by David Ferguson, EDF Energy The potential for Artificial Intelligence in the energy industry, EDF Energy's early experiments and our vision of the future. From the FreshTech 2017 conference by TechExeter www.techexeter.uk

1. EDF Energy R&D UK Centre
Transforming the energy system with AI
David Ferguson,
Head of Digital Innovation

2. The rules of digital innovation
Move fast and break things.
Unless you are breaking stuff,
you are not moving fast
enough.
“
”- Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook

3. Move fast and break things?

4. The old energy system

5. The new energy system

6. The new energy system… it’s really complex!
1 million homes with
solar panels
1 million homes with
smart thermostats

7. Energy innovation is not coming from the old energy sector
New tech + new ways of working

8. 80
5 Teams People
40 Phd students15 NationalitiesBudget
Nuclear
Renewables
Smart Customers
Digital Innovation
Open Innovation
Brighton
Manchester
London
£40m
Conventions or contracts with EDF
Energy Business Units or EDF Group100% 26% 10%
Public fundingCorporate activities
Funding
3 Locations
EDF Energy R&D UK Centre

9. Image: Wired
- Andrew Ng, Baidu, 2016
AI will transform many
industries.
But it’s not magic.
“
”
Let’s not get carried away just yet

10. What is it? Use cases for EDF Energy
Generation
● Condition monitoring
● Predictive maintenance
● Digital replicas
● Operational support
● Autonomous robotic devices
Customers
● Customer service
● Energy use analytics
● Home automation
● Optimisation and trading
Grids and networks
● Predictive maintenance
● Demand-side response
● Trading
Support functions
● Supply chain optimisation
● Legal services
Reasoning
Knowledge
Planning
Learning
Natural Language
Understanding
Perception
How could AI apply to EDF Energy?

11. Early R&D
R&D UK Centre

12. Digital replicas: label recognition in power stations
Images: EDF
30,000
labels
500 bn
pixels
4
person-months
per building
10
buildings per
year

13. Digits zone cropping
Preprocessing (B&W and cleaning)
Digits recognition:
02615.0
Customer service: optical character recognition

14. Energy use analytics: Virtual Data Lab

15. Customer service: chatbots and voice

16. Our vision
R&D UK Centre

17. Real-time condition
monitoring
Two use cases for AI for EDF Energy
The intelligent home

18. Real-time condition
monitoring
AI in power stations
1 - Explain
2 - Predict
3 - Prescribe
4 - Automate

19. Real-time condition
monitoring
AI for residential customers
The intelligent home
1 - Show me
2 - Help me
3 - Do it for me

20. The challenges of turning vision into reality
R&D UK Centre

21. Delivering the promise of AI in a ‘legacy’ company
Challenges
Generic
Specific to legacy
orgs.
Skills
Ethics
Privacy
Security
Data
Connectivity
Roll out
‘The day job’

22. Conclusions
 The energy system is complex and is changing
 AI is not magic
 It will help manage the new, complex system
 Our approach: start with small, difficult problems
 Legacy companies have a significant disadvantage

23. Thank you!
david.ferguson@edfenergy.com
@daveyf
R&D UK Centre