How AI Is Outsmarting Green Energy, Zero Carbon Fantasies
By Larry Bell
Big artificial intelligence-related companies are soon coming to realize that net-zero emissions plans to kill and replace fossil energy with wind and solar is a dumb notion that will leave them and American power consumers competing in the dark.
As noted by Wall Street Journal writers Jennifer Hiller and Scott Patterson, giant data centers providing computing power needed for artificial intelligence are setting off a four-way battle among electric utilities trying to keep the lights on, tech companies that like to tout their climate credentials, consumers angry at rising electricity prices, and regulators overseeing investments in the grid and trying to turn it green.
Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon, three of the largest AI data center users, have previously criticized a proposal by utility company Georgia Power to expand natural gas use at the expense of hurting their renewable energy programs.
The rise of ChatGPT and similar large-language AI models require huge amounts of computing power which has turbocharged data-center demand.
As former Microsoft vice president Brian Janous observes, whereas “No data center wants to be tied to the need for new fossil resources, that’s the problem… You can’t throw this much [data-center] capacity at the system and not have some degree of fossil resources to support it.”
An explosion of new hyperscale data centers in Northern Virginia will consume enormous amounts of power, some using as much as currently used to supply the city of Seattle.
Referred to as “Data Center Alley,” the area is home to about 150 data warehouses which support about 70% of global internet traffic through a spider web of crisscrossing power lines.
Amazon Web Services, Amazon.com’s cloud-computing business, has previously invested $52 billion in the region with plans to add another $35 billion by 2040.
Amazon has reportedly enabled 19 solar farms in Virginia and is the world’s largest corporate renewable energy buyer.
Dominion Energy which supplies electricity to most of the Virginia data centers projects their power requirements to quadruple over the next 15 years, representing 40% of the utility’s demand in the entire state.
Dominion CEO Robert Blue said: “We’re going to continue to be a big builder of renewables. We’re building a big offshore wind farm. We’re building a lot of solar. We’re adding a lot of storage. … But we also recognize that we’re going to need some more natural gas in order to keep the lights on.”
In addition to developing more natural gas plants to balance power grids from expansions of intermittent renewables, rising demands are also delaying some retirement of coal plants.
Duke Energy has told Carolina regulators it will either need three new gas-fired plants or keep existing coal plants open longer than planned.
Dominion wants to build a 1,000-megawatt natural-gas plant in Chesterfield County where a coal plant closed last year, stating that the addition is critically important for reliability.
Significant costs for these increased power demands — including transmission infrastructures — will be passed on to household and business consumers.
Dominion projects that grid investments, plus the new projects, will raise average utility bills for Virginia customers from around $133 a month to $174 over 15 years.
Meanwhile, electricity demand by power data centers is projected to increase by 13% to 15%, compounded annually through 2030, a shortage that is already delaying new centers by two to six years.
As Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie warned last month, “The problem is that utilities are rapidly retiring fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. We are subtracting dispatchable [fossil fuel] resources at a pace that’s not sustainable, and we can’t build dispatchable resources to replace the dispatchable resources we’re shutting down.”
We don’t have to rely on supersmart AI to warn us that this is really dumb policy.
This commentary was first published at Newsmax on May 3, 2024.
CO2 Coalition Member Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is “Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design” (2022).