West Somerset Lagoon would harness renewable energy for UK's AI boom - and create'iconic' arc around Bristol Channel The architect of the London Eye wants to build a vast tidal power station in a 14-mile arc off the coast of Somerset that could help Britain meet surging electricity demand to power artificial intelligence - and create a new race track to let cyclists skim over the Bristol Channel. Julia Barfield, who designed the Eye and the i360 observation tower in Brighton, is part of a team that has drawn up the £11bn proposal. The proposal comes amid growing concern that rapidly rising use of AI in Britain will drive up carbon emissions unless more renewable energy sources are found. The AI boom is expected to add to sharp increases in demand for electricity across the UK, which the government estimated this month could more than double by 2050. "If the decision is to go ahead with adopting more and more AI - which I am surprised is not being questioned more at a time of climate emergency - then it is going to be better with a renewable energy source," said Barfield.

Integrated wind-solar-wave marine energy systems hold broad promise for supplying clean electricity in offshore and coastal regions. By leveraging the spatiotemporal complementarity of multiple resources, such systems can effectively mitigate the intermittency and volatility of single-source outputs, thereby substantially improving overall power-generation efficiency and resource utilization. Accurate ultra-short-term forecasting is crucial for ensuring secure operation and optimizing proactive dispatch. However, most existing forecasting methods construct separate models for each energy source, insufficiently account for the complex couplings among multiple energies, struggle to capture the system's nonlinear and nonstationary dynamics, and typically depend on extensive manual parameter tuning-limitations that constrain both predictive performance and practicality. We address this issue using a Bayesian-optimized Multivariate Variational Mode Decomposition-Long Short-Term Memory (MVMD-LSTM) framework. The framework first applies MVMD to jointly decompose wind, solar and wave power series so as to preserve cross-source couplings; it uses Bayesian optimization to automatically search the number of modes and the penalty parameter in the MVMD process to obtain intrinsic mode functions (IMFs); finally, an LSTM models the resulting IMFs to achieve ultra-short-term power forecasting for the integrated system. Experiments based on field measurements from an offshore integrated energy platform in China show that the proposed framework significantly outperforms benchmark models in terms of MAPE, RMSE and MAE. The results demonstrate superior predictive accuracy, robustness, and degree of automation.

As the consumption of traditional energy sources intensifies and their adverse environmental impacts become more pronounced, wave energy stands out as a highly promising member of the renewable energy family due to its high energy density, stability, widespread distribution, and environmental friendliness. The key to its development lies in the precise prediction of Significant Wave Height (WVHT). However, wave energy signals exhibit strong nonlinearity, abrupt changes, multi-scale periodicity, data sparsity, and high-frequency noise interference; additionally, physical models for wave energy prediction incur extremely high computational costs. To address these challenges, this study proposes a hybrid model combining STL-FFT-STFT-TCN-LSTM. This model exploits the Seasonal-Trend Decomposition Procedure based on Loess (STL), Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT), Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN), and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) technologies. The model aims to optimize multi-scale feature fusion, capture extreme wave heights, and address issues related to high-frequency noise and periodic signals, thereby achieving efficient and accurate prediction of significant wave height. Experiments were conducted using hourly data from NOAA Station 41008 and 41047 spanning 2019 to 2022. The results showed that compared with other single models and hybrid models, the STL-FFT-STFT-TCN-LSTM model achieved significantly higher prediction accuracy in capturing extreme wave heights and suppressing high-frequency noise, with MAE reduced by 15.8\%-40.5\%, SMAPE reduced by 8.3\%-20.3\%, and R increased by 1.31\%-2.9\%; in ablation experiments, the model also demonstrated the indispensability of each component step, validating its superiority in multi-scale feature fusion.

This paper investigates the capability of Neural Networks (NNs) as alternatives to the traditional methods to analyse the performance of aerofoils used in the wind and tidal energy industry. The current methods used to assess the characteristic lift and drag coefficients include Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), thin aerofoil and panel methods, all face trade-offs between computational speed and the accuracy of the results and as such NNs have been investigated as an alternative with the aim that it would perform both quickly and accurately. As such, this paper provides a benchmark for the windAI_bench dataset published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in the USA. In order to validate the methodology of the benchmarking, the AirfRANSdataset benchmark is used as both a starting point and a point of comparison. This study evaluates four neural networks (MLP, PointNet, GraphSAGE, GUNet) trained on a range of aerofoils at 25 angles of attack (4$^\circ$ to 20$^\circ$) to predict fluid flow and calculate lift coefficients ($C_L$) via the panel method. GraphSAGE and GUNet performed well during the training phase, but underperformed during testing. Accordingly, this paper has identified PointNet and MLP as the two strongest models tested, however whilst the results from MLP are more commonly correct for predicting the behaviour of the fluid, the results from PointNet provide the more accurate results for calculating $C_L$.

Precise forecasting of significant wave height (Hs) is essential for the development and utilization of wave energy. The challenges in predicting Hs arise from its non-linear and non-stationary characteristics. The combination of decomposition preprocessing and machine learning models have demonstrated significant effectiveness in Hs prediction by extracting data features. However, decomposing the unknown data in the test set can lead to data leakage issues. To simultaneously achieve data feature extraction and prevent data leakage, a novel Adaptive Feature Extraction Time-Frequency Network (AFE-TFNet) is proposed to improve prediction accuracy and stability. It is encoder-decoder rolling framework. The encoder consists of two stages: feature extraction and feature fusion. In the feature extraction stage, global and local frequency domain features are extracted by combining Wavelet Transform (WT) and Fourier Transform (FT), and multi-scale frequency analysis is performed using Inception blocks. In the feature fusion stage, time-domain and frequency-domain features are integrated through dominant harmonic sequence energy weighting (DHSEW). The decoder employed an advanced long short-term memory (LSTM) model. Hourly measured wind speed (Ws), dominant wave period (DPD), average wave period (APD) and Hs from three stations are used as the dataset, and the four metrics are employed to evaluate the forecasting performance. Results show that AFE-TFNet significantly outperforms benchmark methods in terms of prediction accuracy. Feature extraction can significantly improve the prediction accuracy. DHSEW has substantially increased the accuracy of medium-term to long-term forecasting. The prediction accuracy of AFE-TFNet does not demonstrate significant variability with changes of rolling time window size. Overall, AFE-TFNet shows strong potential for handling complex signal forecasting.

Reducing the environmental impact of cloud computing requires efficient workload distribution across geographically dispersed Data Center Clusters (DCCs) and simultaneously optimizing liquid and air (HVAC) cooling with time shift of workloads within individual data centers (DC). This paper introduces Green-DCC, which proposes a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based hierarchical controller to optimize both workload and liquid cooling dynamically in a DCC. By incorporating factors such as weather, carbon intensity, and resource availability, Green-DCC addresses realistic constraints and interdependencies. We demonstrate how the system optimizes multiple data centers synchronously, enabling the scope of digital twins, and compare the performance of various RL approaches based on carbon emissions and sustainability metrics while also offering a framework and benchmark simulation for broader ML research in sustainability.

Environmental pollution and fossil fuel depletion have prompted the need for renewable energy-based power generation. However, its stability is often challenged by low energy density and non-stationary conditions. Wave energy converters (WECs), in particular, need reliable real-time wave height prediction to address these issues caused by irregular wave patterns, which can lead to the inefficient and unstable operation of WECs. In this study, we propose an AI-powered reliable real-time wave height prediction model that integrates long short-term memory (LSTM) networks for temporal prediction with deep ensemble (DE) for robust uncertainty quantification (UQ), ensuring high accuracy and reliability. To further enhance the reliability, uncertainty calibration is applied, which has proven to significantly improve the quality of the quantified uncertainty. Using real operational data from an oscillating water column-wave energy converter (OWC-WEC) system in Jeju, South Korea, the model achieves notable accuracy (R2 > 0.9), while increasing uncertainty quality by over 50% through simple calibration technique. Furthermore, a comprehensive parametric study is conducted to explore the effects of key model hyperparameters, offering valuable guidelines for diverse operational scenarios, characterized by differences in wavelength, amplitude, and period. These results demonstrate the model's capability to deliver reliable predictions, facilitating digital twin of the ocean.

In this paper, we propose Knowledge Base augmented Language Model (KBLaM), a new method for augmenting Large Language Models (LLMs) with external knowledge. KBLaM works with a knowledge base (KB) constructed from a corpus of documents, transforming each piece of knowledge in the KB into continuous key-value vector pairs via pre-trained sentence encoders with linear adapters and integrating them into pre-trained LLMs via a specialized rectangular attention mechanism. Unlike Retrieval-Augmented Generation, KBLaM eliminates external retrieval modules, and unlike in-context learning, its computational overhead scales linearly with KB size rather than quadratically. Our approach enables integrating a large KB of more than 10K triples into an 8B pre-trained LLM of only 8K context window on one single A100 80GB GPU and allows for dynamic updates without model fine-tuning or retraining. Experiments demonstrate KBLaM's effectiveness in various tasks, including question-answering and open-ended reasoning, while providing interpretable insights into its use of the augmented knowledge.

Tidal energy is one of the key components in increasing the penetration rate of renewable energy. The penetration of tidal energy in the electrical grid depends on the accuracy of tidal current speed forecasting. Modeling inaccuracies hinder forecast accuracy. Previous research has primarily used physical models to forecast tidal current speed. However, tidal current variations influenced by the orbital periods of celestial bodies make accurate physical modeling challenging. Researching the multiple periodicity of tides is crucial for accurately forecasting tidal current speed. In this article, we propose the Wavelet-Enhanced Convolutional Network (WCN) to learn multiple periodicity. The framework embeds intra-period and inter-period variations of one-dimensional tidal current data into the rows and columns of a two-dimensional tensor. Then, the two-dimensional variations of the sequence can be processed by convolutional kernels. We integrate a time-frequency analysis method into the framework to further address local periodic features. Additionally, to enhance the framework's stability, we optimize the framework's hyperparameters with the Tree-structured Parzen Estimator algorithm. The proposed framework avoids the lack of learning multiple periodicity. Compared with benchmarks, the proposed framework reduces the mean absolute error and mean square error in 10-step forecasting by, at most, 90.36% and 97.56%, respectively.

The alignment process changes several properties of a large language model's (LLM's) output distribution. We analyze two aspects of post-alignment distributional shift of LLM responses. First, we re-examine previously reported reductions in response diversity post-alignment. Our analysis suggests that an apparent drop in the diversity of responses is largely explained by quality control and information aggregation. Alignment suppresses irrelevant and unhelpful content while shifting the output distribution toward longer responses that cover information spanning several responses from the base LLM, essentially presenting diverse information in a single response. Finding little evidence that alignment suppresses useful information, it is natural to ask the opposite question: do aligned models surface information that cannot be recovered from base models? Our second investigation shows this is not the case and the behavior of aligned models is recoverable from base models without fine-tuning. A combination of in-context examples and lower-resolution semantic hints about response content can elicit responses from base LLMs that are as similar to alignment-tuned LLM responses as alignment-tuned LLM responses are to each other. Taken together, these results indicate that current alignment techniques capture but do not extend the useful subset of assistant-like base LLM behavior, providing further evidence for the Superficial Alignment Hypothesis. They also show that in-context alignment can go surprisingly far as a strategy for imitating aligned LLMs without fine-tuning. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/thomlake/investigating-alignment.