I try to mitigate climate change using computer science. I co-founded [Open Climate Fix](http://openclimatefix.org), a non-profit research lab focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Previously, I was a Research Engineer at [DeepMind](https://deepmind.com), where I used machine learning to predict wind power.
We had 10 solar PV panels installed on our roof in south-east London back in 2022. I’ve finally gotten round to writing code to grab live data from our solar system over the local area network and plot the live data. This has been a good excuse to try out publishing a simple dashboard without an SQL database or a server. The visualisation is a Marimo app, exported as web assembly. The Python code…
My family is finally getting over whooping cough. It has been a very bumpy ride. The aim of this blog post is to try to explain the ways in which our experience of whooping cough differed from the “textbook” description of whooping cough. And I’ll very cautiously offer some advice for folks who think they may have whooping cough. But I must emphasise that I’m not a medical doctor! Please take my…
Four years ago, I wrote a blog post on Using computing to fix climate change. Since then, I’ve learnt a lot! So I thought I’d write a follow-on to that blog post. Compared to my old blog post, this new blog post is more philosophical, and less practical. So, if you want practical advice, then please check my previous blog post. Who is this blog post for? This blog post is primarily aimed at…
TL;DR: To enable many more people to train machine learning models on large, dense, multidimensional datasets (like weather and satellite datasets), I’m planning to dedicate several days a week (starting in September) to helping to speed up Zarr. This blog post describes my motivations for helping to speed up Zarr. And goes into a little detail on how I hope to speed up Zarr. My ultimate goal…
I’d like to propose that there are two broad “levels” of applying machine learning to solar power forecasting. The first level is relatively easy, and everyone is doing it: I don’t know for sure, but I’m almost certain that “level one ML” is what almost all power forecasting providers mean when they say they’re “using AI” in their glossy sales brochures! The second level is much harder to achieve,…
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 2019 paper; sign up to their newsletter, and join their forum! Also check out Paul Strobel’s six-part illustrated blog series about the paper. And here’s their list of climate change & ML job…
Here’s an animated map of UK PV power generation on the day of the UK power cuts on 2019-08-09. Hit the ‘play’ button on the bottom of the video. The timestamp is shown at the top of the video. White dots mean no data. The power was normalised relative to the maximum power output per PV system on 2019-08-09 (not normalised relative to the nominal capacity of each system). Data was pulled from…
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! The OpenStreetMap (OSM) community has already done an incredible job mapping over 10,000 PV installations in the UK (out of over 1 million…
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. We’ll use machine learning to combine satellite images, numerical weather predictions, and live…
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. First, a quick disclaimer: OCF is still very, very young. We don’t yet have funding, a bank account, or an online forum. (These things will come!) I’m spending the majority of my time meeting…