Crusoe & Lowercarbon to Host AI Hackathon to Accelerate Clean Energy Development, OpenAI Offering Credits and Mentoring Hackers, Department of Energy to Speak at Public Workshop

**100 engineers, designers and product leaders will harness a new data set from the Department of Energy (DOE) to overcome barriers to the federal permitting process for clean energy projects among other prompts**

Lowercarbon and Crusoe Energy Systems LLC (“Crusoe”), announced today that they are hosting a “Hackathon for Clean Energy” at Crusoe’s San Francisco offices. OpenAI will join and provide credits, technical mentorship and take part in the judging. This 24-hour event beginning Friday afternoon will bring together experts from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and approximately 100 engineers, designers and product leaders to explore how artificial intelligence (AI) can help the U.S. bring more clean energy projects online. Secretary of Government Operations for the State of California Amy Tong will also help kick off the event.

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The hackathon will include participants from Fortune 500 companies, academia, startups and private capital. Expert mentors from OpenAI, DOE, National Labs, Crux, and Eli, among others, will guide participating teams.

The hackathon will be judged by:

• Vanessa Ching, NVIDIA. Vanessa oversees Ecosystem & Startup Alliances at NVIDIA North America's Inception program for startups, helping startups to accelerate in AI.
• Clay Dumas, Lowercarbon. Clay is a founding partner at Lowercarbon.
• Chase Lochmiller, Crusoe. Chase is the co-founder and CEO of Crusoe, on a mission to align the future of computing with the future of the climate.
• Jonathan Reiber, OpenAI. Jonathan serves on the Strategic Intelligence and Analysis team at OpenAI, leading work on scenario planning, international security, and geopolitical risk analysis.
• Professor Jane Woodward, an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University she teaches classes on energy and environment.

Harnessing Crusoe’s sustainably-powered Cloud platform and OpenAI credits, teams of hackers will explore how you can use AI to accelerate the permitting process and deliver valuable technological solutions for the public good. Participants will have access to a new AI-ready data set that was just released to the public by the Department of Energy and compiled by the Pacific Northwest National Lab. The data set consists of nearly all environmental impact statements published by federal agencies since October 2012, including EIS’s for clean energy projects. This totals more than 4.8 million documents. Other prompts include simplifying tax credit monetization for renewable energy developers and manufacturers and easing access to rebates for home electrification.

Opening the hackathon on Friday, officials from the U.S. Department of Energy will host a public workshop focused on how AI can help accelerate the energy transition by working through key items such as energy permitting. The workshop will include:

• Charles Yang, Department of Energy, Office of Critical and Emerging Technologies, AI Policy Advisory focused on DOE’s role with respect to AI and future AI initiatives;
• Keith Benes, Department of Energy, Senior Fellow providing context on permitting and how it relates to clean energy deployment;
• Dan Nally, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Project Manager; and
• Shivam Sharma, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Data Scientist focusing on the NEPA permitting process and AI corpus release.

The Department of Energy public workshop will be available to livestream here at 2:30pm PT today.

“Crusoe is determined to scale AI sustainably and responsibly through harnessing the power of clean energy sources,” said Chase Lochmiller, CEO and Co-Founder of Crusoe. “As AI models have grown, so has the demand for the electricity and the infrastructure to power and support these models. AI holds vast potential to overcome barriers to renewable energy development and society’s energy demand challenges. It’s very encouraging to see the best minds from the private sector, government, private capital and academia coming together to harness the tremendous leap in human innovation that AI represents.”

"AI's energy demand is multiplying too quick for the power sector to keep up. Either we move faster, build new tech, and get out ahead of the tide -- or the AI tsunami will wipe out our plans for de-fossilization. This hackathon is for the big wave surfers," said Clay Dumas, General Partner at Lowercarbon Capital.

The hackathon begins at 2pm on Friday, June 28th and concludes the afternoon of Saturday, June 29 with a demo day showcase, where teams will pitch to policymakers, top venture capitalists and engineering leaders.

About Crusoe:

Crusoe is on a mission to align the future of computing with the future of the climate. As builders and operators of clean computing infrastructure, Crusoe reduces both the costs and the environmental impact of the world’s expanding digital economy. By unlocking stranded sources of energy to power artificial intelligence, crypto, and other high performance computing applications, Crusoe is creating the future of compute-intensive innovation that reduces emissions rather than adds to them.

To learn more, visit https://crusoe.ai/ and follow Crusoe on Linkedin and Twitter.

Lowercarbon Capital:

Lowercarbon Capital is a multibillion dollar venture capital fund founded by Chris and Crystal Sacca that backs kickass companies making real money slashing CO2 emissions, sucking carbon out of the sky, and buying us time to unf**k the planet.

To learn more, visit https://lowercarboncapital.com/

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