most burning issue of this decade that is climate change.

This is Crowd Science from the BBC World Service with me Marnie Chesterton.

We're here for  your science questions.

We are under climate crisis

and I am a complete supporter of climate movement  but some reports claim even if we stop emitting  

these greenhouse gases today the temperature will  still rises for maybe 40 years or more.

That means we are eventually destined to an unstable climate  and future.

What are our preparation, what kind of climate smart and adaptive technology

have been going on in this world recently?

Saugat's question is timely the UN body for assessing  climate science - the IPCC - has released a report

warning that we humans are causing irreversible  damage to the planet.

And Saugat should know. He wrote to us from Nepal which has seen an  increase in wildfires and drought in recent years.

The monsoon season there has become less and less  predictable which makes it harder for farmers to  

know when to plant crops or harvest them. Of course  it's not just Nepal, here in Europe we're seeing  

the effects of climate change on weather patterns  too with devastating floods in parts of Germany,  

Belgium and the Netherlands.

Meanwhile over in  the US, wildfires now seem to be an inevitable part of life.

The IPCC has modelled future  scenarios and says that the worst future -

the one with more droughts more floods and millions displaced as their homelands become uninhabitable -

the way to prevent that version is to stop putting more greenhouse gases into the air

and fast. Of course we could all try to not fly, not to drive a  gasoline-powered car and not to eat meat

but this is about more than personal responsibility. This needs big changes to the way our societies operate.

We're unlikely to go back to pre-industrial existence. Life without electricity?

How would you listen to Crowdscience? Unthinkable.

Since life is getting more and more digital maybe we could harness some of the potential

of our tech savvy lifestyles to help reduce our emissions.

Ideally without rebuilding the homes  and cities we've already constructed,  

or causing too much effort to people like me who live in them. Wouldn't that be smart?

Well in today's show we're going to investigate three  areas where smart tech might just be able to help.  

First though let's look at what's producing most of the greenhouse gases.

Generally speaking the direct emissions come from transport, from  buildings, from industry and from agriculture and  

forestry.

That's Professor Srinivasan Keshav from Cambridge University

explaining that we humans are responsible for emitting around 40 billion tons of co2 into the atmosphere every single year.

And co2 or carbon dioxide is the most  common of the greenhouse gases. It might  

surprise you to know that Keshav isn't a climate scientist, he's a data guy. You might be thinking  

what does computer science have to do with global warming? Well Keshav's one of a growing number of  

people using clever computing to help us cut our carbon emissions in all sorts of ways.

So listener Saugat is right on the money.

A recent report that  came out from the World Economic Forum identified digital technology as

being probably the world's most powerful influencer to accelerate action to stabilise global temperatures below two degrees.

And other people identify the digital sector as having the potential to reduce fossil fuel emissions to 15% by 2030.

And it comes from the fact that we can use digital technology to make things  more efficient.

This idea of efficiency is key as we'll hear throughout this show it means we don't need to build a new environmentally friendly world  

from scratch we just need to use what we have but  better. When I say what we have I'm talking about  

the infrastructure, the transport network, the power  grids, the buildings, all of it can be made to work  

much more effectively saving precious energy. So let's start with the sector that actually produces  

the energy because currently it's responsible for more than 70% of our greenhouse gas  

emissions. That includes the energy that powers big industry, heats and cools our buildings  

and fuels our cars. It also powers the tech that aims to radically reduce those emissions. 

I mentioned smart technology earlier and you may be  wondering what makes any of the new developments  

we'll be discussing smart. Keshav says it's a term to be taken with a big dose of cynicism.

Smart is a marketing term you know. It doesn't really mean anything if I say I have a smart  

home, that means everybody else has a dumb  home, obviously? Right so if anybody says  

they have a smart anything I would say you know look twice, they're probably trying to you know.  

Whack an extra 50 dollars on the price of your whatever it is?

Exactly. At some level smartness has to do with the incorporation of digital technologies into the

system so it's somehow responsive to your wishes and to your presence. So yes calling something

smart might just be a way of selling us more stuff but it's still useful as a way of describing

how much more reactive things can be to our needs when artificial intelligence is built in.

Keshav uses an example of a home heating system to explain how.

It is on the risk for you to keep  changing the temperature when you leave home and you come back home etc

or a smart thermostat. What they do is they observe that you typically leave home around 9.00 am

and you typically come back around 5. All right let's go and change the temperatures

and without you having to do anything  it becomes responsive to your occupancy.

Smart thermostats like the one Keshav's talking about  are common place these days.

Maybe some of you have even got one in which case well done you're almost  certainly using less energy to keep warm but don't feel too smug yet

because if that home heating  system is powered by fossil fuel - and globally most heating systems are -

then both digging it out of the ground and burning it produce carbon emissions.

To decarbonize to take carbon dioxide out of the equation we need an alternative like wind power.

Here in the UK renewables like wind and solar, even wave power are already providing just under  

half our energy needs but they don't always work  as efficiently as they could and some companies  

are using artificial intelligence to try and change that. Here to explain how is former Crowd  

scientist Graihagh Jackson.

Hi Graihagh.

Hi Marnie.

The reason we've asked you to come back is because you've now got your own show, also on the BBC World  Service about climate change.

What's that called?

The Climate Question. We basically look at why we find it so hard to save our planet.

Like what's holding us back from taking action.

So you're the perfect person to talk to about a project linking renewable energies to smart  tech.

I mean there are really high hopes for renewable energy as one of the big solutions to climate change but there are some problems.

There's always a problem isn't there. And it's something experts call intermittency. I'm gonna let Enass Abo-Hamed explain that.

She's an award-winning scientist originally from Palestine but she now lives in the UK where she co-founded a company called

H2 Go Power.

Renewable energy is intermittent by  its nature because we're dependent and relying on

the weather. When the sun shines and when the wind blows. And these by nature are not  

24 hour 7 reliable constant.

And that means that  demand doesn't always meet supply of renewables?

It can mean that we get blackouts but on the other hand it means that when the sun is up and we were producing all that

power or when the wind is blowing and we're producing power we might not be able to use that energy -

there's no demand for it. And so it's wasted.

That is absolutely true. Demand varies a lot and it varies with all the changes that we have.

When we've had Covid hitting us our behaviour changed which meant our demand for electricity changed

and the grids are not designed to be extremely flexible. But if we had a source of reliable storage that could bridge this gap between supply  and demand.

We could achieve better results.

Her team have developed this artificially intelligent algorithm that predicts when there's surplus renewable energy

and when there's high demand. So when there's excess it stores the electricity as hydrogen and when there's

high demand it converts the hydrogen back into electricity. That sounds pretty simple, what makes it smart  though?

Well I've made it sound really simple but actually grids are these really big complicated beasts and if you throw in the unpredictability of  

weather and then the fluctuating demand for power there's actually quite a lot of data to process  

and then act upon, make a decision. So what the artificially intelligent algorithm is doing is  

essentially calling the shots, working out when it's best to do what.

And Enass has been trialling this in Orkney this is a little island off the  north coast of Scotland, a country close to  

your heart Marnie I believe?

Yes a place of weather some of it quite bad.

Orkney is a really interesting test bed because you're talking about a remote island,

not a very good connection and the weather conditions there that you have  a lot of variability.

You could have like a week off a lot of wind and then a week of nothing so  basically you're talking about prediction software

that allows you to know when the wind turbine is going to generate a lot of wind or not based on the weather

and then the ability to take that data  process it and predict well in advance what is the best point to instruct

the system to store and then convert it back to the grid.

And you mentioned that it's stored as hydrogen, why hydrogen and why  not just use batteries?

The thing about batteries is they don't hold charge for a long period of time normally people talk about one to four hours.

The 12 plus r1s are just not really that cost effective at the scale we need them to store  

all this surplus renewable energy and this is where it makes sense to convert that electricity  

into hydrogen because you can store it for much much longer and then convert it back whenever  

you need it.

And how do you do that, how do you make the hydrogen?

Split water molecules, H2o, by passing an electric current through that and in this case you create that electric current

with wind so when you want electricity at the other end you simply recombine the oxygen and the hydrogen

to create water and importantly electricity.

Are there other ways people are using computer technology to make wind farms more efficient?

Let's just look at the wind farm for a moment. Before they're even built engineers are using these really sophisticated

computer models to make sure that even the blades are the best shape they possibly can

to harness as much wind as possible. And then if there's going to be more than one turbine software

can make sure that they're placed in the perfect position so one turbine doesn't block another one's bit of wind.

And then even when they're built some engineers use something called a digital twin. This is really  

interesting actually this is where lots of sensors are attached to the wind turbine so it can be  

modeled on a computer in real time and then using machine learning you can then simulate  

what's happening to the wind turbine in specific weather conditions and this is important because  

it means they can make sure they're performing at their best. So basically computer modelling,  

smart tech can be involved at every single step of the process here.

Thank you Graihagh. In return for helping Crowdscience I've helped Graihagh with an episode of

The Climate Question where together we looked in detail at the promise of green hydrogen.

Find it wherever you get your podcasts. In summary I've learned that smart grids don't just transport power

from a source to a plug socket, they're two-way using lots of data to know when conditions

require more electricity and when to save it up for later. Smart grids allow more localised storage

which means more flexibility which we'll need to respond to increasingly noticeable extreme weather events.

And according to Srinivasan Keshev if all of the electric gadgets in our home  connect to these smart grids a computer can start  

the washing machine when the electricity is cheapest without us having to lift a finger.  

It's not going to be possible for humans to deal with the variability and demand. They may not even  

be home to deal with this so many people have put together what they call a home energy controller  

and that home energy controller has the role of forecasting your occupancy, forecasting the demand  

and forecasting the price that they expect to see based on observations of weather, or past history  

or using AI techniques, or talking to other home energy controllers and then saying we're going to  

take these actions and our goal is to keep you comfortable but also reduce your energy demand.  

And do you think in the future as part of this people are going to have batteries in their home  

that sort of store up energy so that the grid is much more of a two-way system -

it's not just us taking electricity from the system?

There have been a bunch of technological changes which have been super positive.

One of them is the rise of solar  and of wind and the holy grail in some sense is for people to install their own solar panel

on the rooftop and put in a storage battery in the garage and they essentially meet

all of the energy needs themselves. With electric cars coming in there's actually a possibility

that we don't need to buy storage, we can just use our cars.

So I have an electric car at home and it has 50 kilowatt hours of storage. It's a lot of storage

enough for about a week of my electricity consumption so all I need  to do would be to store the sunlight by day

and then at night just have my car parked by my house.

This is something that is almost there, we need perhaps a few more years but I fully envisioned that in  the five years

from now when you buy an electric car it'll be a bi-directional electric car and so you'll

put your solar panels on the roof and so your car is being run on sunshine from your home and at night your car runs your lights.

This is Crowdscience from the BBC World Service and this week we're looking at some of the clever  

ways in which smart tech can help us save and store energy and avoid warming the planet.