Broadening the perspective for sustainable AI: Comprehensive sustainability criteria and indicators for AI systems

The increased use of AI systems is associated with multi-faceted societal, environmental, and economic consequences. These include non-transparent decision-making processes, discrimination, increasing inequalities, rising energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in AI model development and application, and an increasing concentration of economic power. By considering the multi-dimensionality of sustainability, this paper takes steps towards substantiating the call for an overarching perspective on "sustainable AI". It presents the SCAIS Framework (Sustainability Criteria and Indicators for Artificial Intelligence Systems) which contains a set 19 sustainability criteria for sustainable AI and 67 indicators that is based on the results of a critical review and expert workshops. This interdisciplinary approach contributes a unique holistic perspective to facilitate and structure the discourse on sustainable AI. Further, it provides a concrete framework that lays the foundation for developing standards and tools to support the conscious development and application of AI systems.

Forecasting Daily Primary Three-Hour Net Load Ramps in the CAISO System

The deepening penetration of variable energy resources creates unprecedented challenges for system operators (SOs). An issue that merits special attention is the precipitous net load ramps, which require SOs to have flexible capacity at their disposal so as to maintain the supply-demand balance at all times. In the judicious procurement and deployment of flexible capacity, a tool that forecasts net load ramps may be of great assistance to SOs. To this end, we propose a methodology to forecast the magnitude and start time of daily primary three-hour net load ramps. We perform an extensive analysis so as to identify the factors that influence net load and draw on the identified factors to develop a forecasting methodology that harnesses the long short-term memory model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology on the CAISO system using comparative assessments with selected benchmarks based on various evaluation metrics.