Predicting Cascading Failures in Power Systems using Graph Convolutional Networks (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Worldwide targets are set for the increase of renewable power generation in electricity networks on the way to combat climate change. Consequently, a secure power system that can handle the complexities resulted from the increased renewable power integration is crucial. One particular complexity is the possibility of cascading failures — a quick succession of multiple component failures that takes down the system and might also lead to a blackout. Viewing the prediction of cascading failures as a binary classification task, we explore the efficacy of Graph Convolution Networks (GCNs), to detect the early onset of a cascading failure. We perform experiments based on simulated data from a benchmark IEEE test system. Our preliminary findings show that GCNs achieve higher accuracy scores than other baselines which bodes well for detecting cascading failures. It also motivates a more comprehensive study of graph-based deep learning techniques for the current problem.

Authors: Tabia Ahmad (University of Strathclyde); Yongli Zhu (Texas A&M Universersity); Panagiotis Papadopoulos (University of Strathclyde)
NeurIPS 2021 A day in a sustainable life (Tutorials Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: In this notebook, we show the reader how to use an electrical battery to minimize the operational carbon intensity of a building. The central idea is to charge the battery when the carbon intensity of the grid energy mix is low, and vice versa. The same methodology is used in practice to optimise for a number of different objective functions, including energy costs. Taking the hypothetical case of Pi, an eco-conscious and tech-savvy householder in the UK, we walk the reader through getting carbon intensity data, and how to use this with a number of different optimisation algorithms to decarbonise. Starting off with easy-to-understand, brute force search, we establish a baseline for subsequent (hopefully smarter) optimization algorithms. This should come naturally, since in their day job Pi is a data scientist where they often use grid and random search to tune hyperparameters of ML models. The second optimization algorithm we explore is a genetic algorithm, which belongs to the class of derivative free optimizers and is consequently extremely versatile. However, the flexibility of these algorithms comes at the cost of computational speed and effort. In many situations, it makes sense to utilize an optimization method which can make use of the special structure in the problem. As the final step, we see how Pi can optimally solve the problem of minimizing their carbon intensity by formulating it as a linear program. Along the way, we also keep an eye out for some of the most important challenges that arise in practice.

Authors: Hussain Kazmi (KU Leuven); Attila Balint (KU Leuven); Jolien Despeghel (KU Leuven)
NeurIPS 2021 Open Catalyst Project: An Introduction to ML applied to Molecular Simulations (Tutorials Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: As the world continues to battle energy scarcity and climate change, the future of our energy infrastructure is a growing challenge. Renewable energy technologies offer the opportunity to drive efficient carbon-neutral means for energy storage and generation. Doing so, however, requires the discovery of efficient and economic catalysts (materials) to accelerate associated chemical processes. A common approach in discovering high performance catalysts is using molecular simulations. Specifically, each simulation models the interaction of a catalyst surface with molecules that are commonly seen in electrochemical reactions. By predicting these interactions accurately, the catalyst's impact on the overall rate of a chemical reaction may be estimated. The Open Catalyst Project (OCP) aims to develop new ML methods and models to accelerate the catalyst simulation process for renewable energy technologies and improve our ability to predict properties across catalyst composition. The initial release of the Open Catalyst 2020 (OC20) dataset presented the largest open dataset of molecular combinations, spanning 55 unique elements and over 130M+ data points. We will present a comprehensive tutorial of the Open Catalyst Project repository, including (1) Accessing & visualizing the dataset, (2) Overview of the various tasks, (3) Training graph neural network (GNN) models, (4) Developing your own model for OCP, (5) Running ML-driven simulations, and (6) Visualizing the results. Primary tools include PyTorch and PyTorch Geometric. No background in chemistry is assumed. Following this tutorial we hope to better equip attendees with a basic understanding of the data and repository.

Authors: Muhammed Shuaibi (Carnegie Mellon University); Anuroop Sriram (Facebook); Abhishek Das (Facebook AI Research); Janice Lan (Facebook AI Research); Adeesh Kolluru (Carnegie Mellon University); Brandon Wood (NERSC); Zachary Ulissi (Carnegie Mellon University); Larry Zitnick (Facebook AI Research)
ICML 2021 Physics-Informed Graph Neural Networks for Robust Fault Location in Power Grids (Papers Track) Best Paper: ML Innovation
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The reducing cost of renewable energy resources, such as solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind farms, is accelerating global energy transformation to mitigate climate change. However, a high level of intermittent renewable energy causes power grids to have more stability issues. This accentuates the need for quick location of system failures and follow-up control actions. In recent events such as in California, line failures have resulted in large-scale wildfires leading to loss of life and property. In this article, we propose a two-stage graph learning framework to locate power grid faults in the challenging but practical regime characterized by (a) sparse observations, (b) low label rates, and (c) system variability. Our approach embeds the geometrical structure of power grids into the graph neural networks (GNN) in stage I for fast fault location, and then stage II further enhances the location accuracy by employing the physical similarity of the labeled and unlabeled data samples. We compare our approach with three baselines in the IEEE 123-node benchmark system and show that it outperforms the others by significant margins in various scenarios.

Authors: Wenting Li (Los Alamos National Laboratory); Deepjyoti Deka (Los Alamos National Laboratory)
ICML 2021 Learning Optimal Power Flow with Infeasibility Awareness (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Optimal power flow provides an energy-efficient operating point for power grids and therefore supports climate change mitigation. This function has to be run every few minutes day and night, thus a reliable and computationally efficient solution method is of vital importance. Deep learning seems a promising direction, and related works have emerged recently. However, considering feasible scenarios only during the learning process, existing works will mislead system operators in infeasible scenarios and pose a new threat to system resilience. Paying attention to infeasibility in the decision making process, this paper tackles this emerging threat with multi-task learning. Case studies on the IEEE test system validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Authors: Gang Huang (Zhejiang Lab); Longfei Liao (Zhejiang Lab); Lechao Cheng (Zhejiang Lab); Wei Hua (Zhejiang Lab)
ICML 2021 DeepOPF-NGT: A Fast Unsupervised Learning Approach for Solving AC-OPF Problems without Ground Truth (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: AC optimal power flow (AC-OPF) problems need to be solved more frequently in the future to maintain the reliable and cost-effective operation of power systems. Recently, supervised-learning approaches have been developed to speed up the solving time of AC-OPF problems without incurring infeasibility or much optimality loss by learning the load-solution mapping embedded in the training dataset. However, it is non-trivial and computationally expensive to prepare the training dataset with single embedded mapping, due to that AC-OPF problems are non-convex and may admit multiple optimal solutions. In this paper, we develop an unsupervised learning approach (DeepOPF-NGT) for solving AC-OPF problems, which does not require training datasets with ground truth to operate. Instead, it uses a properly designed loss function to guide the tuning of the neural network parameters to directly learn one load-solution mapping. Preliminary results on the IEEE 30-bus test system show that the unsupervised DeepOPF-NGT approach can achieve comparable optimality, feasibility, and speedup performance against an existing supervised learning approach.

Authors: Wanjun Huang (City University of Hong Kong); Minghua Chen (City University of Hong Kong)
ICML 2021 Probabilistic Short-Term Low-Voltage Load Forecasting using Bernstein-Polynomial Normalizing Flows (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The transition to a fully renewable energy grid requires better forecasting of demand at the low-voltage level. However, high fluctuations and increasing electrification cause huge forecast errors with traditional point estimates. Probabilistic load forecasts take future uncertainties into account and thus enables various applications in low-carbon energy systems. We propose an approach for flexible conditional density forecasting of short-term load based on Bernstein-Polynomial Normalizing Flows where a neural network controls the parameters of the flow. In an empirical study with 363 smart meter customers, our density predictions compare favorably against Gaussian and Gaussian mixture densities and also outperform a non-parametric approach based on the pinball loss for 24h-ahead load forecasting for two different neural network architectures.

Authors: Marcel Arpogaus (Konstanz University of Applied Sciences); Marcus Voß (Technische Universität Berlin (DAI-Labor)); Beate Sick (ZHAW and University of Zurich); Mark Nigge-Uricher (Bosch.IO GmbH); Oliver Dürr (Konstanz University of Applied Sciences)
ICML 2021 Guided A* Search for Scheduling Power Generation Under Uncertainty (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Increasing renewables penetration motivates the development of new approaches to operating power systems under uncertainty. We apply a novel approach combining self-play reinforcement learning (RL) and traditional planning to solve the unit commitment problem, an essential power systems scheduling task. Applied to problems with stochastic demand and wind generation, our results show significant cost reductions and improvements to security of supply as compared with an industry-standard mixed-integer linear programming benchmark. Applying a carbon price of \$50/tCO$_2$ achieves carbon emissions reductions of up to 10\%. Our results demonstrate scalability to larger problems than tackled in existing literature, and indicate the potential for RL to contribute to decarbonising power systems.

Authors: Patrick de Mars (UCL); Aidan O'Sullivan (UCL)
ICML 2021 Reinforcement Learning for Optimal Frequency Control: A Lyapunov Approach (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Renewable energy resources play a vital role in reducing carbon emissions and are becoming increasingly common in the grid. On one hand, they are challenging to integrate into a power system because the lack of rotating mechanical inertia can lead to frequency instabilities. On the other hand, these resources have power electronic interfaces that are capable of implementing almost arbitrary control laws. To design these controllers, reinforcement learning has emerged as a popular method to search for policy parameterized by neural networks. The key challenge with learning based approaches is enforcing the constraint that the learned controller need to be stabilizing. Through a Lyapunov function, we explicitly identify the structure of neural network-based controllers such that they guarantee system stability by design. A recurrent RL architecture is used to efficiently train the controllers and they outperform other approaches as demonstrated by simulations.

Authors: Wenqi Cui (University of Washington); Baosen Zhang (University of Washington)
ICML 2021 Power Grid Cascading Failure Mitigation by Reinforcement Learning (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: This paper proposes a cascading failure mitigation strategy based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) method. Firstly, the principles of RL are introduced. Then, the Multi-Stage Cascading Failure (MSCF) problem is formulated, and its challenges are investigated. The problem is then tackled by the RL based on DCOPF (Direct Current Optimal Power Flow). Designs of the RL framework (rewards, states, etc.) are illustrated in detail. Experiments on the IEEE 118-bus system by the proposed RL method demonstrate promising performance in reducing system collapses.

Authors: Yongli Zhu (Texas A&M University)
ICML 2021 Graph Neural Networks for Learning Real-Time Prices in Electricity Market (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Solving the optimal power flow (OPF) problem in real-time electricity market improves the efficiency and reliability in the integration of low-carbon energy resources into the power grids. To address the scalability and adaptivity issues of existing end-to-end OPF learning solutions, we propose a new graph neural network (GNN) framework for predicting the electricity market prices from solving OPFs. The proposed GNN-for-OPF framework innovatively exploits the locality property of prices and introduces physics-aware regularization, while attaining reduced model complexity and fast adaptivity to varying grid topology. Numerical tests have validated the learning efficiency and adaptivity improvements of our proposed method over existing approaches.

Authors: Shaohui Liu (University of Texas at Austin); Chengyang Wu (University of Texas at Austin); Hao Zhu (University of Texas at Austin)
ICML 2021 Reducing Carbon in the Design of Large Infrastructure Scheme with Evolutionary Algorithms (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The construction and operations of large infrastructure schemes such as railways, roads, pipelines and power lines account for a significant proportion of global carbon emissions. Opportunities to reduce the embodied and operational carbon emissions of new infrastructure schemes are greatest during the design phase. However, schedule and cost constraints limit designers from assessing a large number of design options in detail to identify the solution with the lowest lifetime carbon emissions using conventional methods. Here, we develop an evolutionary algorithm to rapidly evaluate in detail the lifetime carbon emissions of thousands of possible design options for new water transmission pipeline schemes. Our results show that this approach can help designers in some cases to identify design solutions with more than 10% lower operational carbon emissions compared with conventional methods, saving more than 1 million tonnes in lifetime carbon emissions for a new water transmission pipeline scheme. We also find that this evolutionary algorithm can be applied to design other types of infrastructure schemes such as non-water pipelines, railways, roads and power lines.

Authors: Matt Blythe (Continuum Industries)
ICML 2021 Designing Bounded min-knapsack Bandits algorithm for Sustainable Demand Response (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Around 40% of global energy produced is consumed by buildings. By using renewable energy resources we can alleviate the dependence on electrical grids. Recent trends focus on incentivizing consumers to reduce their demand consumption during peak hours for sustainable demand response. To minimize the loss, the distributor companies should target the right set of consumers and demand the right amount of electricity reductions. This paper proposes a novel bounded integer min-knapsack algorithm and shows that the algorithm, while allowing for multiple unit reduction, also optimizes the loss to the distributor company within a factor of two (multiplicative) and a problem-dependent additive constant. Existing CMAB algorithms fail to work in this setting due to non-monotonicity of reward function and time-varying optimal sets. We propose a novel algorithm Twin-MinKPDR-CB to learn these compliance probabilities efficiently. Twin-MinKPDR-CB works for non-monotone reward functions bounded min-knapsack constraints and time-varying optimal sets. We find that Twin-MinKPDR-CB achieves sub-linear regret of O(log T) with T being the number of rounds demand response is run.

Authors: Akansha Singh (Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar); Meghana Reddy (Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar); Zoltan Nagy (University of Texas); Sujit P. Gujar (Machine Learning Laboratory, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad); Shweta Jain (Indian Institute of Technology Ropar)
ICML 2021 EVGen: Adversarial Networks for Learning Electric Vehicle Charging Loads and Hidden Representations (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The nexus between transportation, the power grid, and consumer behavior is much more pronounced than ever before as the race to decarbonize intensifies. Electrification in the transportation sector has led to technology shifts and rapid deployment of electric vehicles (EVs). The potential increase in stochastic and spatially heterogeneous charging load presents a unique challenge that is not well studied, and will have significant impacts on grid operations, emissions, and system reliability if not managed effectively. Realistic scenario generators can help operators prepare, and machine learning can be leveraged to this end. In this work, we develop generative adversarial networks (GANs) to learn distributions of electric vehicle (EV) charging sessions and disentangled representations. We show that this model successfully parameterizes unlabeled temporal and power patterns and is able to generate synthetic data conditioned on these patterns. We benchmark the generation capability of this model with Gaussian Mixture Models (GMMs), and empirically show that our proposed model framework is better at capturing charging distributions and temporal dynamics.

Authors: Robert Buechler (Stanford University); Emmanuel O Balogun (Stanford University); Arun Majumdar (Stanford University); Ram Rajagopal (Stanford University)
ICML 2021 A Set-Theoretic Approach to Safe Reinforcement Learning in Power Systems (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Reducing the carbon footprint of the energy sector will be a vital part of the fight against climate change, and doing so will require the widespread adoption of renewable energy resources. Optimally integrating a large number of these resources requires new control techniques that can both compensate for the variability of renewables and satisfy hard engineering constraints. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach to data-driven control, but it is difficult to verify that the policies derived from data will be safe. In this paper, we combine RL with set-theoretic control to propose a computationally efficient approach to safe RL. We demonstrate the method on a simplified power system model and compare it with other RL techniques.

Authors: Daniel Tabas (University of Washington); Baosen Zhang (University of Washington)
ICML 2021 A study of battery SoC scheduling using machine learning with renewable sources (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: An open energy system (OES) enables the shared distribution of energy resources within a community autonomously and efficiently. For this distributed system a rooftop solar panel and a battery are installed in each house of the community. The OES system monitors the State of Charge (SoC) of each battery independently, arbitrates energy-exchange requests from each house, and physically controls peer-to-peer energy exchanges. In this study, our goal is to optimize those energy exchanges to maximize the renewable energy penetration within the community using machine learning techniques. Future household electricity consumption is predicted using machine learning from the past time series. The predicted consumption is used to determine the next energy-exchange strategy, i.e. when and how much energy should be exchanged to minimize the surplus of solar energy. The simulation results show that the proposed method can increase the amount of renewable energy penetration within the community.

Authors: Daisuke Kawamoto (Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.); Gopinath Rajendiran (CSIR Central Scientific Instruments Organisation, Chennai)
ICML 2021 Deep Spatial Temporal Forecasting of Electrical Vehicle Charging Demand (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Electric vehicles can offer a low carbon emission solution to reverse rising emission trends. However, this requires that the energy used to meet the demand is green. To meet this requirement, accurate forecasting of the charging demand is vital. Short and long-term charging demand forecasting will allow for better optimisation of the power grid and future infrastructure expansions. In this paper, we propose to use publicly available data to forecast the electric vehicle charging demand. To model the complex spatial-temporal correlations between charging stations, we argue that Temporal Graph Convolution Models are the most suitable to capture the correlations. The proposed Temporal Graph Convolutional Networks provide the most accurate forecasts for short and long-term forecasting compared with other forecasting methods.

Authors: Frederik B Hüttel (Technical University of Denmark (DTU)); Filipe Rodrigues (Technical University of Denmark (DTU)); Inon Peled (Technical University of Denmark (DTU)); Francisco Pereira (DTU)
ICML 2021 Solar PV Maps for Estimation and Forecasting of Distributed Solar Generation (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Rapid uptake of distributed solar PV is starting to make the operation of grids and energy markets more challenging, and better methods are needed for measuring and forecasting distributed solar PV generation across entire regions. We propose a method for converting time series data from a number of point sources (power measurements at individual sites) into 2-dimensional maps that estimate total solar PV generation across large areas. These maps may be used on their own, or in conjunction with additional data sources (such as satellite imagery) in a deep learning framework that enables improved regional solar PV estimation and forecasting. We provide some early validation and results, discuss anticipated benefits of this approach, and argue that this method has the potential to further enable significant uptake of solar PV, assisting a shift away from fossil fuel-based generation.

Authors: Julian de Hoog (The University of Melbourne); Maneesha Perera (The University of Melbourne); Kasun Bandara (The University of Melbourne); Damith Senanayake (The University of Melbourne); Saman Halgamuge (University of Melbourne)
ICML 2021 An Iterative Approach to Finding Global Solutions of AC Optimal Power Flow Problems (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: To achieve a cleaner energy system, a diverse set of energy resources such as solar PV, battery storage and electric vehicles are entering the electric grid. Their operation is typically controlled by solving a resource allocation problem, called the AC optimal power flow (ACOPF) problem. This problem minimizes the cost of generation subject to supply/demand balance and various other engineering constraints. It is nonlinear and nonconvex, and existing solvers are generally successful in finding local solutions. As the share of renewable energy resources increases, it is becoming increasingly important to find globally optimal solutions to utilize these resources to the full extent. In this paper, we propose a simple iterative approach to find globally optimal solutions to ACOPF problems. First, we call an existing solver for the ACOPF problem and we form a partial Lagrangian from the associated dual variables. This partial Lagrangian has a much better optimization landscape and we use its solution as a warm start for the ACOPF problem. By repeating this process, we can iteratively improve the solution quality, moving from local solutions to global ones. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm on standard benchmarks. We also show how the dual variables could be found by using a neural network to further speed up the algorithm.

Authors: Ling Zhang (University of Washington); Baosen Zhang (University of Washington)
ICML 2021 Virtual Screening for Perovskites Discovery (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Re-inventing the global energy harvesting system from fossil fuels to renewables is essential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in line with current climate targets. Perovskite photovoltaics (PVs), the class of materials with relatively unexplored material configurations, play key role in solar energy generation due to their low manufacturing cost and exceptional optoelectronic properties. Without the efficient utilisation of machine learning, the discovery and manufacturing process could take a dangerously long time. We present a high-throughput computational design that leverages machine learning algorithms at various steps in order to assess the suitability of the organic molecules for the perovskite crystals.

Authors: Andrea Karlova (UCL); Cameron C.L. Underwood (University of Surrey); Ravi Silva (University of Surrey)
ICML 2021 Forecasting emissions through Kaya identity using Neural ODEs (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Starting from Kaya identity, we used a Neural ODE model to predict the evolution of several indicators related to carbon emissions, on a country-level : population, GDP per capita, energy intensity of GDP, carbon intensity of energy. We compared the model with a baseline statistical model - VAR - and obtained good performances. We conclude that this machine-learning approach can be used to produce a wide range of results and give relevant insight to policymakers.

Authors: Pierre Browne (Imperial College London)
ICML 2021 Reducing greenhouse gas emissions by optimizing room temperature set-points (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: We design a learning and optimization framework to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions associated with heating and cooling buildings. The framework optimizes room temperature set-points based on forecasts of weather, occupancy, and the greenhouse gas intensity of electricity. We compare two approaches: the first one combines a linear load forecasting model with convex optimization that offers a globally optimal solution, whereas the second one combines a nonlinear load forecasting model with nonconvex optimization that offers a locally optimal solution. The project explores the two approaches with a simulation testbed in EnergyPlus and experiments in university-campus buildings.

Authors: Yuan Cai (MIT); Subhro Das (MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, IBM Research); Leslie Norford (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Jeremy Gregory (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Julia Wang (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Kevin J Kircher (MIT); Jasmina Burek (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
ICML 2021 APPLYING TRANSFORMER TO IMPUTATION OF MULTI-VARIATE ENERGY TIME SERIES DATA (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: To reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from electricity production, it is necessaryto switch to an energy system based on renewable energy sources (RES). However,intermittent electricity generation from RES poses challenges for energy systems.The primary input for data-driven solutions is data on electricity generation fromRES, which usually contain many missing values. This proposal studies the useof attention-based algorithms to impute missing values of electricity production,electricity demand and electricity prices. Since attention mechanisms allow us totake into account dependencies between time series across multiple dimensionsefficiently, our approach goes beyond classic statistical methods and incorporatesmany related variables, such as electricity price, demand and production by othersources. Our preliminary results show that while transformers can come at highercomputational costs, they are more precise than classical imputation methods.

Authors: Hasan Ümitcan Yilmaz (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology); Max Kleinebrahm (Karlsruhe Institut für Technologie); Christopher Bülte (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology); Juan Gómez-Romero (Universidad de Granada)
NeurIPS 2020 Is Africa leapfrogging to renewables or heading for carbon lock-in? A machine-learning-based approach to predicting success of power-generation projects (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Several extant energy-planning studies, comprising wide-ranging assumptions about the future, feature projections of Africa’s rapid transition in the next decade towards renewables-based power generation. Here, we develop a novel empirical approach to predicting medium-term generation mix that can complement traditional energy planning. Relying on the largest dataset on historic and planned power plants available for Africa, combined with country-level characteristics, we build a machine-learning-based model, using gradient boosted trees, that demonstrates high predictive performance. Training our model on past successful and failed projects, we find that the most relevant factors for commissioning are plant-level: capacity, fuel, ownership and grid connection type. We then apply the trained model to predict the realisation of the current project pipeline. Contrary to the rapid transition scenarios, our results show that the share of non-hydro renewables in generation is likely to remain below 10% in 2030, despite total generation more than doubling. These findings point to high carbon lock-in risks in Africa, highlighting the urgency to shift its pipeline of projects towards low-carbon energy and improve the realisation chances of renewable energy plants.

Authors: Galina Alova (University of Oxford); Philipp Trotter (University of Oxford); Alex Money (University of Oxford)
NeurIPS 2020 pymgrid: An Open-Source Python Microgrid Simulator for Applied Artificial Intelligence Research (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Microgrids – self-contained electrical grids that are capable of disconnecting from the main grid – hold potential in both tackling climate change mitigation via reducing CO$_2$ emissions and adaptation by increasing infrastructure resiliency. Due to their distributed nature, microgrids are often idiosyncratic; as a result, control of these systems is nontrivial. While microgrid simulators exist, many are limited in scope and in the variety of microgrids they can simulate. We propose \HL{pymgrid}, an open-source Python package to generate and simulate a large number of microgrids, and the first open-source tool that can generate more than 600 different microgrids. \HL{pymgrid} abstracts most of the domain expertise, allowing users to focus on control algorithms. In particular, \HL{pymgrid} is built to be a reinforcement learning (RL) platform, and includes the ability to model microgrids as Markov decision processes. \HL{pymgrid} also introduces two pre-computed list of microgrids, intended to allow for research reproducibility in the microgrid setting.

Authors: Gonzague Henri (Total); Tanguy Levent (Ecole Polytechnique); Avishai Halev (Total, UC Davis); Reda ALAMI (Total R&D); Philippe Cordier (Total S.A.)
NeurIPS 2020 Deep Reinforcement Learning in Electricity Generation Investment for the Minimization of Long-Term Carbon Emissions and Electricity Costs (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: A change from a high-carbon emitting electricity power system to one based on renewables would aid in the mitigation of climate change. Decarbonization of the electricity grid would allow for low-carbon heating, cooling and transport. Investments in renewable energy must be made over a long time horizon to maximise return of investment of these long life power generators. Over these long time horizons, there exist multiple uncertainties, for example in future electricity demand and costs to consumers and investors. To mitigate for imperfect information of the future, we use the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) deep reinforcement learning approach to optimize for a low-cost, low-carbon electricity supply using a modified version of the FTT:Power model. In this work, we model the UK and Ireland electricity markets. The DDPG algorithm is able to learn the optimum electricity mix through experience and achieves this between the years of 2017 and 2050. We find that a change from fossil fuels and nuclear power to renewables, based upon wind, solar and wave would provide a cheap and low-carbon alternative to fossil fuels.

Authors: Alexander J. M. Kell (Newcastle University); Pablo Salas (University of Cambridge); Jean-Francois Mercure (University of Exeter); Matthew Forshaw (Newcastle University); A. Stephen McGough (Newcastle University)
NeurIPS 2020 Short-Term Solar Irradiance Forecasting Using Calibrated Probabilistic Models (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Advancing probabilistic solar forecasting methods is essential to supporting the integration of solar energy into the electricity grid. In this work, we develop a variety of state-of-the-art probabilistic models for forecasting solar irradiance. We investigate the use of post-hoc calibration techniques for ensuring well-calibrated probabilistic predictions. We train and evaluate the models using public data from seven stations in the SURFRAD network, and demonstrate that the best model, NGBoost, achieves higher performance at an intra-hourly resolution than the best benchmark solar irradiance forecasting model across all stations. Further, we show that NGBoost with CRUDE post-hoc calibration achieves comparable performance to a numerical weather prediction model on hourly-resolution forecasting.

Authors: Eric Zelikman (Stanford University); Sharon Zhou (Stanford University); Jeremy A Irvin (Stanford); Cooper Raterink (Stanford University); Hao Sheng (Stanford University); Avati Anand (Stanford University); Jack Kelly (Open Climate Fix); Ram Rajagopal (Stanford University); Andrew Ng (Stanford University); David J Gagne (National Center for Atmospheric Research)
NeurIPS 2020 A Temporally Consistent Image-based Sun Tracking Algorithm for Solar Energy Forecasting Applications (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Improving irradiance forecasting is critical to further increase the share of solar in the energy mix. On a short time scale, fish-eye cameras on the ground are used to capture cloud displacements causing the local variability of the electricity production. As most of the solar radiation comes directly from the Sun, current forecasting approaches use its position in the image as a reference to interpret the cloud cover dynamics. However, existing Sun tracking methods rely on external data and a calibration of the camera, which requires access to the device. To address these limitations, this study introduces an image-based Sun tracking algorithm to localise the Sun in the image when it is visible and interpolate its daily trajectory from past observations. We validate the method on a set of sky images collected over a year at SIRTA's lab. Experimental results show that the proposed method provides robust smooth Sun trajectories with a mean absolute error below 1% of the image size.

Authors: Quentin Paletta (University of Cambridge); Joan Lasenby (University of Cambridge)
NeurIPS 2020 Towards Tracking the Emissions of Every Power Plant on the Planet (Papers Track) Best Pathway to Impact
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Greenhouse gases emitted from fossil-fuel-burning power plants are a major contributor to climate change. Current methods to track emissions from individual sources are expensive and only used in a few countries. While carbon dioxide concentrations can be measured globally using remote sensing, background fluctuations and low spatial resolution make it difficult to attribute emissions to individual sources. We use machine learning to infer power generation and emissions from visible and thermal power plant signatures in satellite images. By training on a data set of power plants for which we know the generation or emissions, we are able to apply our models globally. This paper demonstrates initial progress on this project by predicting whether a power plant is on or off from a single satellite image.

Authors: Heather D Couture (Pixel Scientia Labs); Joseph O'Connor (Carbon Tracker); Grace Mitchell (WattTime); Isabella Söldner-Rembold (Carbon Tracker); Durand D'souza (Carbon Tracker); Krishna Karra (WattTime); Keto Zhang (WattTime); Ali Rouzbeh Kargar (WattTime); Thomas Kassel (WattTime); Brian Goldman (Google); Daniel Tyrrell (Google); Wanda Czerwinski (Google); Alok Talekar (Google); Colin McCormick (Georgetown University)
NeurIPS 2020 A Machine Learning Approach to Methane Emissions Mitigation in the Oil and Gas Industry (Papers Track) Overall Best Paper
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Reducing methane emissions from the oil and gas sector is a key component of climate policy in the United States. Methane leaks across the supply chain are stochastic and intermittent, with a small number of sites (‘super-emitters’) responsible for a majority of emissions. Thus, cost-effective emissions reduction critically relies on effectively identifying the super-emitters from thousands of well-sites and millions of miles of pipelines. Conventional approaches such as walking surveys using optical gas imaging technology are slow and time-consuming. In addition, several variables contribute to the formation of leaks such as infrastructure age, production, weather conditions, and maintenance practices. Here, we develop a machine learning algorithm to predict high-emitting sites that can be prioritized for follow-up repair. Such prioritization can significantly reduce the cost of surveys and increase emissions reductions compared to conventional approaches. Our results show that the algorithm using logistic regression performs the best out of several algorithms. The model achieved a 70% accuracy rate with a 57% recall and a 66% balanced accuracy rate. Compared to the conventional approach, the machine learning model reduced the time to achieve a 50% emissions mitigation target by 42%. Correspondingly, the mitigation cost reduced from $85/t CO2e to $49/t CO2e.

Authors: Jiayang Wang (Harrisburg University); Selvaprabu Nadarajah (University of Illinois at Chicago); Jingfan Wang (Stanford University); Arvind Ravikumar (Harrisburg University)
NeurIPS 2020 Deep learning architectures for inference of AC-OPF solutions (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: We present a systematic comparison between neural network (NN) architectures for inference of AC-OPF solutions. Using fully connected NNs as a baseline we demonstrate the efficacy of leveraging network topology in the models by constructing abstract representations of electrical grids in the graph domain, for both convolutional and graph NNs. The performance of the NN architectures is compared for regression (predicting optimal generator set-points) and classification (predicting the active set of constraints) settings. Computational gains for obtaining optimal solutions are also presented.

Authors: Thomas Falconer (University College London); Letif Mones (Invenia Labs)
NeurIPS 2020 Predicting the Solar Potential of Rooftops using Image Segmentation and Structured Data (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Estimating the amount of electricity that can be produced by rooftop photovoltaic systems is a time-consuming process that requires on-site measurements, a difficult task to achieve on a large scale. In this paper, we present an approach to estimate the solar potential of rooftops based on their location and architectural characteristics, as well as the amount of solar radiation they receive annually. Our technique uses computer vision to achieve semantic segmentation of roof sections and roof objects on the one hand, and a machine learning model based on structured building features to predict roof pitch on the other hand. We then compute the azimuth and maximum number of solar panels that can be installed on a rooftop with geometric approaches. Finally, we compute precise shading masks and combine them with solar irradiation data that enables us to estimate the yearly solar potential of a rooftop.

Authors: Daniel de Barros Soares (nam.R); François ANDRIEUX (nam.R); Bastien HELL (nam.R); Julien LENHARDT (nam.R; ENSTA); JORDI BADOSA (Ecole Polytechnique); Sylvain GAVOILLE (nam.R); Stéphane GAIFFAS (nam.R; LPSM (Université de Paris)); Emmanuel BACRY (nam.R; CEREMADE (Université Paris Dauphine, PSL))
NeurIPS 2020 Using attention to model long-term dependencies in occupancy behavior (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Over the past years, more and more models have been published that aim to capture relationships in human residential behavior. Most of these models are different Markov variants or regression models that have a strong assumption bias and are therefore unable to capture complex long-term dependencies and the diversity in occupant behavior. This work shows that attention based models are able to capture complex long-term dependencies in occupancy behavior and at the same time adequately depict the diversity in behavior across the entire population and different socio-demographic groups. By combining an autoregressive generative model with an imputation model, the advantages of two data sets are combined and new data are generated which are beneficial for multiple use cases (e.g. generation of consistent household energy demand profiles). The two step approach generates synthetic activity schedules that have similar statistical properties as the empirical collected schedules and do not contain direct information about single individuals. Therefore, the presented approach forms the basis to make data on occupant behavior freely available, so that further investigations based on the synthetic data can be carried out without a large data application effort. In future work it is planned to take interpersonal dependencies into account in order to be able to generate entire household behavior profiles.

Authors: Max Kleinebrahm (Karlsruhe Institut für Technologie); Jacopo Torriti (University Reading); Russell McKenna (University of Aberdeen); Armin Ardone (Karlsruhe Institut für Technologie); Wolf Fichtner (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)
NeurIPS 2020 Machine learning for advanced solar cell production: adversarial denoising, sub-pixel alignment and the digital twin (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Photovoltaic is a main pillar to achieve the transition towards a renewable energy supply. In order to continue the tremendous cost decrease of the last decades, novel cell techologies and production processes are implemented into mass production to improve cell efficiency. Raising their full potential requires novel techniques of quality assurance and data analysis. We present three use-cases along the value chain where machine learning techniques are investigated for quality inspection and process optimization: Adversarial learning to denoise wafer images, alignment of surface structuring processes via sub-pixel coordinate regression, and the development of a digital twin for wafers and solar cells for material and process analysis.

Authors: Matthias Demant (Fraunhofer ISE); Leslie Kurumundayil (Fraunhofer ISE); Philipp Kunze (Fraunhofer ISE); Aditya Kovvali (Fraunhofer ISE); Alexandra Woernhoer (Fraunhofer ISE); Stefan Rein (Fraunhofer ISE)
NeurIPS 2020 Can Federated Learning Save The Planet ? (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Despite impressive results, deep learning-based technologies also raise severe privacy and environmental concerns induced by the training procedure often conducted in data centers. In response, alternatives to centralized training such as Federated Learning (FL) have emerged. Perhaps unexpectedly, FL in particular is starting to be deployed at a global scale by companies that must adhere to new legal demands and policies originating from governments and the civil society for privacy protection. \textit{However, the potential environmental impact related to FL remains unclear and unexplored. This paper offers the first-ever systematic study of the carbon footprint of FL.} First, we propose a rigorous model to quantify the carbon footprint, hence facilitating the investigation of the relationship between FL design and carbon emissions. Then, we compare the carbon footprint of FL to traditional centralized learning. Our findings show FL, despite being slower to converge, can be a greener technology than data center GPUs. Finally, we highlight and connect the reported results to the future challenges and trends in FL to reduce its environmental impact, including algorithms efficiency, hardware capabilities, and stronger industry transparency.

Authors: Xinchi Qiu (University of Cambridge); Titouan Parcollet (University of Oxford); Daniel J Beutel (Adap GmbH / University of Cambridge); Taner Topal (Adap GmbH); Akhil Mathur (Nokia Bell Labs); Nicholas Lane (University of Cambridge and Samsung AI)
NeurIPS 2020 An Enriched Automated PV Registry: Combining Image Recognition and 3D Building Data (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: While photovoltaic (PV) systems are installed at an unprecedented rate, reliable information on an installation level remains scarce. As a result, automatically created PV registries are a timely contribution to optimize grid planning and operations. This paper demonstrates how aerial imagery and three-dimensional building data can be combined to create an address-level PV registry, specifying area, tilt, and orientation angles. We demonstrate the benefits of this approach for PV capacity estimation. In addition, this work presents, for the first time, a comparison between automated and officially-created PV registries. Our results indicate that our enriched automated registry proves to be useful to validate, update, and complement official registries.

Authors: Benjamin Rausch (Stanford); Kevin Mayer (Stanford); Marie-Louise Arlt (Stanford); Gunther Gust (University of Freiburg); Philipp Staudt (KIT); Christof Weinhardt (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology); Dirk Neumann (Universität Freiburg); Ram Rajagopal (Stanford University)
NeurIPS 2020 OGNet: Towards a Global Oil and Gas Infrastructure Database using Deep Learning on Remotely Sensed Imagery (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: At least a quarter of the warming that the Earth is experiencing today is due to anthropogenic methane emissions. There are multiple satellites in orbit and planned for launch in the next few years which can detect and quantify these emissions; however, to attribute methane emissions to their sources on the ground, a comprehensive database of the locations and characteristics of emission sources worldwide is essential. In this work, we develop deep learning algorithms that leverage freely available high-resolution aerial imagery to automatically detect oil and gas infrastructure, one of the largest contributors to global methane emissions. We use the best algorithm, which we call OGNet, together with expert review to identify the locations of oil refineries and petroleum terminals in the U.S. We show that OGNet detects many facilities which are not present in four standard public datasets of oil and gas infrastructure. All detected facilities are associated with characteristics critical to quantifying and attributing methane emissions, including the types of infrastructure and number of storage tanks. The data curated and produced in this study is freely available at https://link/provided/in/camera/ready/version.

Authors: Hao Sheng (Stanford University); Jeremy A Irvin (Stanford); Sasankh Munukutla (Stanford University); Shawn Zhang (Stanford University); Christopher Cross (Stanford University); Zutao Yang (Stanford University); Kyle Story (Descartes Labs); Rose Rustowicz (Descartes Labs); Cooper Elsworth (Descartes Labs); Mark Omara (Environmental Defense Fund); Ritesh Gautam (Environmental Defense Fund); Rob Jackson (Stanford University); Andrew Ng (Stanford University)
NeurIPS 2020 OfficeLearn: An OpenAI Gym Environment for Building Level Energy Demand Response (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Energy Demand Response (DR) will play a crucial role in balancing renewable energy generation with demand as grids decarbonize. There is growing interest in developing Reinforcement Learning (RL) techniques to optimize DR pricing, as pricing set by electric utilities often cannot take behavioral irrationality into account. However, so far, attempts to standardize RL efforts in this area do not exist. In this paper, we present a first of the kind OpenAI gym environment for testing DR with occupant level building dynamics. We demonstrate the variety of parameters built into our office environment allowing the researcher to customize a building to meet their specifications of interest. We hope that this work enables future work in DR in buildings.

Authors: Lucas Spangher (U.C. Berkeley); Akash Gokul (University of California at Berkeley); Utkarsha Agwan (U.C. Berkeley); Joseph Palakapilly (UC Berkeley); Manan Khattar (University of California at Berkeley); Akaash Tawade (University of California at Berkeley); Costas J. Spanos (University of California at Berkeley)
NeurIPS 2020 Data-driven modeling of cooling demand in a commercial building (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems account for 30% of the total energy consumption in buildings. Design and implementation of energy-efficient schemes can play a pivotal role in minimizing energy usage. As an important first step towards improved HVAC system controls, this study proposes a new framework for modeling the thermal response of buildings by leveraging data measurements and formulating a data-driven system identification model. The proposed method combines principal component analysis (PCA) to identify the most significant predictors that influence the cooling demand of a building with an auto-regressive integrated moving average with exogenous variables (ARIMAX) model. The performance of the developed model was evaluated both analytically and visually. It was found that our PCA-based ARIMAX (2-0-5) model was able to accurately forecast the cooling demand for the prediction horizon of 7 days. In this work, the actual measurements from a university campus building are used for model development and validation.

Authors: Aqsa Naeem (Stanford University); Sally Benson (Stanford University); Jacques de Chalendar (Stanford University)
NeurIPS 2020 A Generative Adversarial Gated Recurrent Network for Power Disaggregation & Consumption Awareness (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Separating the household aggregated power signal into its additive sub-components is called energy (power) disaggregation or Non-Intrusive Load Monitoring. NILM can play an instrumental role as a driver towards consumer energy consumption awareness and behavioral change. In this paper, we propose EnerGAN++, a model based on GANs for robust energy disaggregation. We propose a unified autoencoder (AE) and GAN architecture, in which the AE achieves a non-linear power signal source separation. The discriminator performs sequence classification, using a recurrent CNN to handle the temporal dynamics of an appliance energy consumption time series. Experimental results indicate the proposed method’s superiority compared to the current state of the art.

Authors: Maria Kaselimi (National Technical University of Athens); Athanasios Voulodimos (University of West Attica); Nikolaos Doulamis (National Technical University of Athens); Anastasios Doulamis (Technical University of Crete); Eftychios Protopapadakis (National Technical University of Athens)
NeurIPS 2020 Explaining Complex Energy Systems: A Challenge (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Designing future low-carbon, sector-coupled energy systems is a complex task. The work is therefore often supported by software tools that model and optimize possible energy systems. These tools typically have high dimensional inputs and outputs and are tailored towards domain experts. The final investment decisions to implement a certain system, however, are mostly made by people with little time and prior knowledge, thus unable to understand models and their input data used in these tools. Since such decisions are often connected to significant personal consequences for the decision makers, it is not enough for them to rely on experts only. They need an own, at least rough understanding. Explaining the key rationales behind complex energy system designs to non-expert decision makers in a short amount of time is thus a critical task for realizing projects of the energy transition in practice. It is also an interesting, novel challenge for the explainable AI community.

Authors: Jonas Hülsmann (TU Darmstadt); Florian Steinke (TU Darmstadt)
NeurIPS 2020 Privacy Preserving Demand Forecasting to Encourage Consumer Acceptance of Smart Energy Meters (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: In this proposal paper we highlight the need for privacy preserving energy demand forecasting to allay a major concern consumers have about smart meter installations. High resolution smart meter data can expose many private aspects of a consumer’s household such as occupancy, habits and individual appliance usage. Yet smart metering infrastructure has the potential to vastly reduce carbon emissions from the energy sector through improved operating efficiencies. We propose the application of a distributed machine learning setting known as federated learning for energy demand forecasting at various scales to make load prediction possible whilst retaining the privacy of consumers’ raw energy consumption data.

Authors: Christopher Briggs (Keele University); Zhong Fan (Keele University); Peter Andras (Keele University, School of Computing and Mathematics, Newcastle-under-Lyme, UK)
NeurIPS 2020 Leveraging Machine learning for Sustainable and Self-sufficient Energy Communities (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Community Energies (CEs) are the next-generation energy management techniques that empowers citizens to interact with the energy market as self-consumers or prosumers actively. Successful implementation of CEs will promote sustainable energy production and consumption practices; thus, contributing to affordable and clean energy (SDG7) and climate action (SDG 13). Despite the potential of CEs, managing the overall power production and demand is challenging. This is because power is generated, distributed and controlled by several producers, each of which with different, and potentially conflicting, objectives. Thus, this project will investigate the role of machine learning approaches in smartening CEs, increasing energy awareness and enabling distributed energy resources planning and management. The project implementation will be centered around proof of concept development and capacity development in Africa.

Authors: Anthony Faustine (University College Dublin); Lucas Pereira (ITI, LARSyS, Técnico Lisboa); Loubna Benabou (UQAR); Daniel Ngondya (The University of Dodoma)
NeurIPS 2020 ACED: Accelerated Computational Electrochemical systems Discovery (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Large-scale electrification is vital to addressing the climate crisis, but many engineering challenges remain to fully electrifying both the chemical industry and transportation. In both of these areas, new electrochemical materials and systems will be critical, but developing these systems currently relies heavily on computationally expensive first-principles simulations as well as human-time-intensive experimental trial and error. We propose to develop an automated workflow that accelerates these computational steps by introducing both automated error handling in generating the first-principles training data as well as physics-informed machine learning surrogates to further reduce computational cost. It will also have the capacity to include automated experiments ``in the loop'' in order to dramatically accelerate the overall materials discovery pipeline.

Authors: Rachel C Kurchin (CMU); Eric Muckley (Citrine Informatics); Lance Kavalsky (CMU); Vinay Hegde (Citrine Informatics); Dhairya Gandhi (Julia Computing); Xiaoyu Sun (CMU); Matthew Johnson (MIT); Alan Edelman (MIT); James Saal (Citrine Informatics); Christopher V Rackauckas (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Bryce Meredig (Citrine Informatics); Viral Shah (Julia Computing); Venkat Viswanathan (Carnegie Mellon University)
NeurIPS 2020 Forecasting Marginal Emissions Factors in PJM (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Many climate change applications rely on accurate forecasts of power grid emissions, but many forecasting methods can be expensive, sensitive to input errors, or lacking in domain knowledge. Motivated by initial experiments using deep learning and power system modeling techniques, we propose a method that combines the strengths of both of these approaches to forecast hourly day-ahead MEFs for the PJM region of the United States.

Authors: Amy H Wang (Western University); Priya L Donti (Carnegie Mellon University)
ICLR 2020 Deep Reinforcement Learning based Renewable Energy Error Compensable Forecasting (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Recently, renewable energy is rapidly integrated into the power grid to prevent climate change, and accurate forecasting of renewable generation becomes critical for reliable power system operation. However, existing forecasting algorithms only focused on reducing forecasting errors without considering error compensability by using a large-scale battery. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy called error compensable forecasting. We switch the objective of forecasting from reducing errors to making errors compensable by leveraging a battery. Specifically, we propose a deep reinforcement learning based framework having forecasting in the loop of control. Extensive simulations show that the proposed one-hour ahead forecasting achieves zero error for more than 98% of time while reducing the operational expenditure by up to 44%.

Authors: Jaeik Jeong (Sogang University); Hongseok Kim (Sogang University)
ICLR 2020 Missing-insensitive Short-term Load Forecasting Leveraging Autoencoder and LSTM (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Short-term load forecasting (STLF) is fundamental for power system operation, demand response, and also greenhouse gas emission reduction. So far, most deep learning-based STLF techniques require intact data, but many real-world datasets contain missing values due to various reasons, and thus missing imputation using deep learning is actively studied. However, missing imputation and STLF have been considered independently so far. In this paper, we jointly consider missing imputation and STLF and propose a family of autoencoder/LSTM combined models to realize missing-insensitive STLF. Specifically, autoencoder (AE), denoising autoencoder (DAE), and convolutional autoencoder (CAE) are investigated for extracting features, which is directly fed into the input of LSTM. Our results show that three proposed autoencoder/LSTM combined models significantly improve forecasting accuracy compared to the baseline models of deep neural network and LSTM. Furthermore, the proposed CAE/LSTM combined model outperforms all other models for 5%-25% of random missing data.

Authors: Kyungnam Park (Sogang University); Jaeik Jeong (Sogang University); Hongseok Kim (Sogang University)
ICLR 2020 SolarNet: A Deep Learning Framework to Map Solar Plants In China From Satellite Imagery (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Renewable energy such as solar power is critical to fight the ever more serious climate, how to effectively detect renewable energy has became an important issue for governments. In this paper, we proposed a deep learning framework named SolarNet which is designed to perform semantic segmentation on large scale satellite imagery data to detect solar farms. SolarNet has successfully mapped 439 solar farms in China, covering near 2000 square kilometers, equivalent to the size of whole Shenzhen city or two and a half of New York city. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that we used deep learning to reveal the locations and sizes of solar farms in China, which could provide insights for solar power companies, climate finance and markets.

Authors: Xin Hou (WeBank); Biao Wang (WeBank); Wanqi Hu (WeBank); lei yin (WeBank); Anbu Huang (WeBank); Haishan Wu (WeBank)
ICLR 2020 Benchmarks for Grid Flexibility Prediction: Enabling Progress and Machine Learning Applications (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Decarbonizing the grid is recognized worldwide as one of the objectives for the next decades. Its success depends on our ability to massively deploy renewable resources, but to fully benefit from those, grid flexibility is needed. In this paper we put forward the design of a benchmark that will allow for the systematic measurement of demand response programs' effectiveness, information that we do not currently have. Furthermore, we explain how the proposed benchmark will facilitate the use of Machine Learning techniques in grid flexibility applications.

Authors: Diego Kiedansk (Telecom ParisTech); Lauren Kuntz (Gaiascope); Daniel Kofman (Telecom ParisTech)
ICLR 2020 Advancing Renewable Electricity Consumption With Reinforcement Learning (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: As the share of renewable energy sources in the present electric energy mix rises, their intermittence proves to be the biggest challenge to carbon free electricity generation. To address this challenge, we propose an electricity pricing agent, which sends price signals to the customers and contributes to shifting the customer demand to periods of high renewable energy generation. We propose an implementation of a pricing agent with a reinforcement learning approach where the environment is represented by the customers, the electricity generation utilities and the weather conditions.

Authors: Filip Tolovski (Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institut)
ICLR 2020 Towards a unified standards for smart infrastructure datasets (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Development of smart devices and smart home appliances allowed us to harness more data about energy patterns inside households, overtime this amount will increase. There are contributions published to address building datasets, working for objective of energy consumption optimization. Yet there are still factors if included could help in understanding problem better. This proposal tries to annotate missing features that if applied could help in a better understanding energy consumption in smart buildings impact on environment. Second, to have a unified standards that help different solutions to be compared properly.

Authors: Abdulrahman A Ahmed (Cairo University)
NeurIPS 2019 Warm-Starting AC Optimal Power Flow with Graph Neural Networks (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Efficient control of power grids is important both for efficiently managing genera- tors and to prolong longevity of components. However, that problem is NP-hard and linear approximations are necessary. The deployment of machine learning methods is hampered by the need to guarantee solutions. We propose to use Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to model a power grid and produce an initial solution used to warm-start the optimization. This allows us to achieve the best of both worlds: Fast convergence and guaranteed solutions. On a synthetic power grid modelling Texas, we achieve a mean speedup by a factor of 2.8. This allows us to dispense with linear approximation, leads to more efficient generator dispatch, and can potentially save hundreds of megatons of CO2 -equivalent.

Authors: Frederik Diehl (fortiss)
NeurIPS 2019 DeepWind: Weakly Supervised Localization of Wind Turbines in Satellite Imagery (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Wind energy is being adopted at an unprecedented rate. The locations of wind energy sources, however, are largely undocumented and expensive to curate manually, which significantly impedes their integration into power systems. Towards the goal of mapping global wind energy infrastructure, we develop deep learning models to automatically localize wind turbines in satellite imagery. Using only image-level supervision, we experiment with several different weakly supervised convolutional neural networks to detect the presence and locations of wind turbines. Our best model, which we call DeepWind, achieves an average precision of 0.866 on the test set. DeepWind demonstrates the potential of automated approaches for identifying wind turbine locations using satellite imagery, ultimately assisting with the management and adoption of wind energy worldwide.

Authors: Sharon Zhou (Stanford University); Jeremy Irvin (Stanford); Zhecheng Wang (Stanford University); Ram Rajagopal (Stanford University); Andrew Ng (Stanford U.); Eva Zhang (Stanford University); Will Deaderick (Stanford University); Jabs Aljubran (Stanford University)
NeurIPS 2019 Natural Language Generation for Operations and Maintenance in Wind Turbines (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Wind energy is one of the fastest-growing sustainable energy sources in the world but relies crucially on efficient and effective operations and maintenance to generate sufficient amounts of energy and reduce downtime of wind turbines and associated costs. Machine learning has been applied to predict faults in wind turbines, but these predictions have not been supported by suggestions on how to avert and fix occurring errors. In this paper, we present a data-to-text generation system utilising transformers to produce event descriptions of turbine faults from SCADA data capturing the operational status of turbines, and proposing maintenance strategies. Experiments show that our model learns reasonable feature representations that correspond to expert judgements. We anticipate that in making a contribution to the reliability of wind energy, we can encourage more organisations to switch to sustainable energy sources and help combat climate change.

Authors: Joyjit Chatterjee (University of Hull); Nina Dethlefs (University of Hull)
NeurIPS 2019 Reduction of the Optimal Power Flow Problem through Meta-Optimization (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: We introduce a method for solving Optimal Power Flow (OPF) using meta-optimization, which can substantially reduce solution times. A pre-trained classifier that predicts the binding constraints of the system is used to generate an initial reduced OPF problem, defined by removing the predicted non-binding constraints. Through an iterative procedure, this initial set of constraints is then ex- tended by those constraints that are violated but not represented in the reduced OPF, guaranteeing an optimal solution of the original OPF problem with the full set of constraints. The classifier is trained using a meta-loss objective, defined by the computational cost of the series of reduced OPF problems.

Authors: Letif Mones (Invenia Labs); Alex Robson (Invenia Labs); Mahdi Jamei (Invenia Labs); Cozmin Ududec (Invenia Labs)
NeurIPS 2019 Design, Benchmarking and Graphical Lasso based Explainability Analysis of an Energy Game-Theoretic Framework (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Energy use in buildings account for approximately half of global electricity consumption and a significant amount of CO2 emissions. The occupants of a building typically lack the independent motivation necessary to optimize their energy usage. In this paper, we propose a novel energy game-theoretic framework for smart building which incorporates human-in-the-loop modeling by creating an interface to allow interaction with occupants and potentially incentivize energy efficient behavior. We present open-sourced dataset and benchmarked results for forecasting of energy resource usage patterns by leveraging classical machine learning and deep learning methods including deep bi-directional recurrent neural networks. Finally, we use graphical lasso to demonstrate the explainable nature on human decision making towards energy usage inherent in the dataset.

Authors: Hari Prasanna Das (UC Berkeley ); Ioannis C. Konstantakopoulos (UC Berkeley); Aummul Baneen Manasawala (UC Berkeley); Tanya Veeravalli (UC Berkeley); Huihan Liu (UC Berkeley ); Costas J. Spanos (University of California at Berkeley)
NeurIPS 2019 Quantifying the Carbon Emissions of Machine Learning (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: From an environmental standpoint, there are a few crucial aspects of training a neural network that have a major impact on the quantity of carbon that it emits. These factors include: the location of the server used for training and the energy grid that it uses, the length of the training procedure, and even the make and model of hardware on which the training takes place. In order to approximate these emissions, we present our Machine Learning Emissions Calculator, a tool for our community to better understand the environmental impact of training ML models. We accompany this tool with an explanation of the factors cited above, as well as concrete actions that individual practitioners as well as organizations can take to mitigate their carbon emissions.

Authors: Sasha Luccioni (Mila); Victor Schmidt (Mila); Alexandre Lacoste (Element AI); Thomas Dandres (Polytechnique Montreal)
NeurIPS 2019 A Global Census of Solar Facilities Using Deep Learning and Remote Sensing (Papers Track) Honorable Mention
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: We present a comprehensive global census of solar power facilities using deep learning and remote sensing. We search imagery from the Airbus SPOT 6/7 and European Space Agency Sentinel-2 satellites covering more than 48% of earth’s land-surface using a combination of deep-learning models, image processing, and hand-verification. We locate solar facilities and measure their footprints and installation dates. The resulting dataset of 68,797 facilities has an estimated generating capacity of 209 GW; 78% of this capacity was not previously reported in public databases. These asset-level data are critical for understanding energy infrastructure, evaluate climate risk, and efficiently use intermittent solar energy - ultimately enabling the transition to a predominantly renewable energy system.

Authors: Lucas Kruitwagen (University of Oxford); Kyle Story (Descartes Labs); Johannes Friedrich (World Resource Institute); Sam Skillman (Descartes Labs); Cameron Hepburn (University of Oxford)
NeurIPS 2019 Identify Solar Panels in Low Resolution Satellite Imagery with Siamese Architecture and Cross-Correlation (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Understanding solar adoption trends and their underlying dynamics requires a comprehensive and granular time-series solar installation database which is unavailable today and expensive to create manually. To this end, we leverage a deep siamese network that automatically identifies solar panels in historical low-resolution (LR) satellite images by comparing the target image with its high-resolution exemplar at the same location. To resolve the potential displacement between solar panels in the exemplar image and that in the target image, we use a cross-correlation module to collate the spatial features learned from each input and measure their similarity. Experimental result shows that our model significantly outperforms baseline methods on a dataset of historical LR images collected in California.

Authors: Zhengcheng Wang (Tsinghua University); Zhecheng Wang (Stanford University); Arun Majumdar (Stanford University); Ram Rajagopal (Stanford University)
NeurIPS 2019 Fine-Grained Distribution Grid Mapping Using Street View Imagery (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Fine-grained distribution grid mapping is essential for power system operation and planning in the aspects of renewable energy integration, vegetation management, and risk assessment. However, currently such information can be inaccurate, outdated, or incomplete. Existing grid topology reconstruction methods heavily rely on various assumptions and measurement data that is not widely available. To bridge this gap, we propose a machine-learning-based method that automatically detects, localizes, and estimates the interconnection of distribution power lines and utility poles using readily-available street views in the upward perspective. We demonstrate the superior image-level and region-level accuracy of our method on a real-world distribution grid test case.

Authors: Qinghu Tang (Tsinghua University); Zhecheng Wang (Stanford University); Arun Majumdar (Stanford University); Ram Rajagopal (Stanford University)
NeurIPS 2019 Bayesian optimization with theory-based constraints accelerates search for stable photovoltaic perovskite materials (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Bringing a new photovoltaic technology from materials research stage to the market has historically taken decades, and the process has to be accelerated for increasing the share of renewables in energy production. We demonstrate Bayesian optimization for accelerating stability research. Convergence is reached even faster when using a constraint for integrating physical knowledge into the model. In our test case, we optimize the stability of perovskite compositions for perovskite solar cells, an efficient new solar cell technology suffering from limited lifetime of devices.

Authors: Armi Tiihonen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
NeurIPS 2019 Increasing performance of electric vehicles in ride-hailing services using deep reinforcement learning (Papers Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: New forms of on-demand transportation such as ride-hailing and connected autonomous vehicles are proliferating, yet are a challenging use case for electric vehicles (EV). This paper explores the feasibility of using deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to optimize a driving and charging policy for a ride-hailing EV agent, with the goal of reducing costs and emissions while increasing transportation service provided. We introduce a data-driven simulation of a ride-hailing EV agent that provides transportation service and charges energy at congested charging infrastructure. We then formulate a test case for the sequential driving and charging decision making problem of the agent and apply DRL to optimize the agent's decision making policy. We evaluate the performance against heuristic policies and show that our agent learns to act competitively without any prior knowledge.

Authors: Jon Donadee (LLNL); Jacob Pettit (LLNL); Ruben Glatt (LLNL); Brenden Petersen (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
NeurIPS 2019 Machine learning identifies the most valuable synthesis conditions for next-generation photovoltaics (Papers Track) Best Paper Award
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Terawatts of next-generation photovoltaics (PV) are necessary to mitigate climate change. The traditional R&D paradigm leads to high efficiency / high variability solar cells, limiting industrial scaling of novel PV materials. In this work, we propose a machine learning approach for early-stage optimization of solar cells, by combining a physics-informed deep autoencoder and a manufacturing-relevant Bayesian optimization objective. This framework allows to: 1) Co-optimize solar cell performance and variability under techno-economic revenue constrains, and 2) Infer the effect of process conditions over key latent physical properties. We test our approach by synthesizing 135 perovskite solar cells, and finding the optimal points under various techno-economic assumptions.

Authors: Felipe Oviedo (MIT) and Zekun Ren (MIT)
NeurIPS 2019 Towards self-adaptive building energy control in smart grids (Proposals Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Energy consumption in buildings greatly contributes to worldwide CO2 emissions and thus any improvement in HVAC operation will greatly help tackling global climate change. We are putting forward a proposal for self-adaptive energy control in smart grids based on Deep Learning, Deep Reinforcement Learning and Multi-Agent technologies. Particularly, we introduce the concept of Deep Neural Simulation Model (DNSM) as a way of generating digital twins of buildings in which the agent can test and learn optimal operations by itself and by collaborating with other agents. Not only do we expect a reduction on energy consumption and an increment on the use of renewable sources, but also a reduction on the cost of controlling energy in buildings.

Authors: Juan Gómez-Romero (Universidad de Granada); Miguel Molina-Solana (Imperial College London)
ICML 2019 Using Bayesian Optimization to Improve Solar Panel Performance by Developing Antireflective, Superomniphobic Glass (Research Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Photovoltaic solar panel efficiency is dependent on photons transmitting through the glass sheet covering and into the crystalline silicon solar cells within. However, complications such as soiling and light reflection degrade performance. Our goal is to identify a fabrication process to produce glass which promotes photon transmission and is superomniphobic (repels fluids), for easier cleaning. In this paper, we propose adapting Bayesian optimization to efficiently search the space of possible glass fabrication strategies; in this search we balance three competing objectives (transmittance, haze and oil contact angle). We present the glass generated from this Bayesian optimization strategy and detail its properties relevant to photovoltaic solar power.

Authors: Sajad Haghanifar (University of Pittsburgh); Bolong Cheng (SigOpt); Mike Mccourt (SigOpt); Paul Leu (University of Pittsburgh)
ICML 2019 Data-driven Chance Constrained Programming based Electric Vehicle Penetration Analysis (Research Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Transportation electrification has been growing rapidly in recent years. The adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) could help to release the dependency on oil and reduce greenhouse gas emission. However, the increasing EV adoption will also impose a high demand on the power grid and may jeopardize the grid network infrastructures. For certain high EV penetration areas, the EV charging demand may lead to transformer overloading at peak hours which makes the maximal EV penetration analysis an urgent problem to solve. This paper proposes a data-driven chance constrained programming based framework for maximal EV penetration analysis. Simulation results are presented for a real-world neighborhood level network. The proposed framework could serve as a guidance for utility companies to schedule infrastructure upgrades.

Authors: Di Wu (McGill); Tracy Cui (Google NYC); Doina Precup (McGill University); Benoit Boulet (McGill)
ICML 2019 Machine Learning for AC Optimal Power Flow (Research Track) Honorable Mention
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: F( We explore machine learning methods for AC Optimal Powerflow (ACOPF) - the task of optimizing power generation in a transmission network according while respecting physical and engineering constraints. We present two formulations of ACOPF as a machine learning problem: 1) an end-to-end prediction task where we directly predict the optimal generator settings, and 2) a constraint prediction task where we predict the set of active constraints in the optimal solution. We validate these approaches on two benchmark grids.

Authors: Neel Guha (Carnegie Mellon University); Zhecheng Wang (Stanford University); Arun Majumdar (Stanford University)
ICML 2019 The Impact of Feature Causality on Normal Behaviour Models for SCADA-based Wind Turbine Fault Detection (Research Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The cost of wind energy can be reduced by using SCADA data to detect faults in wind turbine components. Normal behavior models are one of the main fault detection approaches, but there is a lack of work in how different input features affect the results. In this work, a new taxonomy based on the causal relations between the input features and the target is presented. Based on this taxonomy, the impact of different input feature configurations on the modelling and fault detection performance is evaluated. To this end, a framework that formulates the detection of faults as a classification problem is also presented.

Authors: Telmo Felgueira (IST)
ICML 2019 PVNet: A LRCN Architecture for Spatio-Temporal Photovoltaic Power Forecasting from Numerical Weather Prediction (Deployed Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Photovoltaic (PV) power generation has emerged as one of the leading renewable energy sources. Yet, its production is characterized by high uncertainty, being dependent on weather conditions like solar irradiance and temperature. Predicting PV production, even in the 24-hour forecast, remains a challenge and leads energy providers to left idling - often carbon-emitting - plants. In this paper, we introduce a Long-Term Recurrent Convolutional Network using Numerical Weather Predictions (NWP) to predict, in turn, PV production in the 24-hour and 48-hour forecast horizons. This network architecture fully leverages both temporal and spatial weather data, sampled over the whole geographical area of interest. We train our model on a prediction dataset from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to predict spatially aggregated PV production in Germany. We compare its performance to the persistence model and state-of-the-art methods.

Authors: Johan Mathe (Frog Labs)
ICML 2019 Using Smart Meter Data to Forecast Grid Scale Electricity Demand (Deployed Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Highly accurate electricity demand forecasts represent a major opportunity to create grid stability in light of the concurrent deployment of distributed renewables and energy storage, as well as the increasing occurrence of extreme weather events caused by climate change. We present an overview of a deployed machine learning system that accomplishes this task by using smart meter data (AMI) within the region governed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).

Authors: Abraham Stanway (Amperon Holdings, Inc); Ydo Wexler (Amperon)
ICML 2019 Machine Learning-based Maintenance for Renewable Energy: The Case of Power Plants in Morocco (Ideas Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: In this project, the focus will be on the reduction of the overall electricity cost by the reduction of operating expenditures, including maintenance costs. We propose a predictive maintenance (PdM) framework for multi-component systems in renewables power plants based on machine learning (ML) and optimization approaches. This project would benefit from a real database acquired from the Moroccan Agency Of Sustainable Energy (MASEN) that own and operate several wind, solar and hydro power plants spread over Moroccan territory. Morocco has launched an ambitious energy strategy since 2009 that aims to ensure the energy security of the country, diversify the source of energy and preserve the environment. Ultimately, Morocco has set the target of 52% of renewables by 2030 with a large capital investment of USD 30 billion. To this end, Morocco will install 10 GW allocated as follows: 45% for solar, 42% for wind and 13% for hydro. Through the commitment of many actors, in particular in Research and Development, Morocco intends to become a regional leader and a model to follow in its climate change efforts. MASEN is investing in several strategies to reduce the cost of renewables, including the cost of operations and maintenance. Our project will provide a ML predictive maintenance framework to support these efforts.

Authors: Kris Sankaran (Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms); Zouheir Malki (Polytechnique Montréal); Loubna Benabou (UQAR); Hicham Bouzekri (MASEN)
ICML 2019 The Grid Resilience & Intelligence Platform (GRIP) (Ideas Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: Extreme weather events pose an enormous and increasing threat to the nation’s electric power systems and the associated socio-economic systems that depend on reliable delivery of electric power. The US Department of Energy reported in 2015, almost a quarter of unplanned grid outages were caused by extreme weather events and variability in the environment. Because climate change increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, communities everywhere will need to take steps to better prepare for, and if possible prevent major outages. While utilities have software tools available to help plan their daily and future operations, these tools do not include capabilities to help them plan for and recover from extreme events. Software for resilient design and recovery is not available commercially and research efforts in this area are preliminary. In this project, we are developing and deploying a suite of novel software tools to anticipate, absorb and recover from extreme events. The innovations in the project include the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning for distribution grid resilience, specifically, by using predictive analytics, image recognition and classification, and increased learning and problem-solving capabilities for the anticipation of grid events.

Authors: Ashley Pilipiszyn (Stanford University)
ICML 2019 Meta-Optimization of Optimal Power Flow (Ideas Track)
Abstract and authors: (click to expand)

Abstract: The planning and operation of electricity grids is carried out by solving various forms of con- strained optimization problems. With the increasing variability of system conditions due to the integration of renewable and other distributed energy resources, such optimization problems are growing in complexity and need to be repeated daily, often limited to a 5 minute solve-time. To address this, we propose a meta-optimizer that is used to initialize interior-point solvers. This can significantly reduce the number of iterations to converge to optimality.

Authors: Mahdi Jamei (Invenia Labs); Letif Mones (Invenia Labs); Alex Robson (Invenia Labs); Lyndon White (Invenia Labs); James Requeima (Invenia Labs); Cozmin Ududec (Invenia Labs)