Introduction
Over the past few months, the newswires have been hot with stories about the large-scale data centres that will be required to meet the needs of the forthcoming revolution in Artificial Intelligence (AI). How much electricity will these new data centres consume and what does that mean for the electricity demand forecasts underpinning the plans for Net Zero?
Recent Date Centre Announcements
To give a flavour of the scale of data centre developments that are coming, it is helpful to look at recent announcements from large tech companies. Back in March, it was announced that Amazon had bought a 960MW data centre that is powered by an adjacent nuclear power station. In April, Mark Zuckerberg CEO of Meta that owns Facebook and Instagram said energy requirements may hold back the build out of AI data centres. He also talked about building data centres that would consume 1GW of power.
Last month, Oracle chairman Larry Ellison announced that Oracle was designing a data centre that would consume more than 1GW that would be powered by three small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). Then Microsoft also got in on the act when it announced it had done a deal with U.S. utility Constellation to restart the 835MW Three Mile Island (TMI) Unit 1 nuclear power plant to power its data centres. Anxious not to be left out, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google said they too were working on 1GW data centres and saw money being invested in SMRs.
Finally, Sam Altman of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT has trumped them all by pitching the idea of 5GW data centres to the White House. Altman has been heard talking of building five to seven of these leviathans.
Bloomberg, usually a driver of the Net Zero band wagon, has reluctantly admitted that there’s not enough clean energy – nuclear or otherwise – to satisfy AI’s voracious appetite and gas will have to fill the gap. America’s national security and energy security is eclipsing climate concerns.
This admission is important because it acknowledges that such important infrastructure cannot rely upon the vicissitudes of the weather. These data centres need a source of electricity that is reliable and always available. It would be absurd to think that a ChatGPT user will want to receive a message saying their request cannot be processed because it is not windy enough.
Scale of AI Energy Demand
When companies bandy about such large numbers it is sometimes difficult to visualise just how big they are. For context, consider that a 1GW data centre would consume 8.76TWh of electricity each year. Seven of Altman’s enormous 5GW data centres would consume 306.6TWh. According to DUKES data (Table 5.6) the UK generated 292.6TWh in 2023. The plans for ChatGPT alone would consume more electricity in a year than the U.K., the sixth largest economy in the world, managed to generate. Now consider what the total demand is going to be when you add in the requirements the likes of Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, Google and X.
Net Zero Electricity Plans
Clearly, AI energy demand is going to be huge and if we want to compete in this new industry, we are going to need cheap, reliable and abundant energy. However, the plans for U.K. electricity use in 2050 are tiny by comparison. The Royal Society assumed 570TWh of annual demand in its report on long term storage. In their latest FES report, the NG ESO assumed a total 615-719TWh of demand across Industrial & Commercial, Residential and Transport sectors in their pathways that achieve Net Zero by 2050. The RS report relies solely on wind and solar renewables plus hydrogen storage whereas the FES report supplements renewables with BECCS, gas with carbon capture, together with some nuclear and hydrogen. It is easy to see how the AI revolution could consume an extremely high proportion, or even all the electricity that is being planned for 2050. It is difficult to see how there is going to be enough electricity to go around.
We are already way off-track to deliver the renewables capacity for both Labour’s 2030 target and the Royal Society’s 2050 plan. There is precious little chance of accelerating delivery to meet electricity demand that might easily be twice the current estimates. Of course, they are also relying upon what they euphemistically call Demand Side Response, otherwise known as turning off companies and domestic appliances at times of high demand or in plain terms energy rationing. A rickety power system where data centres can be turned off at short notice (even if they are paid to do so) will not be robust enough for the AI industry, which is why so many of them are talking about nuclear power. However, only last week we learned that an appointee to the DESNZ Board of Commissioners is actively opposed to nuclear power.
This all puts in doubt Blackstone’s recently agreed deal to invest £10 billion in a new data centre complex in Blyth. With the Government recently announcing we have the most expensive industrial electricity costs of the 28 countries covered by the IEA, there has to be a significant risk that the project does not go ahead. Remember, the same Blyth site was once earmarked to manufacture energy-intensive EV batteries and that deal fell through.
We can see that plans for expensive, scarce energy are not only damaging existing industries, they are also hampering our ability to compete to host the industries of the future. We need to radically change our energy policy before it is too late. As the Amazon and Microsoft investments demonstrate, nuclear needs to play a much bigger role in our future energy mix. We need much more of it and we need it now.
David Turver writes the Eigen Values Substack, where this article first appeared.
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The Internet is powered by Unicorn Farts – electricity comes out of the wall as if by magic if you are doing stuff online. Online is Green.
I don’t remember any Green saying there should be less online stuff, less tech, or fewer Amazon home deliveries for 15 minute city folk.
I’ve been pointing this out repeatedly.
Such as here
https://x.com/mind_basic/status/1841492237529624950
Each generation of AI consumes roughly an order of magnitude more power than the generation before.
One of the business models with AI is data mining. Data mining will be conducted all the time there is a return on investment. The more you do if it the more money you make. So the key point that needs to be understood is a logical one. There is a binary policy choice here (some form of halfway house could be proposed, but on analysis it will quickly be seen such a restricted approach will doom business to failure and will not fly) Either businesses are unshackled and can use AI or they can’t. Try to compete and net zero is totally and utterly blown.
The other point here is we are censored and cancelled by these awful Silicon Valley tech firms who push ESG, yet this will prove their commitment is utterly inauthentic and fraudulent.
None of these “skin deep” woke “Silicon Valley” firms are admitting their plans now blow net zero.
Hobble business use of AI and we lose before the race has even fully started. The likes of China and India will do a clean sweep. So we must press ahead, net zero be damned.
Pressing ahead it will be.
As commentators on this, we need to push the message out. This is the crunch point and our governments will be found not to be truly serious about the 2030 and 2050 agenda. Ed Miliband needs to be put on the spot and kept on the spot on this very issue.
Here’s a real world example of what to expect, this is irelands data centre usage at present
https://www.cso.ie/en/releasesandpublications/ep/p-dcmec/datacentresmeteredelectricityconsumption2023/keyfindings/
“There was a steady rise in data centre consumption from 290 Gigawatt hours in January to March (Q1) 2015 to 1,661 GWh in October to December (Q4) 2023”
Alongside a complete lack of any challenge towards this bizarre mass race to implement a type of technology that would appear to have overwhelming minuses except in a few niche professional areas (Artificial Intelligence, the clue is in the name), you sometimes have to read articles quite carefully to uncover the standard promotion of the pseudo-scientific and catastrophically harmful Climate Change / Net Zero narrative, in this case re:
“Bloomberg, usually a driver of the Net Zero band wagon, has reluctantly admitted that there’s not enough clean energy – nuclear or otherwise – to satisfy AI’s voracious appetite and gas will have to fill the gap. America’s national security and energy security is eclipsing climate concerns….We are already way off-track to deliver the renewables capacity for both Labour’s 2030 target and the Royal Society’s 2050 plan. There is precious little chance of accelerating delivery to meet electricity demand that might easily be twice the current estimates….We can see that plans for expensive, scarce energy are not only damaging existing industries, they are also hampering our ability to compete to host the industries of the future. We need to radically change our energy policy before it is too late. As the Amazon and Microsoft investments demonstrate, nuclear needs to play a much bigger role in our future energy mix. We need much more of it and we need it now.”
So no direct rejection of the current ‘Climate Change’ hypothesis and agenda (other than a possible tiny hint via the single word ‘bandwagon’) and instead an acceptance of its ‘clean energy’ / anti-C02 demands (re 2030 and 2050);
And simply pushing for nuclear over wind and solar etc.
There are two major problems over this approach:
Nuclear is both far less flexible and massively more expensive (taking construction and maintenance costs into consideration) than fossil fuels, so we would just be continuing down the same energy and thus generally impoverishing current national trajectory.
But above all it gives a free pass to the most pernicious, deceitful, economically destructive and freedom destroying project in human history, that of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change.
We don’t need more nuclear.
We need to get back to the full utilisation of by far the most useful, efficient and reliable fuel and energy sources known to man: coal, oil and gas –
Of which Britain has an unusual abundance, these precious resources being ever-increasingly abandoned (or completely ignored in the case of fracking).
The more I read about our future and what it may have in store, the more I think a prolonged power outage of weeks or months might focus minds on what is actually important in our lives. Storing every online utterance from everyone and getting computers to do our thinking for us – well, we can do without that, can’t we? All I can say is thank God I am just about at my three score years and ten and won’t have to put up with all this nonsense for too long, but I feel sorry for those that will.
If consumer demand falls off a cliff owing to electricity becoming unaffordable the likes of Amazon, Google, Facebook and the rest will force a different sort of Reset. Simple supply and demand. This may be our best hope. And if the likes of Amazon do not address this issue then they are as doomed as we are.
It has never been about carbon, or how much electricity you use. These AI centres prove that beyond any doubt. It is about taking total control, then cutting consumption by any and all means necessary. Yours of course, not theirs. Covid was intended to be the impetus for The Great Reset with digital vaccine passports and all the rest, but independent journalist broke the MSM monopoly and illuminated all their lies. They will not make that mistake again. Now they want to take away constitutional free speech rights and enforce censorship on all platforms. The next “pandemic”, or whatever they think up next will happen straight thereafter, and the sheeple will welcome the digital cell they are put in to protect them.
Ten years ago such views would have been laughed out of court. Today they sound all too probable.
And yet a report by the Council of The Club of Rome in 1991 titled The First Global Revolution stated that “As now practised, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead” and “States with constitutional laws and rights violate international law anytime the matter is one of strict national interest.” Implying that both democracy and constitutional rights are a problem.
“In 1992 Maurice Strong, Secretary General of the UN Earth Summit, and member of The Club of Rome said ” It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patens of the affluent middle class involving high meet intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, ownership of motor vehicles, small electrical appliances, home and workplace air conditioning, and suburban housing are not sustainable!!!”
This is the basis of the UN Agenda 21, which later became Sustainable Development. So the roots of this nonsense go back decades. Notice they blame the middle class and give themselves, the upper/elites class a free pass.
“there’s not enough clean energy – nuclear or otherwise”
So coal… that enormous solar storage battery.
“We are already way off-track to deliver the renewables capacity for both Labour’s 2030 target and the Royal Society’s 2050 plan.”
What is meant by capacity is power – expressed in watts. Capacity is meaningless, we need to know electrical energy, how long the power flows – expressed in watts per second, or as we domestically see it kWh.
A subsidy (wind) farm with a capacity of say 100MW, cannot deliver that on average for more than 30% of the time and intermittently.
It really is time for all commentators when they write, to understand and make this important distinction, because it won’t matter if Labour’s capacity target is met, or even exceeded, it won’t deliver more than about one-third of the electrical energy needed to meet demand.
Furthermore the grid infrastructure is incapable of carrying and distributing the load that an all-electric the Net Zero economy would require, so whether enough subsidy farms are built, is moot.
There is a simple solution to increasing AI demand, let the tech companies build their own power plants. This won’t involve the consumer grid except maybe they can sell surplus energy to it.
Cheapest, quickest, least land footprint, cheapest to operate is coal or gas. The problem is they would not get permits. Nuclear is very expensive, but maybe a consortium of AI outfits could afford it. Again, would they get permits? Nuclear is “green” or not depending on the phase of the Moon it seems – lunatics.
Microsoft has done a deal to help finance the reopening of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant – so the precedent is there.
It’s interesting to see in most of the examples, nuclear is first choice, and a total lack of solar or wind farms… it seems always on IS important eh
AI before pensioners?
The proposed electric arc furnaces have hit a snag, well who’d have thought it!
All the drivel about data centres etc will not come to fruition, just as the EAFs will, I suspect, never be built.
And all this tech will not produce the thousands of green jobs that have been promised.
https://www.energylivenews.com/2024/10/07/uk-green-steel-switch-to-electric-furnaces-delayed-until-2032/
Assuming that even this government will not be suicidal enough to deny its citizens AI, we shall need many SMRs. These can be sited where required so avoid the need to build lots of pylons. Why combine SMRs with wind and solar and carbon capture and hydrogen ?