The growth of artificial intelligence is so powerful and rapid that it threatens to destabilize the energy industry, the economy, and the climate.
Last week, Google announced that its carbon emissions had soared by 48% over the past five years. “AI-powered services require significantly more computing power (i.e. electricity) than regular online activity, sparking a series of warnings about the technology’s environmental impact,” the BBC reported Thursday. In fact, a recent study by Cornell University scientists found that generative AI systems like ChatGPT consume up to 33 times more energy than computers running task-specific software. What’s more, AI-powered internet queries use roughly 10 times more energy than traditional internet searches.
The growing adoption of AI is driving skyrocketing electricity consumption, posing a direct threat to the tech industry’s ability to meet its decarbonization promises. While Google remains committed to its goal of reaching net zero by 2030, the company acknowledges that “further integrating AI into our products may make it harder to reduce emissions.”
Overall, the global AI sector is expected to account for 3.5% of global electricity consumption by 2030. In the United States, data centers alone could consume 9% of electricity production by 2030, a two-fold increase from current levels. This stringent growth rate will have major implications for the nation’s energy security, not to mention the economy.
“When you look at the numbers, it’s shocking,” Jason Shaw, chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Georgia, the electricity regulator, told The Washington Post in March. “It makes you scratch your head as to how we got to this point. How could the projections have been so far off? This is creating challenges that we’ve never seen before.”
Combined, AI and electric vehicles are expected to add 290 terawatt-hours of electricity demand to the U.S. power grid in 10 years’ time, according to a forecast by Rystad Energy. By 2030, these two sectors alone will be equal to the energy consumption of the entire country of Turkey, the world’s 18th-largest economy.
All this means the U.S. has to add a lot of energy production capacity at a rapid clip or risk running out of energy. “This growth is a race against time to expand generation without straining the power system,” said Suriya Hendry, an analyst at Rystad.
And Americans are expected to shoulder much of the burden in the form of skyrocketing energy bills. What’s more, this is more of a tech sector issue than a consumer behavior issue, so there’s nothing ordinary consumers can do to stop it. Electricity prices are already on the rise, and the growth rate isn’t going to slow anytime soon, according to a projection from the Bank of America Institute, a think tank that analyzes its own data to provide insights into the economy. Looking at the bigger picture, industry players warn that if the country can’t produce enough energy to keep up with these surging demands, it could stifle economic growth.
No one is more aware of this power shortage than the big tech companies. As CNBC reports, giants like Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta are desperate to produce more energy as they continue to add data centers to the grid, often requiring gigawatts of power. To fill this huge and growing supply gap, many tech titans are calling for the adoption of nuclear energy and the expansion of fusion research, as it is a proven, zero-carbon technology that can produce large amounts of baseload power while avoiding many of the technical and bureaucratic pitfalls that come with renewable energy.
But the reality is that no single energy source can save the United States from the strain of its own technological ambitions: Fueling the insatiable appetite for AI, EVs, and related fields will likely require further extraction and exploration of fossil fuels under a business-as-usual scenario. And that’s a big problem.
But AI can be both a problem and a solution. It could be deployed in “smart grids” to ensure efficiency and reduce emissions. But this requires restraints that the tech industry isn’t very good at. The Department of Energy has warned that this approach, if applied “naively,” could do more harm than good.
Article by Haley Zaremba of Oilprice.com
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