By George Moffatt • Jersey Shore Group Education Chair
What will happen as the continued growth of artificial intelligence (AI) requires more and more electrical power?
While global warming disasters are clearly telling us we must reduce our fossil fuel emissions, some AI companies want to continue using oil, gas, coal, and even aging nuclear power plants to meet their growing electrical needs.
The computer giant Microsoft wants to power its AI operations by buying all the electricity generated at Three Mile Island’s undamaged nuclear reactor Unit 1 at Harrisburg, Pa., where operations ceased in 2019 and are being restarted by Constellation Energy. Constellation is investing $1.6 billion to bring the 2,000-plus megawatt (MW) reactor back to life.
New Jersey residents can rightly be concerned about any ill winds (radiation contamination) blowing from Pennsylvania should Unit 1 emulate Unit 2’s malfunction in 1979. And there is another issue. What will become of the past nuclear waste still stored at the site and, of course, Unit 1’s future waste?
Microsoft, like many other AI companies, consumes unimaginable amounts of electricity to store and crunch its unimaginable amounts of data across acres upon acres of server farms.
Pennsylvania is not alone in feeling the pressure to provide juice for AI. New Jersey had 70 MW of data center capacity under development in June of last year, according to the real estate business JLL, and another 150 MW in the blueprints. Data centers are seen as the next wave of real estate development in New Jersey, following the peak of the warehouse boom.
In Wisconsin, Microsoft recently bought a 407-acre pumpkin farm where it plans to build a 2 million- square-foot data center that, together with other data centers planned, would reportedly consume the equivalent of the output of five average-size nuclear power plants.
Yes, AI’s impacts are truly “unimaginable” everywhere.
Companies offering AI services want more nuclear plants as well as more power from nuclear plants. They also want to draw heavily from aging and inefficient fossil-fuel power plants.
Another problem is financial. Some AI companies may pay only a portion of the costs for upgrading electrical utilities to meet their needs, with the remainder paid by the utility’s other customers.
In 2023, US utilities generated about 4.18 trillion kilowatt hours (kWh), by using fossil fuels (60%), nuclear energy (19%), and renewable energy (21%), according to the US Energy Information Administration.
As AI’s growth continues, it raises some interesting questions. Will AI throw monkey wrenches into the delicate balancing act we need to transition from nuclear and fossil fuel power to clean, green energy, such as solar and wind? This is not a trivial question, since demand for electricity appears to be increasing exponentially, worldwide.
Or, a wishful question: Will AI eventually become an asset, perhaps even our salvation? It may even find solutions to slow down and eventually reverse global warming, something we—and AI—are busy creating for Mother Earth.
It’s just a thought.