The biggest superheroes of the renewable revolution risk becoming the biggest villains. For years, Silicon Valley’s biggest players have been among the loudest and richest. supporters of clean energy investment. But today, thanks to runaway energy demand driven by artificial intelligence, Big Tech’s emissions are rising sharply and their ambitious decarbonization goals are becoming increasingly over-the-top. The bigwigs behind tech companies, including Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI, are now pushing more than ever for greater deployment of renewable energy infrastructure and increased research and development of new clean and alternative energy, but keeping up with AI’s voracious energy appetite is a difficult task. a major challenge.
Google Environmental report 2024 revealed that the company’s greenhouse gas emissions have increased by almost 50% since 2019, driven by the massive expansion of the use of AI in the company’s operations. As a result, the company now publicly acknowledges that its own ambitious goal of reaching net zero emissions by 2030 is becoming increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.
“AI-based services require significantly more computing power – and therefore electricity – than standard online activity, prompting a series of warnings about the technology’s environmental impact,” recently reported the BBC. A study published earlier this year by scientists at Cornell University, found that generative AI systems like ChatGPT consume up to 33 times more energy than standard computers running task-specific software, and that each AI-powered internet query (e.g., a Google search) consumes approximately ten times more energy than a traditional query. And AI is quickly becoming the norm.
As a result, the amount of energy needed to support the growth of the AI sector is doubling approximately every 100 days. At this rate, the AI sector alone could be responsible for a huge 3.5 percent of global energy consumption by 2030, according to some expert projections. “When you look at the numbers, it’s staggering,” Jason Shaw, chairman of the Georgia Public Service Commission, an electricity regulator, told the Washington Post. earlier this year. “It makes you scratch your head and wonder how we ended up in this situation. How were the projections so far off? This created a challenge like we’ve never seen before.
To counteract AI’s rampant energy consumption, big tech companies are banking on still under-explored and underdeveloped clean energy alternatives, such as nuclear fusion, nuclear fission, and geothermal energy. Geothermal energy, which has recently become a much more feasible option for all terrains using drilling technology borrowed from the hydraulic fracturing industry, has emerged as a popular choice.
Meta and Alphabet are among the leading tech companies partnering with geothermal startups to power their data centers. Geothermal companies are popping up across the country and particularly in Texas, “due to the abundance of identified geothermal resources, the one-stop permitting process and our regulatory certainty,” according to Matt Welch of the Texas Geothermal Energy Alliance (TxGEA).
Although geothermal offers virtually unlimited cleanliness with relatively low overhead costs, the initial costs of developing geothermal resources are considerable. “This has dampened some of the initial enthusiasm, with limited investment so far,” Reuters recently reported. “Analysts estimate that just over $700 million in financing has been provided to geothermal projects overall since 2020,” the report adds.
The outlook for geothermal energy is also clouded by what is shaping up to be a major natural gas boom. The oil industry is doubling its natural gas production, and the new presidential administration is certain to provide a a significant boost to the sector. The result is an energy landscape in which new geothermal projects will find it very difficult to compete on cost.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
