The RangL competition platform exists to accelerate progress in data-driven control problems for industry, and today marks the real beginning of that journey.
The purpose of the Net Zero Technology Centre is to develop and deploy technology for an affordable net zero energy industry, and the Offshore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult is the UK’s leading technology innovation and research centre for offshore renewable energy.
Today, colleagues from the Net Zero Technology Centre, ORE Catapult and RangL team gathered to make a start on the Pathways to Net Zero challenge. The agenda was focused on first introducing the competition platform and then understanding the Net Zero Technology Centre / ORE Catapult Integrated Energy Vision (IEV) model, on which the challenge will be based.
The IEV is the result of a major modelling exercise undertaken collaboratively by the Net Zero Technology Centre and ORE Catapult, and addresses the UK's vision of achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 for the North Sea offshore energy industry. The range of possibilities is illustrated by three imagined pathways, Breeze, Gale and Storm, each addressing the four main technology pillars of offshore energy: offshore wind, oil and gas, hydrogen, and carbon capture and storage (CCS).
The Pathways to Net Zero challenge aims to build on the IEV by first allowing a range of intermediate pathways between Breeze, Gale and Storm, then defining a criterion to measure the quality of each pathway in a specific sense. Challenge participants will be invited to apply reinforcement learning, or any other approach of their choice, to find the ‘best’ pathway. The challenge will be made more realistic and difficult by the inclusion of uncertainty over future parameters such as energy revenues and technological progress.