Google is backing a climate change start-up founded by ex-DeepMind employee Jack Kelly through its philanthropic arm, Google.org.
Google is backing a climate change start-up founded by an ex-DeepMind employee through its philanthropic arm, Google.org. Open Climate Fix, a non-profit lab focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, announced Tuesday that it had been awarded over £500,000 ($686,350) by Google.org’s Impact Challenge on Climate, which has committed 10 million euros to funding new green technologies. The London-headquartered start-up is aiming to build an online solar electricity forecasting service for the U.K. and Europe. The service will aim to predict cloud cover, which determines how much electricity solar panels can generate, through a combination of satellite images and new artificial intelligence software. Jack Kelly, the co-founder of Open Climate Fix and a former research engineer at Alphabet-owned DeepMind, told CNBC on Tuesday that the U.K. currently has to keep „lots of fossil fuel generators spinning at less than their full capacity“ in case „a large cloud comes along and covers Cornwall.
