What to do about the electric power demands of artificial intelligence data centers? –

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

CATOCTIN MOUNTAINS, Md. – It’s a lovely summer day in the mountains, and the last thing I want to be doing is thinking about this Biden-Trump rematch presidential debate everyone on news talk and social media are going on about.

These so-called debates are about as useless as the party conventions these days anyway. But I suppose most people have no choice but to follow along with whatever sensational clickbait dominates the day. The questions that will be asked are so predictable it’s really gotten totally ridiculous.

President Joe Biden will be prepared to answer them as if they are really what matters in this screwed up, crazy world we live in now. Donald Trump will only be prepared to spout the same nonsensical bullshit he says somewhere every day, which somehow still holds sway with his uneducated, anti-woke followers, who make up just about half the damn country now.

Clearly the human brain is deteriorating in evolutionary terms when actual deep thought is no longer possible thanks in large measure to social media and cable TeeVee. When is the last time you heard or actually participated in an actual intellectual discussion with anyone on any worthy topic? I don’t even believe this goes on in think tanks anymore, where even those writers on the left and right just parrot the same talking points we’ve been hearing since the 1980s, when Reagan and Jerry Falwell first started using the airwaves to twist the collective minds of American Christians.

Trump should not even be on the stage. He should be in prison. But thanks to the political cowardice of Attorney General Merrick Garland, and the crypto-fascist Catholics sitting for life on the Supreme Court, here we are.

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If the candidates on the stage were more reasonable and I was the associate producer writing the questions, there is a burning question I would like to ask. Unfortunately, it’s just too complicated even for members of Congress now, where one religion’s prayers and commandments in public schools are far more important than solving our energy or environmental problems.

QUESTION: What are you going to do, what is your plan, to make sure the monumental energy demands for building artificial intelligence data centers does not swamp the power grid we already have? Is there anyone in your administration who understands these needs who is working on a plan?

Sorry, Democrats, but check out the Biden administration’s U.S. Department of Energy website and you will not find a single policy proposal or press release about this, and no one is answering reporter questions on the subject by email or phone. I know because I tried. This is not what anyone wants to talk about in the presidential campaign, because it is a very complex issue that very few people understand and an issue that threatens to swamp all others.

If we had a Congress that wasn’t spending all it’s time in prayer breakfasts, someone would be writing new regulations immediately to address this issue. Most people probably don’t even know what I’m talking about. How could they? It’s not being discussed on their favorite cable shows, or anywhere on the Facebook news feed. Elon Musk mentions it from time to time on Twitter (X), but who pays attention to him anymore?

There are a few reporters out there working on the issue, but no one is paying attention. How could they? We are stuck in a 2016 Trump loop like a bad episode of the “Twilight Zone,” which anyone born after 1990 has never heard of anyway. We can’t even have a discussion about it, so I’m left talking to my Baby Boomer friends on Facebook who know what I’m talking about.

I was planning to publish a massive story explaining the problem. But why bother? No one would read it, share it or fund it anyway.

So instead I’m just going to provide anyone who might be interested a summary and some links to news stories I’ve been reading to learn about the issue. Be forewarned that most of these stories are pretty boring reading, filled with all kinds of harrowing numbers.

The Jeff Bezos Washington Post, which is on track to lose $100 million this year after losing $73 million last year, tried to get people’s attention with this sensational headline claiming we are running out of power to run the grid due to the “explosive” demand of data centers designed to create the artificial intelligence that is putting us journalists out of business anyway. They don’t tell you that last part. I just did.

Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power

“Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.”

You get the picture.

The problem is going on in Georgia, Arizona, Texas and other states. But nowhere is the problem more pronounced than in Northern Virginia, where the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants will be needed to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction, “where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days.”

Remember the big power outages in Texas a few years ago that went on for days?

Wait until Alabama Power decides to punish its customers with a massive power outage on the hottest of summer days now that the dreaded Environmental Protection Agency has over ridden the Alabama Department of Environmental Management to allow all the toxic coal ash from coal-fired power plants to be buried in place. Because of federal regulations and the Biden administration, the company will now have to develop a plan to spend millions or billions of dollars to remove the coal ash and recycle it and use it somewhere else.

The new guy at Alabama Public Radio, Pat Duggins, is touting his team’s award winning story on the subject. But there’s really not much to the story.

“Bad Chemistry” — An APR news special

Do you have your backup generator and solar panels in place yet? It might be a good time to go shopping – even if the prices seem higher than they need to be.

That is of course if Biden is reelected. If Trump is elected again, the power companies will be off the hook, and they can just keep those coal and gas plants going indefinitely, bringing the Earth that much closer to a global warming tipping point, where nothing will save us.

“The soaring demand is touching off a scramble to try to squeeze more juice out of an aging power grid while pushing commercial customers to go to extraordinary lengths to lock down energy sources, such as building their own power plants,” the Post reports.

“When you look at the numbers, it is staggering,” said Jason Shaw, chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, which regulates electricity. “It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation. How were the projections that far off? This has created a challenge like we have never seen before.”

A major factor behind the skyrocketing demand is the rapid innovation in artificial intelligence, which is driving the construction of large warehouses of computing infrastructure that require exponentially more power than traditional data centers. AI is also part of a huge scale-up of cloud computing. Tech firms like Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta and Microsoft are scouring the nation for sites for new data centers, and many lesser-known firms are also on the hunt.

The proliferation of crypto-mining, in which currencies like bitcoin are transacted and minted, is also driving data center growth. It is all putting new pressures on an overtaxed grid — the network of transmission lines and power stations that move electricity around the country. Bottlenecks are mounting, leaving both new generators of energy, particularly clean energy, and large consumers facing growing wait times for hookups.

It is all happening at the same time the energy transition is steering large numbers of Americans to rely on the power grid to fuel vehicles, heat pumps, induction stoves and all manner of other household appliances that previously ran on fossil fuels.

AI is exhausting the power grid. Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution.

“In the face of this dilemma, Big Tech is going all-in on experimental clean energy projects that have long odds of success anytime soon. In addition to fusion, tech giants are hoping to generate power through such futuristic schemes as small nuclear reactors hooked to individual computing centers and machinery that taps geothermal energy by boring 10,000 feet into the Earth’s crust,” the Post reports.

Tech companies had promised “clean energy would be this magical, infinite resource,” said Tamara Kneese, a project director at the nonprofit Data & Society, which tracks the effect of AI and accuses the tech industry of using “fuzzy math” in its climate claims.

“Coal plants are being reinvigorated because of the AI boom,” Kneese said. “This should be alarming to anyone who cares about the environment.”

Data centers, the nondescript warehouses packed with racks of servers that power the modern internet, have been around for decades. But the amount of electricity they need now is soaring because of AI. Training artificial intelligence models and using AI to execute even simple tasks involves ever more complicated, faster and voluminous computations that are straining the electricity system.

A ChatGPT-powered search, according to the International Energy Agency, consumes almost 10 times the amount of electricity as a search on Google. One large data center complex in Iowa owned by Meta burns the annual equivalent amount of power as 7 million laptops running eight hours every day, based on data shared publicly by the company.

***

“The tech giants say they buy enough wind, solar or geothermal power every time a big data center comes online to cancel out its emissions. But critics see a shell game with these contracts: The companies are operating off the same power grid as everyone else, while claiming for themselves much of the finite amount of green energy. Utilities are then backfilling those purchases with fossil fuel expansions…”

Amazon says it has been “the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for four straight years.” Google wrote that it is using AI “to accelerate climate action,” which is “just as crucial as solving for the environmental impact associated with it.”

Among the region’s mega energy users is Meta, the company that owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads and is working on its own AI project.

A $1.5 billion data center campus is in the works outside Salt Lake City, Utah, that consumes as much power as can be generated by a large nuclear reactor. Google has purchased 300 acres across the street from Meta’s data center and plans its own data center campus.

Sue the Bastards

This all comes at the same time that the New York Times is suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement, opening a new front in the increasingly intense legal battle over the unauthorized use of published work to train artificial intelligence technologies. The Times is the first major American media organization to sue the companies, the creators of ChatGPT and other popular A.I. platforms, over copyright issues associated with its written works.

The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, contends that millions of articles published by The Times were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information.

The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft Over A.I. Use of Copyrighted Work

Again, if we had a Congress not spending all its time in prayer breakfasts and supporting Trump’s false claims of a stolen election in 2020 while trying to help steel one in 2024, we could be trying to get on top of these problems with legislation and regulations. But NOOOO!

Posting the Christian Ten Commandments in public schools is the answer. Just ask lawmakers in Louisiana. Old Judge Roy Moore down in Etowah County in Alabama must be laughing his ass off. He was instrumental in starting this movement, even though he was kicked off the Alabama Supreme Court twice and failed to get elected to the U.S. Senate or governor.

Other large and small news outlets are attempting to take a crack at covering this story. But they all seem to be falling short of getting anyone’s attention on cable or social media.

Energy demands for Northern Virginia data centers almost too big to compute

“The growing presence of data centers in Northern and Central Virginia is causing an unprecedented spike in projected energy use for the region,” reports the Chesapeake Bay Journal. “A sharp increase in the use of energy-hungry artificial intelligence inside the centers is driving it up even faster. As a result, environmental advocates are increasingly concerned about Virginia’s ability to meet renewable energy goals.”

“We’ve just never seen anything like this,” said Buddy Rizer, executive director of Economic Development for Loudoun County, home to the world’s largest concentration of data centers. “… the intensification of energy use being ushered in by artificial intelligence is ‘unfathomable’,” he said.

Maryland

The problem is not just limited to Virginia. It is coming to Maryland too, where the New Democratic Governor Wes Moore recently made an utterance that seemed to support bringing these AI data centers to Maryland. Then he never uttered another word about it. Presumably this is too controversial behind the scenes. So he shut up.

There are all kinds of fantasies going on to try to figure out a way to deal with these problems. There are some young, smart people at the University of Maryland at least thinking about what to do. Whether anything comes of it is questionable.

“The next big data center complex built in Maryland will feature more than just enormous buildings that guzzle electricity and hum in the night,” according to a public relations story on the university’s website. “It will include a 600-acre publicly accessible nature reserve designed specifically to soak up greenhouse gasses and other air pollution, buffer sound and manage rainwater runoff from the new buildings.”

A team of ecological engineers, industrial ecologists and landscape architects … are helping plan the grounds in partnership with the development company Quantum Loophole, which is building its newest data center community in Frederick County.

“I saw this partnership as a way to potentially direct future growth in the world’s data infrastructure into a greener way of doing things,” said Dave Tilley, an associate professor of environmental science and technology and an expert in industrial ecology and ecological engineering.

University of Maryland to Help Reshape the Data Center of the Future

So maybe all hope is not lost. But it will not be the subject of Thursday night’s presidential debate, on the prayer breakfast agenda in Congress, or the talk of cable news or Facebook memes.

Good luck out there. Hope the power grid doesn’t fail where you are during the debate. If it did, what would you do then? Any thoughts? Nah. That’s too hard, and the answer has not already been provided for you by a TeeVee star.

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