Alibaba is helping the International Olympic Committee (IOC) measure and analyse the electricity consumption at the competition venues in Paris.

Alibaba Cloud has deployed its Energy Expert data-driven sustainability option. By migrating the intelligence related to the power consumption and demand of the competition venues to the cloud-based platform, it aims to enable more accurate analysis and better-informed power consumption planning for future Olympic Games.

Energy Expert (www.alibabacloud.com/en/product/energy-expert) is being applied to all 35 competition venues. With this, the IOC (olympics.com/ioc) can consolidate all energy-related data during the Olympics and Paralympics – such as electricity consumption, power demand contingency, venue capacity, competition-related information and onsite weather conditions – into one easy-to-understand dashboard.

Based on the integrated cloud-based intelligence and thanks to deep-learning based AI models from Alibaba Cloud, Energy Expert aims to provide more accurate analysis to produce venue specific forecasts and recommendations such as power demand optimisation to reduce power wastage.

“Sustainability is one of the three pillars of Olympic Agenda 2020+5 alongside credibility and youth,” said llario Corna, IOC’s chief information and technology officer. “With Energy Expert, we can now forecast our energy related impacts well into the future and accurately measure our progress. Electricity consumption is a large contributor to the Olympic Games’ carbon emissions. The data-driven insight produced by Energy Expert will help us learn from each Games edition, and apply that knowledge intelligently to make future events even more energy efficient.”

In addition, real-time electricity consumption at the level of operational spaces on-venue is being gathered from a selection of competition venues with 100 smart electric meters installed to gather more comprehensive datasets. For example, real-time electricity consumption from various operational spaces on-venue, including the playing fields, broadcast and media working areas, technology operational spaces and specific equipment, food and beverage equipment and a host of other temporary operational areas and equipment.

Datasets collected vary, taking into account temperature and real-time occupancy of the areas at different times of the day. Collecting these detailed datasets should enable a more accurate context for the IOC’s organising committees when referring to the energy consumption data from the Paris Games.

To support a more comprehensive analysis of energy consumption trends, electricity data from previous Games, including London 2012, Winter Games PyeongChang 2018 and Tokyo 2020, will also be available for analysis within Energy Expert.

“Energy Expert will further prove its value in the most high-profile and challenging arena of all the fast-paced and highly competitive world of international sports,” said William Xiong, vice president of Alibaba Cloud. “The insights Energy Expert delivers will assist the IOC and future Games to be more sustainable.”

Outside the competition venues, Energy Expert’s AI-driven recommendations have been applied to help Alibaba itself optimise the energy consumption and reduce carbon emission at its temporary exhibition venues during Paris 2024. For example, at the Alibaba Wonder Avenue in the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, sustainable wooden materials and recyclable steel was used for the main structure of the venue to cut the carbon footprint. The semi-open design of the space has also contributed to optimising the energy consumption and reducing carbon emissions, primarily by leveraging natural lighting and ventilation.

Introduced in June 2022, Energy Expert’s first application at a sports event was in 2023 at the first Olympic Esports Week in Singapore. This was trialled for measuring and analysing carbon emissions from temporary constructions built to host the Olympic Esports Week, to generate data-driven insights on the choice of materials and equipment used at the event. Metrics – including the impact of energy consumption, waste management, signage and decoration – were assessed, enabling the comparison of the relative impacts of several types of materials and equipment used at the event.

Beyond the sports environments and applications, Energy Expert also helps more than 3000 users worldwide measure, analyse and manage the carbon emissions of their business activities and products.

Established in 2009, Alibaba Cloud (www.alibabacloud.com) is the digital technology and intelligence backbone of Alibaba Group. It offers cloud services to users worldwide, including elastic computing, database, storage, network virtualisation services, large-scale computing, security, big data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) services.