In the era of sustainability, tech executives are unfortunately relying on fossil fuels to advance artificial intelligence rapidly with the ambition to meet the electricity demand.
According to Business Insider, the energy demand of AI will surpass the capacity of clean sources, including wind energy and solar power.
This will increase the dependence on natural gas, which can be deployed quickly and meet energy requirements imminently.
The Wall Street Journal also reported that questions about fueling the AI boom were under the spotlight earlier this month at the CERAWeek by S&P Global. This is a yearly energy conference where thousands of executives gather in Houston to talk about a myriad of subjects from geopolitics to the energy shift.
Unexpected demand caused by AI boom
While a surge in electricity demand was expected given the transition to electric vehicles, the unexpected AI boom has added to it.
At the conference, Bill Gates remarked that the amount of power AI is bound to consume is mind-blowing.
“You go, ‘Oh, my God, this is going to be incredible’,” Gates said.
ChatGPT alone consumes over 17,000 times the amount of electricity used by the average US household daily, as per Business Insider.
Tech executives are worried that clean sources will not be enough to meet the demands of AI as other natural resources like wind and solar are dependent on weather changes.
Nuclear facilities, on the other hand, take time to be constructed, effectively ruling themselves out as viable alternatives for any urgent need.
Natural gas seems like the only option
“Tech is not going to wait seven to 10 years to get this infrastructure built,” Toby Rice, the CEO of natural gas producer EQT, told The Wall Street Journal. “That leaves you with natural gas.”
Rice was asked two particular questions frequently at the conference, “How fast can you guys move? How much gas can we get?”
The major issue here is that the US government under the Biden Administration is currently undertaking significant efforts to lower carbon emissions resulting from burning coal and natural gas.
The administration has set targets for the power sector and the US economy to be carbon-neutral by 2035 and 2050 respectively.
Some executives were still choosing to believe that the energy demand for AI would remain within the threshold and not hinder the clean energy transition.
“We’re going to be net-zero by 2050. We still absolutely believe that,” said Robert Blue, the CEO of Dominion Energy according to The Wall Street Journal. “But the demand growth now makes that more complicated.”
Blue stated that his company was constructing at least one additional natural gas plant in response to the demand from data centers.
