Data Centers & AI Are Sucking Up Huge Amounts Of Renewable Energy

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Mention electric cars, and some people will go off on a tirade about how there is not enough electricity to charge them all, and if they happened to be charging at the same time, the electrical grid will implode as transmission wires melt and transformers self-destruct in a shower of sparks. There is some truth to those concerns — tens of millions of electric cars are going to need a lot of electrons to keep their batteries charged. But what most people are blissfully unaware of is that data centers and AI are likely to consume half of all the electricity available from renewable energy resources such as solar and wind farms. The grid is under threat, but it’s not from EVs, according to Wired.

There is a new wind farm off the coast of Scotland that is supposed to be able to power 1.3 million homes, but Amazon has just announced it has spoken for more than half of that installation’s 880 MW output. As the world’s biggest companies race to build the infrastructure necessary to enable artificial intelligence, even remote Scottish wind farms are becoming indispensable, Wired says. Which raises this question — Is this why the world is building all these renewable energy resources? We were under the impression that electricity would be used to heat and cool our homes and businesses. Do we the people have to foot the bill to build more transmission lines so Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos can save every keystroke and data point in their insatiable quest to bring digital advertisers into our personal space to sell us more stuff? Inquiring minds want to know.

Big Data & Renewable Energy

Data center activity is increasing dramatically in Europe. Recently, Microsoft announced it would invest $3.2 billion for data centers in Sweden. Earlier this year, it said it would double its data center footprint in Germany, while also pledging a $4.3 billion data center investment for AI infrastructure in France. Amazon announced a network of data centers in the state of Brandenburg as part of a $8.5 billion investment in Germany, later dedicating another $17.1 billion to Spain. Google said it would spend $1.1 billion on its data center in Finland to drive AI growth. Does anyone notice how these numbers sound a lot like the money the automotive industry is investing in the transition to electric transportation?

As the tech giants rush to build more data centers, behind the scenes there is panic around how to power them with renewable energy. Microsoft, Meta, and Google all plan to be net zero before 2030, while logistics-heavy Amazon has targeted 2040. In pursuit of that aim, the past decade has seen those companies hoover up renewable energy contracts with wind or solar companies. But all these projects rely on electricity grids, which are buckling under increased demand for clean energy. That’s forcing the tech giants to think about their energy intensive futures and consider how they might operate their own off-grid power empires, outside the system.

“There is a recognition that as power demand increases, the industry will have to find alternative energy sources,” says Colm Shorten, senior director of data center strategy at real estate services company JLL. He says that server farms are increasingly looking for “behind the wire” power supply, whether that’s gas or diesel generators or more innovative technology such as green hydrogen. Oh, joy. Big data wants to build more thermal generation capacity so it can power its servers to absorb an endless stream of ones and zeros. Is this progress?

Renewable Energy For Chips & Cooling

Data centers need power for two primary purposes, Wired says. The first is to power the chips that enable computers to run algorithms or power video games. The second is to cool the servers so they don’t overheat. Initiatives such as using liquid to cool the chips instead of air are expected to make modest energy savings, but forecasters like the International Energy Association still expect the demand for power to run data centers to double by 2026, thanks in part to the demands of artificial intelligence.

For the past five years, tech companies have been on an increasingly frenzied shopping spree for renewable energy contracts known as power purchase agreements, which can enable data center operators to reserve power from a wind farm or solar site before the projects have even been built. In Denmark, there are solar farms paid for by Meta. In Norway, there are wind farms bankrolled by Google. As early adopters of these types of deals, tech companies have helped fuel Europe’s now-thriving PPA market, says Christoph Zipf, spokesperson at WindEurope. This month, Microsoft struck the…