Data centers and AI are absorbing large amounts of renewable energy – CleanTechnica

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Mention electric cars, and some people will go off on a rant about how there isn’t enough electricity to charge them all, and if they happen to be charging at the same time, the grid will explode as the wires of the transmission melt and the transformers self-destruct in a shower of sparks. There is some truth to these concerns – tens of millions of electric cars will need a lot of electrons to keep their batteries charged. But what most people are blissfully unaware of is that data centers and AI likely consume half of all available electricity from renewable energy sources like solar and wind farms. The network IS under threat, but it is not from EVs, according to Wire.

There’s a new wind farm off the coast of Scotland that’s supposed to be able to power 1.3 million homes, but Amazon has just announced that it has spoken for more than half of that installation’s 880MW output. As the world’s biggest companies race to build the infrastructure needed to enable artificial intelligence, even remote Scottish wind farms are becoming indispensable. Wires say. Which begs the question – Is this why the world is building all these renewable energy sources? We were under the impression that electricity would be used to heat and cool our homes and businesses. Should we the people foot the bill to build more transmission lines so that Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos can capture every hit 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 and Renewable Energy

Data center activity is growing dramatically in Europe. Recently, Microsoft announced that it would invest 3.2 billion dollars 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 investment in data center AI infrastructure in France. Amazon announced a network of data centers in the state of Brandenburg as part of an $8.5 billion investment in Germany, later committing another $17.1 billion to Spain. Google said it would spend $1.1 billion on its data center in Finland to fuel AI growth. Does anyone notice how these numbers sound a lot like the money the auto industry is investing in the transition to electric transportation?

As tech giants rush to build more data centers, behind the scenes there is panic over how to power them with renewable energy. Microsoft, Meta and Google plan to be net zero by 2030, while logistics-heavy Amazon has targeted 2040. In pursuit of that goal, the past decade has seen these companies end renewable energy contracts with wind companies or the sun. But all these projects rely on electricity grids, which are buckling under increasing demand for clean energy. This is forcing tech giants to think about their energy-intensive futures and consider how they can operate their energy empires off the grid, off the grid.

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

Renewable energy for chips and refrigeration

Data centers need power for two main purposes, Wires say. The first is powering the chips that enable computers to run algorithms or power video games. The second is cooling the servers so they don’t overheat. Initiatives such as using liquids to cool chips instead of air are expected to yield modest energy savings, but forecasters such as the International Energy Association still expect the energy demand to run data centers to double by 2026. partly thanks to artificial requirements. intelligence.

For the past five years, technology companies have been on an increasingly frantic shopping spree for renewable energy contracts known as power purchase agreements, which can enable data center operators to reserve energy from a wind farm or solar site before projects are built. In Denmark there are solar farms paid for by Meta. In Norway, there are wind farms funded by Google. As early adopters of these types of deals, technology companies have helped fuel Europe’s now thriving PPA market, says Christoph Zipf, spokesperson at WindEurope. This month, Microsoft struck the world’s largest renewable energy deal, signing a $10 billion clean energy contract across Europe and the US.

Network conflicts

However, renewable energy still needs to go through the electricity grid, which is becoming a bottleneck – especially in Europe – as a growing number of renewable producers try to connect to supply green electricity to a host of sectors. “We’re going to face energy constraints,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted in a podcast in April. At Davos this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also warned that the status quo would not be able to provide AI with the power it needs to advance. “There is no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said in one Bloomberg event.

Network operators basically say the same thing. Ireland’s state-owned electricity provider Eirgrid cited network problems when it imposed an effective moratorium on its Dublin data centers two years ago. When the municipality of Amsterdam introduced a similar moratorium, the Dutch Data Center Association, an industry group, fought back. “The current gridlock in North Holland is blocking the growth of the data center sector,” she said in a statement.

In the search for network space, data centers are being pushed to parts of Europe where their arrival is most visible, risking a backlash from smaller communities when they appear. This trend is already visible in Germany, according to Simon Hinterholzer, a researcher in Germany Borderstep Institute for Innovation and Sustainability. “In the past, most new data centers were being built in Frankfurt,” he says. “That has completely changed in the last two or three years.” It points to a 300 MW data center being built in the small town of Wustermark, as well as Amazon’s latest investment in Brandenburg, the region bordering Berlin where more than 70 wind turbines were installed last year.

Big data thinks outside the grid

This unquenchable thirst for renewable energy has led to more calls for data centers to find ways to survive off the grid. “The size of AI projects is getting bigger and bigger, reaching up to 1 gigawatt of energy, which cannot be supplied by traditional power grids,” says Ricardo Abad, founder of the Quark data center, which is is working on a new site with an unnamed partner in Spain that will be able to generate its own energy through on-site solar and wind power. These types of projects are technically still connected to the grid — in case they want to offload excess power — but they have the ability to operate independently, he says.

In the same year Dublin announced restrictions on data centers, Amazon also opened its largest-ever solar farm in the country, including the roof and car park of its fulfillment center in Seville, Spain. The head of Google’s data center location strategy in Europe has also expressed interest in renewable resources in the country for the next generation of server farms. Microsoft and Meta denied running any projects that are entirely off-grid, but in Dublin, Microsoft is building a data center alongside its own gas-fired back-up power plant, meaning the site could continue to operate even if the operator the network starts it.

The quest for clean electricity to power the insatiable needs of data centers is leading to some previously unimaginable ideas. “In the future, technologies such as advanced nuclear reactors, renewable energy sources and energy storage solutions will be crucial to make this possible,” says Kilian Wagner, an expert in sustainable digital infrastructures at the German Digital Association. Bitkom. OpenAI’s Altman is already an investor in Helion Energy, an American nuclear fusion company that has also agreed to provide Microsoft with 50 megawatts of electricity from its first nuclear fusion plant once it is operational. In the US, Microsoft has already experimented with hydrogen fuel cells, touting them as an emission-free form of energy backup.

Takeaway

The demand for precious electricity to power data centers so people can play video games and mine cryptocurrencies may be surprising to some. When society needs electricity to heat and cool our homes, make green cement and low-carbon steel, and charge the batteries in tens of millions of electric cars, diverting resources to what is essentially entertainment seems completely inappropriate. unnecessary, if not downright stupid.

The US government has essentially decreed that green hydrogen developers must supply their own electricity to run their electrolyzers. Would a similar policy make sense for data centers? It seems pretty clear that ordinary ratepayers will be asked to foot the bill to build the transmission infrastructure to operate these giant server farms – at least until someone invents chips that consume 90% less electricity. There seems to be a hierarchy that prioritizes whoever gets the first information about renewable energy, and it’s hard to imagine that data centers and AI deserve priority in such a distribution strategy.