EuroWire November 2019

Transatlantic cable

Renewable energy needs to be stored and, if battery deployment on a vast scale has to be undertaken, lithium exploration and mining will need to be assessed for its own impact on habitat and agriculture if we are to avoid simply kicking the environmental can down the road.

But it hasn’t been only high-input (if pro table) agricultural land that is being chosen for solar development. Far from installing solar panels on areas of high irrigation need, many have been placed on low-pro t cattle pasture that has never been irrigated. According to Ellen Hanak, who directs the Water Center at the PPIC: “A lot of it is going on non-irrigated rangeland,” adding that, according to PPIC estimates, if farmers do stop growing on irrigated land to avoid overdrawing aquifers, solar panels will “make sense” on only about nine per cent of that idled land. Some of California’s biggest and most in uential agri-executives are among those quick to seize the opportunity. Lynda and Stewart Resnick own the massive Wonderful Company, said to be the world’s largest grower of tree nuts and America’s largest citrus producer. The company’s vice president of strategy, Steven Swartz, told The Times that within a few decades the company will make as much money selling solar power as it does “selling almonds and pistachios”. And what of the rest of the acreage that California needs to meet its clean energy goals? The Nature Conservancy believes that if California builds major transmission lines to other states, it can meet its target without impacting on vital wildlife habitat. Many other states have also set themselves zero-carbon targets, and this could make generous supplies of renewable energy available for exchange. There’s much talk of solar siting versus productive land use, and with the upscaling of renewable energy and the planned phase-out of nuclear this is obviously signi cant for the 2045 target, but generating energy is only part, if a signi cant part, of the problem.

Automotive

The origin of autonomous vehicles? The Google subsidiary Waymo has been working with its fellow subsidiary, DeepMind, to develop a technique called Population Based Training that uses Charles Darwin’s concepts of evolution. “Training an individual neural net has traditionally required weeks of ne-tuning and experimentation, as well as enormous amounts of computational power,” a telecoms.com blog post stated. “Now, Waymo, in a research collaboration with DeepMind, has taken inspiration from Darwin’s insights into evolution to make this training more e ective and e cient.” Put at its simplest, training algorithms is a matter of trial and error. The algorithm performs a task; its performance is graded by the outcome. Depending on the grade, the algorithm will adjust how it performs the task to bring about a more positive outcome. The challenge for engineers and data scientists is how much freedom to give the algorithms to adjust with each trial. Give too little variance and the ne-tuning is a long, laborious process; give too much and the results can be unpredictable. As a result, engineers monitor the tests and manually remove the poorest performing results. The new approach, under development by Waymo and DeepMind, sets multiple di erent tests before the poorest performing ones are culled from the population. From what are described as “the survivors” (an unfortunate choice of words, under the circumstances) copies are made with “slightly mutated hyper-parameters”. The process continues until the algorithms are seen to be more reliable, resilient and safe. Hopefully, rigorous research into developing autonomous vehicles will put some minds at rest. Earlier this year there was a series of attacks on autonomous Waymo vehicles operating in Arizona, with vandalism and reckless driving directed at the cars themselves, and even threats to the passenger/ driver inside. Although the company described Arizonians as “welcoming and excited” about the technology, clearly some people have yet to be convinced. Con dence and trust will need to evolve too. Competition under scrutiny Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook may soon be facing scrutiny, similar to that experienced by Microsoft two decades ago when its Internet Explorer browser came under re. The US Department of Justice has launched an investigation into the e ects on competition of the dominant search engines, social-media platforms and online retailers. Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook are not speci cally mentioned, but are four obvious targets. Internet

26

www.read-eurowire.com

November 2019