A world first innovation that predicts cloud movements through satellite imagery, dramatically improving solar generation forecasts.

This Summer, Open Climate Fix took part in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for the first time. We were lucky enough to be joined by four mentees for the programme, with each bringing their own passion and interest in sustainability to their individual projects. From increasing the accuracy of our solar forecasting tool Quartz Solar, to implementing GenCast into our forecasts, our mentees have produced some incredible results during their time with us.

AI has developed at a stunning pace over the last few years in fields such as natural language processing and image recognition. Given all this development, it's surprising that we haven't seen similarly rapid advancement in the application of AI to electricity forecasting given its critical role in people's lives and the transition to net zero carbon emissions. We'd love to live in a world where it's super-easy to work with huge NWP and satellite datasets. We are already dedicating significant time and effort towards this, and would love to hear from people who support this vision and who can help!

Open Climate Fix and Alan Turing Institute are working on a project to predict cloud cover and solar energy generation.

In the realm of renewable energy, wind and solar power stand out for their potential to reduce carbon emissions at scale. However, the journey from potential to power isn't without its hurdles, with renewable energy variability posing a significant challenge to grid operators and asset owners. The level of variability, and hence the challenges, depends on local climates and the locations of renewable assets. Let’s compare the variability in two regions where we have worked. 

What do you know about clouds? Most of us know the basics. Large white fluffy things that hang about in the sky. Hold rain. Ruin summer picnics, that sort of thing. But there's more, so much more to know. Here are 10 surprising facts about clouds and their role in climate change.

In OCF's mission to create a greener future with short-term solar forecasts, we decided to handle the Airflow deployment ourselves instead of using managed services. We believe in being cost-effective and providing value-driven solutions.

Open source is a movement that has been transforming software through the 21st Century. At Open Climate Fix, everything we do is open source. This allows us to grow faster, to have better software and particularly to have greater climate impact. By being open we enable the crowds to engage with the problem, moving faster than any one person can alone. Hear Jacob Bieker summarise how and why open code and open data are crucial to addressing the climate challenge.

OCF’s first focus is on developing short-term solar forecasts that will decrease CO2 emissions and help electricity network operators integrate more renewables into their power grid. In this article, we talk about how our Nowcasting Service can help with the energy transition.

Over the last couple of months, we have focused on our Machine Learning (ML) research around solar electricity short-term forecasting. The work is progressing nicely: in early March we released our initial results, showing that OCF’s best forecast already is 2.8 times more accurate than the existing solar forecast from National Grid ESO.

Open Climate Fix has recently completed the first phase of our flagship solar PVNowcasting project, which we have been working on with National Grid ESO (NG-ESO) since July 2021. With Nowcasting, we are working to improve the PV output forecast National Grid-ESO is using.

With January already coming to an end, we thought it would be good to take a moment to reflect on everything that happened at OCF in 2021 and bring everyone up to speed on all the exciting developments. And there have been plenty!

Wow, where do we start? So much has happened in the last few months! It’s definitely time to provide another progress update. Keep on reading to learn more about how our projects are doing, news about funding and how the team is growing...

This morning Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, announced the successful applicants to the Google.org Impact Challenge on Climate. The challenge commits €10M to fund “bold ideas that aim to use technology to accelerate Europe’s progress toward a greener, more resilient future”...

In Yuval Noah Harari’s excellent book “Sapiens”, he outlines a fascinating history of how Homo Sapiens pulled apart from other species. That was through the use of our language to describe things that we have never seen, smelt or touched.

All of our values here at Open Climate Fix can be linked back to one word: Sustainability. Let’s start with the obvious: Environmental Sustainability. We are terrified by climate change and want to act on this immediately.

We’ve been quiet for a while, but that’s not because we were enjoying the summer on a small beach island (I wish!), but because we have been super busy with all our projects. Now that things are a tiny bit calmer - not much - we felt like it’s time for another progress update.

Say you want to build an innovative new information service for the energy system. Maybe that’s an interactive map of energy assets; or a resource assessment tool that automatically determines the cheapest place to install new distributed energy resources (DERs)...

Last week, the Open Data Institute, a research institute founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, announced funding for seven UK initiatives and projects as part of their Innovate UK funded R&D programme. Open Climate Fix is one of the seven winners of the fund and will be joining the programme until March 2021.

How do you get all of those distributed energy assets talking to each other to enable the smart use of power around the grid, given the electricity grid is sometimes described as the most complex machine humans have ever built?

To give a feel for why we're so excited about sharing energy data, let me tell a science fiction story to illustrate what we hope a 'web of linked energy data' could enable…. It's 2030. You buy a new electric vehicle...

Back in the 1980s, computers communicated over a hodge-podge mix of clunky, complex protocols. Building new services spanning more than one machine (or just maintaining existing services) was painful, expensive and slow.

There is certainly a lot going on in the world right now, and we hope everyone reading this blog post is in good health. While it is hard to think about anything else right now, the challenge of climate change is no less urgent. We wanted to give an update on what's happening at Open Climate Fix.

If you'd like to use computer science to help mitigate climate change, then check out these resources: ClimateChange.ai - All about using AI to mitigate and adapt to climate change. Check out their excellent...

Solar PV mapping is a sub-project of our PV nowcasting project. Nowcasting will provide solar PV yield predictions for any location. To be able to arrive at an accurate forecast for solar power generation (out-turn), we need to know where all the PV panels are!

At Open Climate Fix, we're about to start work on our solar electricity (PV) nowcasting project. The aim of this project is to help reduce emissions (and costs) by forecasting solar electricity power production at high temporal and spatial resolution, but with a forecast time horizon of a few hours.

I'm building a non-profit called Open Climate Fix, entirely focused on using open-science to help fix climate change ASAP. We'd love help :) This blog post lists a few concrete things we need help with.

Two days ago I tweeted a link to a blog post I wrote stating that I'd left DeepMind to start a non-profit research lab, focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. I've been absolutely blown away by the response! I was expecting maybe a couple of re-tweets. At the time of writing...

Solar PV is the single biggest source of uncertainty in the National Grid's forecasts. To mitigate against the risk of a large cloud sweeping across the country (and hence the grid losing gigawatts of PV generation), the National Grid keep lots of natural gas generators idling ('spinning reserve').

I left Google DeepMind. This is a particularly odd decision because I love the team I worked with at DeepMind. Since joining DeepMind, I've been constantly amazed by this team's compassion, focus, intelligence, optimism, and desire for real-world impact.