Emerging Issues in Energy and Artificial Intelligence

Catalog description

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is growing at a fast pace with major technology companies announcing ambitious goals to scale in the next few years. Over 200 million people now use ChatGPT each month and companies and governments around the world are considering how best to tap AI and to respond to AI’s rapid growth. AI offers many applications that can enhance energy security and reliability and promote energy efficiency, environmental performance, and electric grid modernization. But AI systems training and use are energy intensive, potentially creating new burdens for energy markets and electricity utilities. Therefore, the energy industry is playing a pivotal role in enabling the AI expansion. In this course, we will explore how the growth ambitions of AI (like training large models and data center demands) is re-shaping energy consumption and how the energy and tech industries, along with public and private sectors, can innovate to handle the increased demand as AI scales globally. We will examine real world case studies on how AI applications are being used in the energy industry and study case studies on new startup AI energy businesses including the technology, market potential, and evaluation of sales and profitability over time. Over the course of the semester, students will gain an understanding the potential roles for AI to enable electric grid reliability, energy efficiency in the built environment, and fuel-saving in automated transportation and urban systems planning. Students will be introduced to how to use a large language model to perform regulatory analysis for energy siting and permitting and consider how start-up entrepreneurship is bringing new AI energy-related solutions to scale.