Will AI Eated All The Electricity And Are We DOOMED?

Spoiler: Nah!

Exelon Three Mile Island in 2019; the cooling towers in the foreground are for Unit 1, which was shut down that year. The others have been dormant since Unit 2 partly melted down in 1979. Photo: Constellation Energy, Creative Commons License 4.0.

Earlier this year, there were a lot of panicky headlines about the possibility that the energy demands of new data centers, driven by the boom in artificial intelligence, might be greater than the power grid could supply. The Washington Post offered this dumb sky-is-falling headline in March: “Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power.” (No gift link for that, because it ain’t true.)

The feeling that this AI and data center stuff was maybe getting a little out of hand was enhanced even further in September, when the owner of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania announced that it had made a deal with Microsoft to reopen Unit 1 of the plant. (Unit 2, the reactor that went kerflooey and partly melted down in 1979, has been offline ever since.) Microsoft agreed to buy 100 percent of the plant’s electricity for the next 20 years, to run its data centers in the region. We need inaccurate chatbots and weirdly executed pictures of supermodels riding bikes on Mars so much that we have to reopen TMI, which closed in 2019? Really?

Ready for some good news? We aren’t going to run out of power because Google wants to give you AI-assisted search results that may or may not be accurate. It’s true that data center growth — and what’s more, the transition of many polluting industries, like steel production and clean manufacturing — will definitely require a hell of a lot of new electric power. And some of that power will be generated by nuclear plants.

But before you go trying to hoard electrons in a cigar box under your bed, keep in mind that it’s pretty unlikely that either the US or the rest of the world needs to worry that we won’t be able to meet the demand — and without massive buildouts of new gas-fired power plants, no matter how much the fossil gas industry and rightwing think tanks may whine that we can’t possibly meet demand without more and more planet-warming fossil fuel consumption.

For starters, as this excellent piece from Heatmap News reminds us, we’ve been here before: Back in 1999, an influential article in Forbes claimed that before anyone knew it, home computers, their attached peripherals, the Internet itself, and all the factories necessary to build all the new digital devices would create vast demand for energy! Within a decade, the authors warned, “It’s now reasonable to project that half of the electric grid will be powering the digital-Internet economy.”

We’re going to spoil the suspense for you right now: The article’s headline was “Dig more coal — the PCs are coming” and the authors, Peter Huber and Mark Mills, were rightwing think tank guys who pushed for ever-increasing fossil fuel use, and went on to coauthor a 2005 book calling for endless fossil fuel use.

Their analysis of the power needs for PCs and the internet were grossly exaggerated, both for 1999 (they said computing used 12 percent of all electricity then; it was more like three percent), and in the future. But much of the US economy moved online even as overall electricity demand remained flat for the first two decades of this century, a plateau that is ending as we be begin transitioning to more electric-powered stuff.

Similarly, Heatmap argues that although there’s definitely growing demand for electricity, especially as industry electrifies,

there is surprisingly little evidence that AI, specifically, is driving surging electricity demand. And there are big risks — for utility customers and for the planet — by treating AI-driven electricity demand as an emergency.

There is, to be clear, no shortage of predictions that AI will cause electricity demand to rise.

Big surprise: The predictions that AI will require huge amounts of energy any minute now have led a number of utilities to insist they need emergency permits — bypassing the usual permitting process — to build new fossil gas power plants, especially in the South, and especially when “pushed by vertically integrated monopoly power companies.” And as Heatmap notes, AI is new and different enough that it makes for an effective rhetorical cudgel for companies that want to burn more fossil gas very soon. “The real danger,” Heatmap argues, “is not that we’ll run out of power. It’s that we’ll build too much of the wrong kind.”

Again, more energy generation is needed, but it also needs to be clean energy if we hope to meet our climate goals. And the idea that data centers will bogart all the electricity appears to be more hype than reality. An October Heatmap article notes that the International Energy Agency’s outlook for the coming decade projects that data centers will account for only about 10 percent of new energy demand by 2030, far less than the demand for electricity from developments like the shift to electric vehicles or the growth in demand for cooling as the world gets warmer.

The report also suggests that AI technology will actually boost efficiency of power grids considerably by automating how electricity moves through the system. But even if such gains don’t offset the increased demand from data centers, the IEA report

sounded relatively cheery as it noted that there is “a set of low-emissions options available to meet this [data center] demand,” as cleaner electricity sources are growing much faster than data center electricity use.

This is where we get back to nuclear, and some educated guessing about the role it will play in the energy transition. The chief attraction for nuclear is that, like fossil gas or coal power plants, it’s a source of “firm” power — that is, a consistent amount of power being steadily generated and sent to the grid, as opposed to wind and solar, which depend on the amount of wind or the time of day and other weather conditions. And unlike gas and coal, nuclear provides assloads of firm power without sending any greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

The physical downside, of course, is that you end up with spent fuel that remains radioactive for tens of thousands of years. There’s also the risk of an accident, which may be reduced by some new reactor designs and by standardization. And in the US and elsewhere, uranium mining has often been an ecological disaster, with health consequences lasting long after the end of mining operations.

The economic downside is that nuclear remains the most expensive source of electricity, and new nuclear plants take a decade or more to bring online, which is why restarting recently closed plants is more attractive than building all-new ones.

One other factor that’s suddenly become very relevant to continuing the energy transition: Nuclear is the one form of carbon-free power that Republicans like.

Wind and solar also become sources of firm power when they’re backed up by energy storage — batteries, mostly — that allows the variable power they produce to be stored and then used at a steady rate. Battery technology keeps improving, and both power plants and industrial operations are turning to storing energy with new long duration iron-air batteries, which can store energy for a longer time, about 100 hours, than the lithium-ion batteries common today, which last around four hours in grid applications. Iron-air batteries take up more space and weigh more, but those factors don’t matter so much for grid or factory use, unlike in EVs.

And of course, our favorite new energy technology, enhanced geothermal, which drills deep into the earth to heat water to drive generators, keeps growing; Google recently announced a deal with Fervo Energy for a new 115-megawatt plant that will power Google’s data centers in Nevada, a follow-up to Fervo’s first operational pilot plant that came online last year and has been pumping out 3.5 megawatts of clean firm power since.

All in all, we should probably resist the hype over the supposed insatiable power demand of AI, and instead keep our focus on ramping up renewable energy everywhere. That will include some nukes, and in the future maybe fusion, which is now forever just five years away after decades of being forever just 10 years away.

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[Utility Dive / Heatmap News / MIT Technology Review / Heatmap / Volts]

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