As part of the Biden-Harris administration’s approach towards harnessing the benefits of AI and ensuring its responsible and safe deployment, the Department of Energy (DoE) today released a summary report on the potential benefits and risks of AI use for critical energy infrastructure.
The report from DoE’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) comes as the White House announces that all Federal agencies have completed their 180-day actions set out in the AI executive order (EO) released last October.
“Artificial intelligence holds both incredible promise and potential challenges for the U.S. energy sector,” said CESER Director Puesh Kumar. “The assessment we are releasing today is an integral piece of our ongoing engagement with the sector to harness the power of AI to improve our overall security and resilience, while also working to identify and mitigate risk.”
The assessment finds that AI has the potential to be of tremendous benefit to critical energy infrastructure, with a wide range of benefits that can dramatically improve nearly all aspects of the sector – including security, reliability, and resilience. However, the path to realizing these benefits reveals the clear need for regularly updated, risk-aware best practice guidance to facilitate the safe, secure, and beneficial deployment of AI in critical energy infrastructure, DoE says.
The report identifies ten broad sets of AI applications for critical energy infrastructure, like predictive maintenance and malicious event detection, as well as four categories of potential risk: unintentional failure modes of AI; adversarial attacks against AI; hostile applications of AI; and compromise of the AI software supply chain.
“This assessment is a critical contribution to the safety, security, and governance of artificial intelligence in the energy sector,” said Helena Fu, DoE’s chief AI officer and director of the Office of Critical and Emerging Technologies (CET). “DOE is turning aspirations into action, leveraging the transformative potential of AI to address pressing needs such as enhancing the cybersecurity of the power grid, engineering new materials for batteries, and building the next-generation of grid-scale storage solutions.”
The report lays out eight key next steps for CESER, including developing an internal plan to guide its efforts to leverage the benefits and manage the risks of AI use in the energy sector; continuing to support the research and development of innovative tools and technologies that leverage AI in ways that seek to strengthen the security and resilience of the U.S. energy system; and engaging externally with the energy sector on AI.
Building on today’s report, CESER is announcing plans to expand its engagement with energy sector partners on AI from a security and resilience perspective over the course of 2024. The office said it will host listening sessions on AI with energy sector partners and technical experts this summer and will issue an updated assessment by the end of the year.
The DoE also announced a slew of departmentwide efforts today at the six-month mark of President Biden’s AI EO.
As part of the broader suite of announcements, DoE issued AI and Energy: Opportunities for a Modern Grid and Clean Energy Economy, a first-ever report on AI’s near-term potential to support the growth of America’s clean energy economy. DoE’s national laboratories also issued a complementary report, Advanced Research Directions on AI for Energy, which examines long-term grand challenges in nuclear energy, power grid, carbon management, energy storage, and energy materials.
DoE’s CET also launched a new website that showcases DoE-developed AI tools and foundation models useful for basic and applied science.
“Artificial intelligence can help crack the code on our toughest challenges from combating the climate crisis to uncovering cures for cancer,” said Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm. “DOE, under President Biden’s leadership, is accelerating its AI work on multiple fronts to not only keep the US globally competitive, but also to manage AI’s increasing energy demand so we can maintain our goal of a reliable, affordable and clean energy future.”
DoE is also announcing actions to assess the potential energy opportunities and challenges of AI, accelerate deployment of clean energy, and advance AI software and hardware innovation to manage the growing energy demand of AI, including:
- The new VoltAIc Initiative to use AI to help streamline siting and permitting at the Federal, state, and local level. DoE is investing $13 million in the initiative to build AI-powered tools to improve siting and permitting of clean energy infrastructure and has partnered with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to develop PolicyAI, a policy-specific Large Language Model test bed that will be used to develop software to augment National Environmental Policy Act and related reviews;
- The agency’s comprehensive overview of opportunities and challenges associated with ML techniques and their applications in power system operations. DoE’s Office of Electricity and the PNNL issued a report that provides a foundation for understanding the transformative role of AI and ML in power systems; and
- Establishing a new Working Group on Powering AI and Data Center Infrastructure. The Secretary’s Energy Advisory Board chartered a new working group to make recommendations – by June – on meeting energy demand for AI and data center infrastructure.
