Will AI Make Climate Change Worse?

A coal-fired electricity generating plant in Pennsylvania'
AI is greatly increasing electrical demand, meaning
decommissioning fossil fuel run plants like this
are being postponed, harming the 
battle against climate change. 

 It turns out it takes TONS of electricity to generate AI. 

So much so that electricity demand in the United States, which had been on the stable side in recent years, is set to soar.  And that might screw up the battle against climate change. 

The amount of electricity needed for data centers will more than double between now and 2035. The increase is the equivalent to the amount of electricity the entire state of California used in 2022.

According to Environment America Research Policy Center: 

"Data centers currently make up 3 percent of America's energy demand but that is expected to rise to 8 percent by 2030.

The increase in data center electricity is primarily due to the significant data processing needs of Artificial Intelligence. As AI development accelerates, the need for data processing grows, and companies have to build more and larger data centers to meet those needs - and those data centers use a lot of electricity."

Moving toward EVs and other conversions that supposedly move away from fossil fuel is of course a good thing if you don't want to worsen climate change. 

But if demand for electricity skyrockets, the worry is some of that needed electrical generation won't be clean energy.  

Until now, electricity use hasn't grown much because of efforts to improve energy efficiency. As Environment America points out, the cleanest energy is the energy that never gets used in the first place.

They go on:

"When electricity demand is lower or at least stable and predictable, it is much easier to meet that demand with clean energy like wind and solar. A rapid and unexpected surge in electricity demand is the last thing we need, particularly when energy demand is already expected to grow due to electrification of buildings and transportation."

Environment America notes that utilities have extended the life span of coal plants and proposed new methane gas plants to meet the expected growth in demand from all these data centers. 

Each AI query a person does uses up a lot of juice. As NPR reported, one query to ChatGPT uses about as much electricity as what could power one light bulb for 20 minutes.  One ChatGPT query needs about ten times the amount of electricity as a Google search query.

So imagine what happens when millions of people are poking around Chat GPT or other sources of AI help. 

And as NPR tells us, a majority of that energy needed for AI still comes from the burning of fossil fuels like coal and gas.

The Washington Post tells us that soaring power consumption is delaying coal plant closures in Kansas, Nebraska, Wisconsin and South Carolina. 

Not only does this spiraling demand threaten to aggravate climate change, it also is making regulators worry that residential ratepayers will be stuck paying for the upgrades to the electrical grid

 Then there's this question. Like almost every Next Big Thing I've ever seen, there tends to be an over-enthusiasm bubble which might hit here. 

Will tech companies overbuild data centers only to see demand for AI fall short, maybe because of government regulation,  just too much capacity, or maybe the Next, Next Big Thing will come along after AI to wow the masses. 

If that happens, will we have built climate-damaging fossil fuel generating plants for no good reason?  And how much unnecessary emissions would that add to the world? 

I guess as the world gets more complicated, so does the battle against climate change.