9 June 2023 11:38 pm
Circular Economy and Digital Technologies can

Circular Economy and Digital Technologies can

May 29, 2023

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The Built environment needing a sustainable future should rely on a circular economy and digital technologies to support its building industry. 

These can help it to cope with its worldwide environmental challenge. How is the question that is answered by Jacqueline Cramer.

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How circular economy and digital technologies can support the building sector to cope with its worldwide environmental challenge?

By Jacqueline Cramer

 

The building sector can address pressing environmental problems by leveraging two major trends: circular economy and digital technologies. Circular building practices emphasize restorative design principles, which can significantly reduce the amount of virgin material used and the environmental footprint of buildings. When combined with digital technologies, circular practices can achieve even higher environmental benefits. Such technologies enable visualization of the environmental impact along the entire value chain, facilitating smart design, production, and use to increase material- and eco-efficiency. However, realizing the full potential of these trends requires more than just technological advancements. Institutional, behavioral, and socio-economic system changes are essential to effect a transition towards a circular and digital economy. To facilitate such a transition, a new form of governance is needed, in which network governance complements conventional public governance. Network governance fosters the formation of coalitions of willing partners that jointly strive towards the goal of system change, creating a fertile ground for a new economic paradigm, behavioral change, government regulation and innovation. The effectiveness of network governance in supporting public governance depends on the specific socio-cultural and political context of a country. However, a thoughtful application of this governance model can facilitate the building sector’s journey towards greater material- and environmental efficiency.

Introduction

The building sector is confronted with the imperative of accelerating its environmental performance. Currently, building and construction generate 36 percent of global energy consumption, produce 40 percent of waste and account for roughly 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions worldwide1. To tackle these environmental challenges, the building sector must capture the opportunity that two major trends provide: digital technologies and the circular economy. This article explains why these trends can be critical for mitigating the environmental impact of the building sector and outlines strategies for how their implementation can be achieved and accelerated.

Digital technologies

The application of digital technologies can benefit the building sector by making the building process more material- and eco-efficient2. A broad field of digital technologies are available and continuously scaling, including artificial intelligence, big data, cloud computing, cyber physical systems, blockchain and virtual and augmented reality3. However, the building sector has just begun to adopt these emerging technologies. Integrating these technologies into daily work processes would significantly add value to the sector4. For instance, data management tools—such as Building Information Modeling (BIM), material passports, lifecycle analysis and material flow analysis—can enhance transparency about the environmental performance of the entire building chain and provide insight into how the chain can become more eco-efficient5.

The broad field of virtual and augmented reality can provide a 3D understanding of how a building is constructed, with what materials, and how this can be attuned to the needs of the customer. In addition, it can optimize resource use during the construction, maintenance, and end-of-life phases. An example is the use of digital twins6. This is a virtual representation of an object or system that spans its lifecycle, is updated from real-time data, and uses simulation, machine learning and attendant reasoning to help decision-making, also about material-efficiency7. In addition, 3D printing offers a greener building technique that eliminates a great amount of CO2 emitting and energy-consuming processes compared to conventional building techniques8. Thus, digital technologies can help improve the environmental performance of buildings, particularly when combined with the circular economy.

Circular economy

The concept of the circular economy is simple yet urgent. It highlights the fact that we are overconsuming natural resources, some of which are scarce, on a global scale. In 1970, we only needed one earth to provide mankind with the necessary resources; nowadays we need 1.75 earths. If we continue on our current path, we will require 3 earths by 20509. The Circular Gap Report has revealed that our world is still largely linear10, as we only bring 8.6% of what we use back into the cycle, resulting in a Circularity Gap of over 90%. To address this issue and become more prudent with raw materials, energy, and water, pleas are made to move to a circular economy11. There have been various definitions for the term ‘circular economy’12. However, the common denominator is that it is restorative by design and aims to keep products, components, and materials at their highest utility and value, distinguishing between technical and biological cycles13. This notion is particularly significant important for the building sector because of the high percentage of waste produced. However, this sector is characterized by strong project-based institutionalized practices and market mechanisms, which in many aspects do not facilitate the inclusion of circular economy principles14.

Technically, it is possible to consume far fewer raw materials in the building sector and drastically reduce CO2 emissions. We can extend the lifespan of buildings, redesign them with circularity in mind, reuse parts of them and recycle their materials15. Three Dutch examples serve to illustrate the benefits of building with circular economy principles. For instance, the distribution system operator Alliander—an entity responsible for distributing and managing energy to final consumers—opened its new office in 2015 in Duiven. Although everything about the building exudes style and newness, almost nothing in it is actually new. In fact, 83% of the materials used in the building are recycled. Similarly, in the new Venlo town hall (established in 2016 in the Netherlands) all the raw materials used in the construction can be fully reused with no loss of value. Moreover, the town hall building is entirely energy neutral, thanks to features such as solar panels, thermal energy storage, and solar boilers. The Green House pavilion is the final example, designed to be temporary, as the municipality of Utrecht has plans to redevelop the area in 15 years. The construction used as many recycled materials as possible, which will also be reused when the building is removed. And ultimately, when that happens, there will be no trace left of The Green House in or on the land. The building’s construction is designed to ensure that no pipes, cables, or sewage will remain in the soil under the pavilion, thus minimizing its impact. However, scaling up such iconic projects and making circular building mainstream remains a significant challenge. It requires system innovation, in which technological change goes hand in hand with a socio-economic and behavioral change. The main obstacles to realizing this system change include a focus on short-term goals, complex supply chains, a lack of collaboration between stakeholders, and the absence of a commonly agreed definition of the circular economy within the industry16.

Governance

Experiences in circular economy have demonstrated that the aforementioned obstacles can be overcome with effective governance during the transition to a circular system17. This shift requires a fundamental departure from the current linear system in which products are carelessly discarded after use. No single entity, whether it be a company, local government, or NGO, can undertake such a comprehensive system change on their own. Collaboration among partners who are committed to contributing to the change is necessary to establish a robust network. To ensure its efficacy, this network should be orchestrated through a concept known as ‘network governance’. Network governance is not meant to replace conventional public governance, but rather to complement it. It facilitates the attainment of circular objectives and strengthens societal support for more stringent government measures.

A comparative study encompassing 16 countries has illustrated that network governance can offer substantial added value18. However, the extent to which network governance can support public governance is contingent upon specific socio-cultural and political contexts19. For instance, in countries where the government takes a strong leadership role in circular economy and receptivity towards network governance is high, the conditions for initiating and accelerating circular economy are propitious. The Dutch circular building examples mentioned above serve as a case in point. In contrast, where both forms of governance are weak, it is more arduous to launch circular initiatives. Nevertheless, opportunities for developing circular economy can be identified in all 16 countries studied. In Australia, for instance, industry, government, and NGOs exhibit a rather antagonistic attitude towards one another. However, this does not preclude cooperation among these actors in sectors such as building; it simply necessitates additional incentives. For example, when commissioning parties cooperate in restructuring an urban area and implementing circular strategies, they can urge the network of contractors to exchange data and adopt an integrated circular approach. Digital technologies can reinforce such cooperation.

Hence, the building sector worldwide can make substantial strides on the path to circular economy when new forms of network cooperation among pertinent actors are implemented in conjunction with government leadership. Individual actors frequently hesitate to assume leadership roles in system change, as they do not perceive it to be their core business and await others to step forward. To resolve this predicament, independent intermediaries, known as transition brokers, can play a pivotal role in orchestrating the change process. They can align actors with divergent interests around a shared vision and resolve impasses. To be effective, transition brokers must possess a specific set of competencies and acquire the mandate to function as intermediaries. Once accepted, transition brokers can accelerate the process significantly.

Researchers can also contribute to the transition towards a circular building sector. However, to render their research socially relevant, individual projects should be clustered around themes that collectively portray the broader picture of transitioning to a circular economy. In this way, research can be mobilized that centers on fundamental solutions confronting society today. Generalists with sufficient knowledge about the variety of innovations and the specifics of the building sector are certainly equipped to bundle research and highlight the most promising innovations. These knowledge brokers can facilitate the utilization of research in practical applications in the building sector, in the short or long term20. This would enhance the value of the arduous work undertaken by numerous researchers in the field of the built environment.

The image above is credit to IStock.

.Read more on NATURE urban sustainability

Greenhouse gas emissions tracking project

May 27, 2023

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Greenhouse gas emissions tracking project all over the world looks out of context or mishandled, as We are about to break the 1.5°C limit and as rightly put by Isabelle Kempe in her article republished here. 

Greenhouse gas emissions tracking project addresses ‘flawed’ approach cities use now, researchers say

The image above is metamorworks via Getty Images

City Climate Intelligence can provide free, near-real-time information on greenhouse gas emissions at the city, neighborhood, building and street level.

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Published in Smart City Dive. May 26, 2023

Associate Editor

 

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The systems cities use to monitor and analyze greenhouse gas emissions are “flawed,” says a group of researchers from Carbon Monitor, Hestia, IG3IS, Nexqt and RMI.

That’s why the group is developing City Climate Intelligence, which it describes as a “next-generation” methodology that offers cities free, near-real-time greenhouse gas emissions information at three increasingly granular levels: the metropolitan area, neighborhood and building and street level. The methodology draws on satellite data and local information such as public building databases, transmission service operator data and GPS data.

The greenhouse gas inventory is a hallmark of city climate action plans nationwide, allowing leaders to understand how much climate pollution their city emits and which sectors are responsible. While early tools to create that inventory were suitable for raising big-picture awareness — for example, that a city should drive down transportation or building emissions — they aren’t cutting it anymore, Nexqt founder and CEO Fouzi Benkhelifa said. As climate change impacts bear down on communities, and decarbonization deadlines loom, cities need more specific, timely data to make decisions that reduce emissions the most, he said.

Emma Loewen, a senior associate with RMI’s urban transformation team, described City Climate Intelligence’s future as akin to the National Weather Service. “Everyone can access it; it’s free. It’s updated in a timely manner that is useful for people,” she said. “And there’s no real questioning of it. It’s just an independent third party that is respected and taken for face value.”

Cities currently face numerous challenges in measuring and monitoring greenhouse gas emissions. Inventories are time-consuming and resource-intensive, costing up to tens of thousands of dollars, points out an April report by the City Climate Intelligence team. Further, existing data systems on urban greenhouse gas emissions aren’t designed for planning or implementing emissions reduction efforts, the report says.

“During RMI workshops, city governments and community advocates alike identified policy planning capabilities as a key component of an optimal emissions data tool,” the report states. “Currently, these city stakeholders don’t have the capacity to conduct detailed data analyses on the impact of proposed climate solutions.”

The City Climate Intelligence team has provided emissions data at the metropolitan area level for 53 cities globally, including Madison, Wisconsin, and Portland, Oregon. For the covered cities, users can see two years of emissions data at a 10-kilometer resolution broken down into six sectors: ground transportation, power, industry, residential, aviation and international shipping. The team plans to eventually offer this information for every major metropolitan area in the world.

The researchers have also explored the potential to use street- and building-level data to simulate the effects of specific climate policies in Los Angeles and Paris. In Los Angeles, their analysis showed that installing rooftop solar in central LA for households making less than $50,000 annually would result in a 21.6% annual reduction in citywide emissions compared with 2019 levels. The median savings in annual electricity costs for the more than 260,000 households making the switch would be $1,884, the analysis estimates.

This ability to support effective decision-making is part of what sets City Climate Intelligence apart from other tools, the researchers say. “There are a lot of greenhouse gas emissions data platforms out there,” but they aren’t driving climate action on the ground, Loewen said.

Her team isn’t alone in identifying this information gap. An October report by the National Academy of Sciences acknowledges the rapidly increasing needs of cities and states to manage emissions and calls for accelerated development of greenhouse gas emissions information “at more granular temporal and spatial scales.”

It’s not just city leaders that the researchers believe could benefit from City Climate Intelligence. RMI’s report points to potential uses by community-based organizations to raise awareness of emissions-related equity issues, journalists to track progress toward goals and the climate finance community to locate areas for investment.

Next, the City Climate Intelligence team plans to create a policy toolkit using neighborhood-, street- and building-level information to simulate the impact of policies, investments and infrastructure. It will also develop a platform for the data and methodology that has a user-friendly design, is integrated with existing inventory reporting frameworks and can layer socioeconomic data sets with emissions data.

The researchers also plan to expand emissions data to a larger group of cities, prioritizing smaller ones and those in the Global South that might not have the information they need for a baseline greenhouse gas emissions inventory, the report says.

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Creating a Culture of Sustainability in Homebuilding

May 26, 2023

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Yale School of Management published this insight on Creating a Culture of Sustainability in Homebuilding that could be said to be not beyond their acclaimed mission of educating leaders for business & society.  It is as wise as useful in these days of uncertainty.  Here it is.
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Creating a Culture of Sustainability in Homebuilding

Sustainably built homes cost more up front, but that investment can easily pay off over the decades with savings on heating and cooling—not to mention resiliency and improved indoor air quality. Aaron Smith ’16 is helping builders and buyers understand the benefits of building homes that can generate as much energy as they use.

Aaron Smith

CEO, Energy & Environmental Building Alliance (EEBA); CEO, GreenSmith Builders
Interview conducted and edited by Ted O’Callahan
We’re trying to transform an industry that has been doing things pretty much the same way for more than 100 years. We want to make healthier, electric, resilient, decarbonized, and net-zero homes the norm.

Q: What is the Energy and Environmental Building Alliance?

The Energy and Environmental Building Alliance (EEBA) is a community of 72,000 builders, architects, and other stakeholders across North America coming together to learn, share, and collaborate on how to build homes in a more sustainable manner.

Ultimately, we’re trying to transform an industry that has been doing things pretty much the same way for more than 100 years. We want to make healthier, electric, resilient, decarbonized, and net-zero homes the norm.

Q: Why is that important?

Forty percent of our energy use comes from buildings. That’s a significant contributor to climate change. Overall, the construction industry is very slow to adopt advances; even for great products and effective new approaches, it can take 20 years. But the technology’s there to do better, so if you want to innovate and disrupt, housing is a really interesting space right now.

The move to sustainable methods is a patchwork, but it’s ready to spread. We’re seeing the start of hockey stick growth. EEBA tracks single family homes and multi-family units built at or above a Zero Energy Ready standard across North America. Over the past two years there was a 440% increase.

Q: What do you mean by Zero Energy Ready and above?

The Zero Energy Ready Home is a standard set by the Department of Energy. To qualify a building must be energy efficient enough that a renewable energy system could offset the home’s annual energy use, so it’s extremely well insulated and extremely airtight, and may have an energy recovery ventilator. Above that is net zero, where a solar, wind, or renewable other system is producing all the energy the house needs. And the step beyond that is net positive, which is a building that actually exports energy into the grid.

There are a lot of standards and certification programs out there—LEED, National Green Building Standard, Passive House, Healthy Building, the Living Building Challenge. We tend to educate builders about all of them and allow them to choose the one that’s best for them and their clients.

Something that doesn’t have a certification program but we’re always focused on is building resiliency. How does it protect the occupants and continue to operate during a stressful period? With extreme weather events and potentially extended power outages that’s increasingly important.

The efficacy of solar panels has gone up so much that even a small amount of solar allows an efficient house to be net zero. Pairing that with new inverter technology, which lets your house feed excess solar power into the grid most of the time but switch to running the house directly off solar when the there’s a grid outage, adds resilience.

We’re seeing more and more battery deployment for backup within homes. Those can be dedicated systems or with something like the F-150 Lightning, Ford’s electric pickup, your EV can serve as backup power for the home during an outage.

Q: Is the interest in more sustainable building coming from builders, consumers, or somewhere else?

There are many drivers. In a few places, building codes are requiring new construction to be all electric. For those places, understanding how to build this way is really a license to operate. But for the most part, our members are professionals who want to be the best in their field. They have a sustainability mindset and a calling to build high-performance homes.

I learned about craftsmanship from my grandfather. He was proud of building homes that would last for 100 years. To me, sustainability is an extension of craftsmanship. It just makes sense. I hope my generation decides the building it’s putting up for the next 100 years will be sustainable. Building in the most sustainable way goes to a larger mission of being stewards of this planet for our kids and grandkids. I get excited by that.

And as millennials start to become the generation driving housing, their predisposition toward more sustainable and healthier is pushing awareness of building more sustainably into the industry.

When people consider buying a house, they look at the listing price. It’s not easy to look at the operating costs or the health costs, which can be dramatically different from one house to another.

In some cases, sustainability isn’t at the forefront. A builder in Texas who does net zero homes told me 15% of his customers do it for environmental reasons. Another 25% want the self-sufficiency of being able to go off the grid with their own water supply, solar power, and backup batteries. The remaining 60% do it for economic reasons. Between the rebates and incentives that are available and the certainty of owning their power supply so there won’t be escalating costs, they are ready to make the investment.

Q: Is it more expensive to build in a sustainable way?

It typically does cost from 1% to 11% more to build a very sustainable home. But it’s a lot like electric vehicles. The upfront cost is higher, but it you look at the total cost over time, it more than pays off the investment.

The problem is, when people consider buying a house, they look at the listing price. They don’t think to—and it’s not easy to—look at the operating costs or the health costs, which can be dramatically different from one house to another.

I didn’t ask about heating costs when I rented a wonderful 1740s farmhouse in Connecticut while I attended Yale SOM. It cost $1,000 a month to heat during the winter. Operating costs make a real difference.

In addition to running EEBA, I also co-founded GreenSmith Builders with Marc Wigder a classmate from Yale SOM. We build what we call attainable sustainable housing—energy-efficient single- and multi-family homes. I just got the monthly heating bill for a 27,000 square foot apartment building. It was $720 for the whole building in Minnesota in the winter.

Sustainable building makes housing more affordable when you look at total cost of ownership. When you think about living in a house for years, even decades, would you spend 1%, 5%, 11% more up front if you know you’ll get it back with savings on lower operating costs? Sustainable builders are starting to energy model each home so they can quantify the value long term.

And that’s only considering the energy costs. Health costs are harder to quantify, but in many homes, indoor air quality is worse than outdoor air quality. There are a lot of great systems that ensure a really healthful environment in the home.

Q: Why isn’t this approach the norm?

Market sector change is very difficult. It takes bringing stakeholders together. It takes sharing of ideas and best practices. It takes radical collaboration across organizations. We get up every day at EEBA and try to transform the industry. It’s extremely challenging and frustrating and exciting and rewarding, all at the same time.

Change is hard in any industry. For residential construction, there are a lot of incumbency issues. There’s huge demand for housing. You can sell every house that you build. Why would you change anything? That’s especially true in places where building codes haven’t been updated in years. It’s common to think that a house built to code means it’s all good. Another way to look at a house built to code is that it’s the worst house that’s not illegal. Depending on where you are, simply building to code isn’t desirable.

Switching costs are real, especially in an industry where it’s common to learn through apprenticeship on a job site—“This is how we do it.” At EEBA we try to make that mentoring culture a strength. Because builders work locally, for the most part they’re not in the same market as other EEBA members; they’re not competing against each other, so they can share and learn from each other and continually raise the level of knowledge of what it means to be a sustainable home builder. That’s a powerful part of EEBA.

What we’re trying to do is really speed the adoption of great technology, great building practices, and sustainable thinking across the industry. We’re making continuous learning easier. We provide online and in-person education. We do a yearly summit where we bring builders together.

Given the trends, if builders don’t have a plan to be building Zero Energy Ready houses, they may not be able to operate in the marketplace within a few years. I think it’s going to shift that quickly.

Q: Are there enough people going into the building trades to supply the required labor?

There are not enough people going into the trades. That’s starting to force change in interesting ways. Because builders can’t hire all the labor they’d like, offsite construction techniques are getting attention.

There are a variety of different approaches, but essentially components of the house are built in a factory. Then the floor cassettes or structured insulated panels that make up the walls are trucked to the building site and craned into place. It’s incredible how fast the modules go together.

There are a lot of investments in offsite construction. Builders are looking at it. Lumber yards and other suppliers are interested. We’re seeing a huge shift right now. It really helps with the labor issues. And it can be done to the highest sustainability standards.

Q: What led you to Yale SOM?

When I was an undergraduate there weren’t courses in sustainability, let alone a major. I learned about sustainability on the job as best I could. I went to Yale SOM to strengthen my understanding of sustainability and to learn how to have impact at scale.

When I came across EEBA, an incredible mission-driven organization that’s really changing the face of construction across North America, it just brought together everything that I had learned across my career. Now the goal is to grow the organization significantly and grow our impact significantly so we can speed up that change in the marketplace.

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Read original text on Yale Insights.

AI and Smart Cities–Improving Urban Life

May 25, 2023

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AI and Smart Cities are they meant for Improving Urban Life?  Let us see what AI could bring to Smart Cities.
The image above is credit to World Economic Forum.
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AI and Smart Cities–Improving Urban Life

By Ale Oluwatobi Emmanuel

The world as we have it today is not static. At the snap of a finger, there’s a new innovation in town that everyone makes a fuss about. Over the years and through generations, we’ve witnessed a series of disruptions in various sectors that have impacted our lives and activities.

You’d want to see what the first generation of computers in the 19th century looked like when they were invented. Take your time. They took up the size of an entire room.

Here is the question–who would have thought the same large computers could be compressed into smaller sizes? Today, with a size of 0.3 millimeters, the Michigan micro mote boasts of being the most miniature computer, and guess what? That’s a size smaller than a grain of rice.

What’s more? As humans, there is an exciting future ahead, and we’d have it with artificial intelligence at our beck and call. Recently, you’ve noticed how AI is disrupting virtually all sectors worldwide. Talk of banking, transportation, health, military, and even sports.

As we see with other sectors, our city centers are included in these disruptions, especially now that urban areas are getting more crowded and complex. It’s time to make our cities smart with AI.

What are smart cities, and how do we make our cities smart with this unique technology? There is no better time to have the discussion. Let’s dive in.

Smart Cities: What exactly are they?

If you’ve ever wondered–everyone is talking about smart cities, what’s the fuss about them? A city is smart if it incorporates technology and other digital solutions for its processes.

A smart city would utilize information and communication technologies to improve the quality of life of the citizens and the way the government serves the people.

It utilizes innovative technologies for a more interactive and responsive city administration, improved water supply, innovative urban transport networks, waste management, and many more.

A city is termed smart not by the number of smart technologies it’s got but by how it has effectively used these technologies to positively impact its citizens and drive economic growth.

Here is the catch– Artificial intelligence has a huge potential to access the activities of urban dwellers to bring about urban planning and management.

Talk of handling data from different sources to gain insights for effective municipal operations. Guess what? It also reduces associated expenses. Let’s assess some more use cases of AI in Smart cities.

Artificial Intelligence and Smart City Infrastructures

According to research conducted by the World Bank, 56% of the world’s population, which is about 4.4 billion people, live in cities. By 2050, this figure is expected to have doubled its current size.

At that point, 7 out of 10 people you meet would live in the city. Hence, there is a need to leverage artificial intelligence to enhance infrastructure and create more sustainable and livable urban environments.

For example, in public transit, cities with vast transit infrastructure have much to gain regarding making their processes seamless.

With the power of AI, commuters using major routes can offer real-time information through hands-on devices to communicate the situation of things on the road. This can enable other commuters to decide the ways they’d be taking faster.

As a case study, Dubai initiated a smart city project to monitor bus drivers’ condition, contributing to a 65% reduction in accidents caused by fatigue and stress.

In the same vein, AI can enhance the safety of power grids to improve performance management. Smart grids, such as generation plants, can be created backed by computer technology.

Moreso, prediction models can be set up on these grids to make smart meter readings of large quantities of data. They can also forecast the demand and price at given moments.

Artificial Intelligence and Smart City Services

Today, there is a need for cities around the world to provide improved delivery and quality of services through continuous monitoring of residents. For example, an AI-driven system in Los Angeles monitors air quality in real-time.

This system helps the city reduce air pollution and improve public health. It uses data from air quality sensors to prompt city officials about air pollution hotspots. It helps guide citizens to safe travel places.

Below are some other service sectors experiencing the disruptions of artificial intelligence.

  • Customer Service:

AI is disrupting customer service. Natural language processing (NLP) algorithms in chatbots are now available. The chatbots let customer support executives work effectively by getting information about customers’ issues.

So, it means if you own a business that relies majorly on customer service, you can hire an AI developer that can build chatbots to meet your specific business needs. Due to the accuracy of chatbots, there are speculations that they’d take over customer service roles, but only time will tell.

  • Health care:

In the healthcare service sector, introducing AI can bring about predictive healthcare. By leveraging predictive analytics, AI can help doctors make accurate decisions about the health of their patients. Asides from this, AI can also help streamline the analysis of scan results via image recognition. Doctors diagnose symptoms more accurately and effectively. With the rise of IoT-enabled embedded devices, they can remotely monitor their patient’s health conditions.

  • Banking:

AI is a valuable tool in a field such as the financial sector, which is prone to fraudulent activities. Artificial intelligence helps banks automate processes that are typically carried out by humans, reducing the time and effort it takes if done manually. Interestingly, AI can also help track customers’ credit history. AI’s predictive technology shows the likelihood of an individual not paying a loan back based on the information it analyzes.

That way, financial institutions and other loan services can streamline the process of getting new customers likely to repay their loans.

  • Transportation

Autonomous vehicles are here to stay, and they’re powered by AI. Who would have thought there’d be a time when cars could navigate their ways without human control? Well, it’s happening now. Kudos to Tesla and other big technology companies. Autonomous vehicles can also be used for deliveries and for transporting goods. Self-driving trucks can deliver packages more efficiently. We already see Tesla’s AI-powered Semi automobile do well in this regard.

Artificial Intelligence–The Tool for a Smarter World

No doubt, it is a visible phenomenon that the world of technology and innovation constantly changes. It’s exciting to let you know that we’re still at the early stage of the deployment of AI. Although we’ve seen its applications in diverse sectors, its long-term benefits will start unfolding. If you’re reading this now, you’re lucky. You must begin to adapt and position well for a new world driven by artificial intelligence.

Moving forward, a lot of changes will happen. From lifestyle changes to improvements in societal processes and operations. Welcome to the world of AI.

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Read original TechDay article.

Is generative AI bad for the environment?

May 24, 2023

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Is generative AI bad for the environment? A computer scientist explains the carbon footprint of ChatGPT and its cousins

By Kate Saenko, Boston University

The image above is on The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret, credit to WIRED

AI chatbots and image generators run on thousands of computers housed in data centers like this Google facility in Oregon.
Tony Webster/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

Generative AI is the hot new technology behind chatbots and image generators. But how hot is it making the planet?

As an AI researcher, I often worry about the energy costs of building artificial intelligence models. The more powerful the AI, the more energy it takes. What does the emergence of increasingly more powerful generative AI models mean for society’s future carbon footprint?

“Generative” refers to the ability of an AI algorithm to produce complex data. The alternative is “discriminative” AI, which chooses between a fixed number of options and produces just a single number. An example of a discriminative output is choosing whether to approve a loan application.

Generative AI can create much more complex outputs, such as a sentence, a paragraph, an image or even a short video. It has long been used in applications like smart speakers to generate audio responses, or in autocomplete to suggest a search query. However, it only recently gained the ability to generate humanlike language and realistic photos.

Using more power than ever

The exact energy cost of a single AI model is difficult to estimate, and includes the energy used to manufacture the computing equipment, create the model and use the model in production. In 2019, researchers found that creating a generative AI model called BERT with 110 million parameters consumed the energy of a round-trip transcontinental flight for one person. The number of parameters refers to the size of the model, with larger models generally being more skilled. Researchers estimated that creating the much larger GPT-3, which has 175 billion parameters, consumed 1,287 megawatt hours of electricity and generated 552 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, the equivalent of 123 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles driven for one year. And that’s just for getting the model ready to launch, before any consumers start using it.

Size is not the only predictor of carbon emissions. The open-access BLOOM model, developed by the BigScience project in France, is similar in size to GPT-3 but has a much lower carbon footprint, consuming 433 MWh of electricity in generating 30 tons of CO2eq. A study by Google found that for the same size, using a more efficient model architecture and processor and a greener data center can reduce the carbon footprint by 100 to 1,000 times.

Larger models do use more energy during their deployment. There is limited data on the carbon footprint of a single generative AI query, but some industry figures estimate it to be four to five times higher than that of a search engine query. As chatbots and image generators become more popular, and as Google and Microsoft incorporate AI language models into their search engines, the number of queries they receive each day could grow exponentially.

AI chatbots, search engines and image generators are rapidly going mainstream, adding to AI’s carbon footprint.
AP Photo/Steve Helber

AI bots for search

A few years ago, not many people outside of research labs were using models like BERT or GPT. That changed on Nov. 30, 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT. According to the latest available data, ChatGPT had over 1.5 billion visits in March 2023. Microsoft incorporated ChatGPT into its search engine, Bing, and made it available to everyone on May 4, 2023. If chatbots become as popular as search engines, the energy costs of deploying the AIs could really add up. But AI assistants have many more uses than just search, such as writing documents, solving math problems and creating marketing campaigns.

Another problem is that AI models need to be continually updated. For example, ChatGPT was only trained on data from up to 2021, so it does not know about anything that happened since then. The carbon footprint of creating ChatGPT isn’t public information, but it is likely much higher than that of GPT-3. If it had to be recreated on a regular basis to update its knowledge, the energy costs would grow even larger.

One upside is that asking a chatbot can be a more direct way to get information than using a search engine. Instead of getting a page full of links, you get a direct answer as you would from a human, assuming issues of accuracy are mitigated. Getting to the information quicker could potentially offset the increased energy use compared to a search engine.

Ways forward

The future is hard to predict, but large generative AI models are here to stay, and people will probably increasingly turn to them for information. For example, if a student needs help solving a math problem now, they ask a tutor or a friend, or consult a textbook. In the future, they will probably ask a chatbot. The same goes for other expert knowledge such as legal advice or medical expertise.

While a single large AI model is not going to ruin the environment, if a thousand companies develop slightly different AI bots for different purposes, each used by millions of customers, the energy use could become an issue. More research is needed to make generative AI more efficient. The good news is that AI can run on renewable energy. By bringing the computation to where green energy is more abundant, or scheduling computation for times of day when renewable energy is more available, emissions can be reduced by a factor of 30 to 40, compared to using a grid dominated by fossil fuels.

Finally, societal pressure may be helpful to encourage companies and research labs to publish the carbon footprints of their AI models, as some already do. In the future, perhaps consumers could even use this information to choose a “greener” chatbot.

Kate Saenko, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Boston University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

 

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