CarbonFreed

Development of an Virtual Assistant Chat Bot (NLP)

Project result: Poster (PDF)

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Project Description:

Description of the company
We are a young and determined crew with a mission to initiate innovative projects and develop digital products which will contribute to the decrease of carbon emissions in our atmosphere to enable a better, greener future for everybody on this planet. To achieve this we strive to exhaust recent technological capabilities as well as trendsetting software applications.
In the long run, we do not want to focus on a single domain but rather constantly screen the energy transition market for new challenges which can be tackled using innovative technologies like Artificial Intelligence.
Currently, we concentrate on contributing to the expansion of the Renewable energy sector by providing electrical planning assessments and certificates for medium-sized power systems (e.g. solar systems). These documents are demanded by law if one is planning to install such power systems and hence indispensable when it comes to pushing clean energy forward.
This topic also led to the origin of our first project:  The development of a software solution that automates the elaborate preparation of such documents and thus decreasing the time required significantly. This relieves professional engineers of repetitive tasks, which is crucial due to the skilled worker shortage, while simultaneously increasing the expansion of renewable energy resources.
We operate with a “hands-on mentality” and scrutinize existing structures with the goal to get something going. Because there is no other way if we want to sustainably change our world for the better.

Situation
We’re currently developing an AI-supported browser-based application to provide automated grid code certification for solar power plants. The application will collect all necessary data from the customer, check for completeness, and start selecting the relevant data for the certification process. At this stage, the customer can be reminded in case essential data are missing so that they can upgrade their data set with the missing information. In the next step, the algorithm will extract all information from the data set which is needed for the compliance evaluation. For instance, screening of the type of solar inverters planned to be used, the total installed capacity, or the type of grid protection units used in the power plant. Finally, the algorithm compares the customer data against the norm VDE-AR-N 4110 which describes the grid code requirements for grid connection to the medium-voltage network in Germany. The results get documented in an evaluation report which is the output of the application and subsequent delivery to the customer and grid operator.

Problem
In Germany, it is required by law to have a power plant certificate. Without such a certificate you won’t get grid access and therewith can’t receive the feed-in tariff. Current waiting times are up to 9 months and given the scarcity of Electrical Engineers the Certification bodies can’t just scale up their workforce to cope with the workload. We want to play our role in reducing the waiting times by automating the certification process as much as possible.
During the certification process there are many many questions in regard the specific certification requirements for the PV installer. Many of them just started with projects in size where certification is needed and so there are many questions. Our account mangagers explaining over and over the specific certification requirements to the customers. The questions are mostly concerned about the process itself, which documents to provide for certification and specific requirements of the standard and guidelines when it comes to specific electrical planning of the solar power plants.

Aims of the project
With gridcert we want to support as much PV installers as possible to increase the annual increase in renewable generation tremendously. Having scalability in mind we want to automise our help and support of our customers using a smart chatbot which understands language spoken (Englisch, German) and provides the answers immediately.

Scopes
Main objective of the project is to develop the above-mentioned functionality to create a Virtual Assistant helping our customers to gather the information needed for the certification process. The tools/software/frameworks to be used are secondary. It can be done with Open AI frameworks (pre-developed, pre-trained AI algorithm) or Python-based frameworks. We want to integrate it later in our software, so some interfaces need to be designed.
The work to be done shall be a proof of concept. We can try out different ways to achieve the goal to see which way gives the best results.