Energy justice for AI : a framework

The deployment of AI technologies is expected to generate substantial economic and societal improvements in the energy sector and is already playing a pivotal role in optimizing operations, enhancing efficiency, aiding decarbonisation, reducing costs, enhancing system resilience and driving innovation. In this way, AI could help to promote a just and fair transition, yet, concerns remain in relation to its potential impacts on safety, privacy, transparency, fairness or accountability. The recent EU AI Act seeks to protect fundamental rights, promote ethical development and use of AI and ensure accountability and transparency in AI systems. It thus has implications for a just transition. In this regard, the AI Act requires that systems it classifies as "high risk" (including energy infrastructure such as smart grids), should undergo a risk assessment. However, no EU-level framework for energy justice exists and existing "responsible AI" frameworks may not fully capture the energy-specific context and the complexity of the relationship between energy and society. An energy justice framework for AI can help address these gaps by providing a more nuanced understanding of the energy sector's unique challenges and opportunities. It can also help ensure that AI development in the energy sector acknowledges the needs and rights of disadvantaged, underserved or marginalized communities, promotes energy democracy, and supports a just transition to a low-carbon economy. In this report we first explore the potential energy justice implications of the use of AI in the energy sector. We then propose a tentative energy justice assessment framework tailored to AI applications in the energy sector. We use in-house (JRC) examples of use-cases of AI in the energy transition to demonstrate the framework. Such a guidance framework can help to check whether energy justice is likely to be promoted by a given AI application.