Data centers can set back climate progress

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In 2018, California utility regulators approved a plan to shut down Diablo Canyon’s two nuclear reactors in 2024 and 2025. Doing so would deprive the state’s grid of 2,323 megawatts of generating capacity, but Pacific Gas & Electric, the plant’s operator, and a coalition of labor and environmental groups have proposed replacing the lost power with renewable energy. The plant kicked out enough juice to light about 1.7 million homes, but replacing that power seemed feasible, especially since PG&E predicted that demand would gradually decline over time as more people put solar on their roofs and their energy use reduce.

Pro-nuclear eco-modernists, who see nuclear fission as a primary means of avoiding climate catastrophe, lamented the imminent loss of so much carbon-free power. But clean energy advocates saw it as a sign of the impending energy transition — a move away from gluttonous power consumption to a system where we use much less electricity and generate more of it from solar panels.

Now, however, the whole scenario has been turned on its head: Diablo Canyon’s reactors are ready to continue splitting atoms for the foreseeable future. Contrary to PG&E’s optimistic projections, society at large is becoming even hungrier for power.

Diablo Canyon remains a symbol of the energy transition, no doubt, but not in the way people once hoped. Now its survival represents a transition gone awry.

Looking at the supply side alone can fool you into thinking that the energy transition is still going strong. Solar generating capacity in California has doubled in the past six years. On several occasions this spring, renewables have supplied more than 100% of the total electricity demand on California’s grid in the afternoon, when solar output peaks. Even more striking is the growth of grid-scale battery storage in the state, which has jumped from 770 megawatts in 2019 to more than 10,000 now. On one day in April, battery storage became the largest energy source on California’s grid.

On the demand side, however, things went haywire. PG&E CEO Patti Poppe predicted earlier this month that the power supply – or the amount of power consumed – would double by 2040. Dolls don’t exaggerate; Texas grid operators expect demand there to double in just six years. Some of this additional cargo was foreseeable. Human-caused climate change is raising temperatures, transforming energy-intensive air conditioning from a luxury to a life-or-death necessity. And all those Teslas and other electric vehicles you see cruising down the highway? They need to be charged even as more people switch out their dirty natural gas appliances for electric ones.

But back in 2018, few anticipated the incredibly rapid buildup of all the electricity-sucking data centers we’d need to process our credit card payments, all the computing we do, our constant Google searches, and the endless movies we stream. These claims, meanwhile, pale in comparison to the huge power consumption required to mine a single bitcoin or process a generative AI operation. And together they threaten to completely overwhelm power supplies, strain the grid and throw a digital wrench into the energy transition.

A recent report by the Edison Power Research Institute found that US-based conventional data centers alone (not including the harder-to-track cryptocurrency mining) consume more than 150 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, equivalent to the output from 100 Diablo Canyon plants. (A single terawatt-hour, or TWh, is equivalent to 1 trillion watt-hours.) Federal analysts estimate cryptocurrency mining uses up to an additional 80 TWh each year in the U.S. Taken together, this is enough to power the air conditioners in hundreds of keeping millions of homes running year-round.

And demand will continue to grow exponentially, especially in a handful of Western states. Since a single AI query uses about 10 times the energy of a Google search, the spread of this technology is expected to mean that by 2030, conventional data centers will absorb about 15% of the country’s total power consumption, with the highest percentages in Arizona, Oregon and Nevada, where new centers quickly sprouted. Throw cryptocurrency mining into the mix, and it becomes clear that the country’s current generation capacity is nowhere near up to the task.

A single AI query uses about 10 times the energy of a Google search. By 2030, conventional data centers will absorb around 15% of the country’s total power consumption.

The technophiles insist that this is a good thing, that data centers’ gargantuan power needs spur innovation in, and deployment of, renewable electricity sources, thereby accelerating the energy transition. It’s true that many data center operators buy enough clean energy from utilities to offset their power consumption, and some cryptocurrency miners have developed their own solar installations or set up remote shops in oil fields to harness methane that would otherwise be flared or spewed into the atmosphere. would become . A few are even developing small nuclear reactors to power their operations, technology that can then be used for other applications.

However, this is not enough. New clean energy development must do more than break even, given our ballooning consumption. To mitigate the worsening effects of climate change, the world has no choice but to burn fewer fossil fuels. Clean energy sources must displace dirty sources. But that only works if new clean energy supplies outpace the increase in demand, a near impossibility given the enormous needs of data centers and other emerging technologies.

As it is, we are simply building new clean resources on top of the old dirt, plastering the desert with solar installations and littering public lands with wind turbines, even as we extend the lives of coal and natural gas plants. to meet the insatiable demand.