Electrification (of energy demand) and deep decarbonization—via clean renewable energy supply—are two important advances on the path towards lowering carbon emissions in the fight against climate change.
The rate of penetration of renewables supply is fundamentally constrained by the volatility of renewables production, and coincidence of production with demand—especially solar. Deep decarbonization involves significant penetration and integration of variable renewables (VRE) with grids, intermediated by electricity markets and energy trading.
Monetization of renewables, integration of energy storage as a strategic resource, and energy trading / risk management involve increasingly complex decisions under uncertainty. Naturally, companies want to leverage their wealth of data for such decisions. These companies also would like to leverage the state-of-the-art AI technologies (deep learning, deep reinforcement/generative learning) but would like to simplify the challenges around data engineering and application of these technologies. Unfortunately, most companies are addressing these problems with bespoke solutions and this approach is both expensive and difficult to scale.
Today energy storage is expensive or has a limited number of cycles. A holy grail in renewable energy is an energy storage device that “time-shifts” energy an infinite number of times to help balance demand with increasingly volatile supply at multiple points on the grid. Virtual battery technologies offer a unique opportunity to use elastic compute combined with elastic power to emulate a battery.
We expect the lowering of costs in renewables to lead to a large number (10-100X) of remote sites (with rich renewable resources). This increase will drive an associated need for remote operational support to handle the management of the assets – including management of health, live streaming performance information, and assessing risk conditions.
Increased renewables production will drive demand technologies for superior forecasting, stochastic optimization, and autonomous remote management—real-time & look-ahead uncertainty, risk management, and autonomous remote operations will help manage these requirements.
As COVID has changed life, lifestyles and workstyles—a blend of remote/local work is the new normal, leading to increasing migration or creation of new “home bases” and rejuvenating remote communities. Clean and resilient remote communities (RE microgrids + e-mobility + Azure Space/MDC + local/indoor farming and water) will meet the needs of flexible and affordable clean transportation.