AI tool could help plan NYS's transition to clean electrical power

Cornell engineers have developed a powerful artificial intelligence tool that could help New York state and other governments plan the transition to a carbon-neutral power sector, using a combination of machine learning and optimization modeling to provide hour-by-hour analysis of the empire state's energy needs. States including New York, which has committed to producing 100% clean electricity by 2040, are using technological, environmental and economic data to determine the best policy and investment choices for integrating more renewable energy into the grid. But from a computational perspective, the modeling challenge is enormous, said Fengqi You, the Roxanne E. and Michael J. Zak Professor in Energy Systems Engineering at Cornell Engineering. "There are design decisions such as how many solar panels or wind turbines to install, and how much energy storage capacity to build," said You, a senior faculty fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability, "but even more complex are hourly operating decisions such as how much electricity goes from upstate to downstate, or from a storage center to a neighborhood." You said such high-resolution planning can be achieved using "multi-scale, bottom-up optimization" modeling combined with machine learning.