It's a little misleading to say they're using AI. Most of this work (and all the specific examples listed on the project webpage) is more appropriately called statistics.
> no clear difference between statistics and machine learning
Yes, there is. When your model has thousands/millions of parameters, or when your model has many more parameters than the number of examples in your training set, it's called Machine Learning.
That's not true. Linear and logistic regression are like the first things you learn in a machine learning class. Many popular ML models do not have millions of parameters, including decision trees and shallow neural networks.
Machine learning is setting it up to find the correlations for you these days :p It is annoying when people choose things due to a more exciting name/buzzword rather than actual merit...
> Since wind and PV-power forecasts do not follow exact theoretical error distributions, the probabilistic power forecasts will be based on quantile regression coupled to artificial intelligence or data-mining methods. Additionally, methods such as kernel density estimation, ensemble dressing, or Bayesian model averaging, which have proved useful in meteorological applications, will be evaluated in this subproject.
AI is only mentioned as a possibility in the context of one subproject of three subprojects. Based on titles alone they've made only a single publication[1] involving AI and they've been publishing for a few years already. Saying that AI is used here may be technically correct but seems like a massive overstatement.
This does happen, but in the US (and most(?) countries) we don't have command economies. Consequently, this sort of model-based approach to economics (logistics) is done by businesses. The big, successful ones are very good at it. Walmart knows how much of what good to send to what region on what day. They've been collecting and correlating data for decades now.
Where it's done by the government it's applied at the level of bonds and currency production and such. More abstract levels than directing purchase or production of specific items (generally, more direct intervention does still happen of course, but usually masked).
Germany doesn't have a command economy either, it's a combination of government incentives, private enterprise, and (semi-)public utilities all going in this direction.
Anyone not familiar with this, do go to the link and check out the Control Room. Beautifully retro-futuristic, looks like a '70s sci-fi film set, but they were actually using the thing.
A tangential question related to carbon-free energy production:
Are there companies that do software for nuclear power plant construction? Like modern project management software for nuclear power plants? It seems that a few bigger nuclear projects in Europe (namely in Finland and France) are in trouble mainly due to project management reasons.
Renewable energy supply strongly depends on weather forecast so essentially one needs a good algorithm for weather forecast. Yet, forecasting energy supply is much easier if all generators are integrated into one power grid because it is necessary to predict average supply for a (large) reagion.
It's a little misleading to say they're using AI. Most of this work (and all the specific examples listed on the project webpage) is more appropriately called statistics.