Essay by Eric Worrall
“… plans to decommission several coal plants have been delayed … 20 per cent of global electricity use by 2030. … “
AI is bad for the environment, and the problem is bigger than energy consumption
Published: January 30, 2025 2.43am AEDT
Hamish van der Ven
Assistant Professor of Sustainable Business Management of Natural Resources, University of British ColumbiaArtificial intelligence technologies, like chatbots, are attracting growing scrutiny for their voracious energy demands. However, energy consumption is only one part of their broader environmental impact.
…
Late last year, ChatGPT, the popular AI chatbot run by OpenAI, celebrated its second birthday. In its brief existence, the platform has amassed over 300 million weekly users who send roughly one billion messages to the chatbot per day.
…
Elsewhere in tech, other companies marked less savoury milestones. Alphabet — the parent company of Google — recently announced that its GHG emissions are up 48 per cent since 2019. At roughly the same time, Microsoft announced that its emissions are up 29 per cent since 2020.
…The burgeoning AI industry needs so much electricity that plans to decommission several coal plants have been delayed. By some estimates, the collective demand of AI and other digital technologies will constitute 20 per cent of global electricity use by 2030.
…
Read more: https://theconversation.com/ai-is-bad-for-the-environment-and-the-problem-is-bigger-than-energy-consumption-247842
Microsoft is re-commissioning Three Mile Island, but how many mothballed nuclear reactors are available? Even gas has limits. It was inevitable they would turn to coal in their hour of need.
The interesting point about this article is the author didn’t even try to claim renewables have a place in this new world order. They’re still fretting about climate change, but nobody is taking their coals, I mean calls.
The green movement is finally being relegated back to its proper place in society – a fringe movement of ignored radicals.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
To the general population: Curb your appetite for electricity! Here are your smart meters! Adjust your expectations and your lifestyles! You mill workers should learn to code!
To the AI and other favored industries: Welcome! At your service! How much electricity will you be needing?
This is only mildly /sarc.
And they will want the consumer to pay a lot more for those kwhs. Not going to fly in flyover America. Sane utilities and states can relieve the GHG obsessed of mucho dinero by building CGT capacity to help in their hours (years) of need if they are smart about it.
The AI firms should pay 100% of all the cost for their electricity.
AI firms should generate their own electricity.
Learn to code so Big Tech can hire H1-B visa workers to take your next job. But don’t worry, AI will take their jobs in 5 years.
“hire H1-B visa workers” was 1990s. Today’s coders don’t need a building in a US city.
No, there are hundreds of thousands of active H1-B visas today. The program began in the 1990s and accelerated about 15 years ago when Big Tech sold us the STEM workers shortage lie.
You must not work in IT, software development or a white-collar job as you would know many employers are enacting strict Return To Office policies. This is no secret and is widely reported in the mainstream media.
And I don’t understand how the two things go together. Are you saying H1-B visa holders don’t work in office buildings?
It’s like when you take two unrelated things and put them into one sentence but they are still unrelated. Like you did. Would you clarify?
Signed, long-time coder and remote worker.
I think you missed the key point in the comment from KevinM.
A US office.
H1-B is a visa. The workers come to the US. They work here, typically in office buildings. You’re thinking of jobs being outsourced to Asia, I believe.
Only 7% of federal workers, mostly Democrats, pretend to “work” full time in a federal office.
Most of them work one or two days at their desk, mostly to catch up on the latest gossip, the rest of the time at home with hubby and the kids.
Why do you think the bloated IRS needed 82000 more, mostly Democrat, bodies?
The US Post Office employees try to emulate other federal workers, but found you cannot deliver the mail that way.
In the 1950s we had mail delivery 2 times per day, a letter was 5 cent.
What the hell is going on.
Privatize It.
Get out the chain saw
My next-door neighbor, about 100 yards away, works for the Harvard Property Department, but she works 5 days a week at home, and very rarely goes to her office in Boston about 125 miles from here
The power consumption per transistor continues to drop…ever since transistors were invented. The time is coming when significant AI will run on a measly 1 KW like dishwasher….it is just a matter of time….just like our smartphones today would have needed a small hydro dam to run them if they were designed like the original Univac.
And our AI is only subject-predicate pattern recognition in a literature search, some rephrasing software to avoid copyright issues…basically providing the enquirer with a consensus viewpoint…..not much actual intelligent assessment involved.
The new chatBots have train-of-thought and implication to check what it is doing and to give the user so additional information.
“The green movement is finally being relegated back to its proper place in society – a fringe movement of ignored radicals.”
YES! I was waiting for the glorious day! I knew it was a passing fad. Fit for the dust bin of history. I used to hang out with leftists back when I thought I was one of them. Then I realized they are all a bunch of hypocrites. I am all for the separation of state and church, but that must include the church of climastrology.
Automated Idiocy has some massive downsides, but its great gift to humanity will be to shine a great big bright light on the colossal stupidity of grid connected wind and solar “power.”
hopefully!
Faint hope? DeepSeek will say whatever the CCP tells it to say. It will not be shining a bright light on anything useful to anyone except the CCP, and that means that it will harm the USA and western democracies at every possible opportunity. As for the others, except for Grok, they “learn” from information controlled by people you would prefer not to control it. There is a wide deep swamp around the information we seek, and most AI is set up to sink in the swamp.
So we shouldn’t call it artificial intelligence- more like Fake Intelligence. Seems like a waste of a lot of money and all the energy to drive it.
They are quite helpful when researching problems. Much, much easier than trying to use Google to find something.
Even if its information base is highly controlled, that does not mean that it isn’t good processing. only that for you it can only tell you what ‘They” want you to know. When it is used by “Them” for their own processes, it might be as objective and complete as possible. After all “They” probably do want to know the truth. How else can they be sure they are doing the best job of controlling you?
Not renewables? Woulda thunk it?
“Alphabet … emissions are up 48 percent … Microsoft .. emissions are up 29 percent”
They generate emissions with similar hardware.
Someone is winning more than someone else.
Fire up all fossil fuel and nuclear generators, build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators, remove all wind and solar from the grid.
“The green movement is finally being relegated back to its proper place in society – a fringe movement of ignored radicals.”
Not in Wokeachusetts where the state is unaware of the new sheriff in town.
Cold, alone, in the dark, under a bridge waiting for the AI drone to deliver your allotment of cricket paste.
The delivery will be live streamed in a charity ball in Sky City, along with a running AI generated bio of your life and how you ended up under a bridge. After dumping the cricket paste in your lap, which bursts from its eco-friendly packaging as it lands because of the rain, everyone will congratulate themselves on how they are taking care of the less fortunate, before the party gets into full swing.
Of course, other outcomes are possible.
Welcome to the industrial revolution golden age where coal is king.
We can use coal to make solar panels to put on roofs of Califonia houses so those living the easy life can feel good about themselves.
Another scary prediction:
“… the age of electricity and of copper will be short. At the intense rate of production that must come, the copper supply of the world will last hardly a score of years. … Our civilization based on electrical power will dwindle and die.” [ 1924 ]
Ira Joralemon, geologist and copper-mining expert
Background reading: Julian Simon versus Paul Ehrlich wager of 1980.
Interestingly, addition of graphene (a real type of carbon) to copper increases its efficiency for electricity transmission.
That is interesting.
“Copper is essential to electricity generation, distribution and storage. Copper availability and demand determine the rate of electrification. Just to meet business as usual trends 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically to date. To electrify the global vehicle fleet requires bringing in to production 55% more new mines than would otherwise be needed”
“New copper mines that started between 2019 and 2022 took an average of 23 years from time of discovery ….. to be put in to operation. Production will continue to rise to 2025 but then decline….so that production rates in 2030 are nearly the same as 2018 – following a study of scheduled mine closures and new mine development.”
International Energy Forum ‘Copper Mining and Vehicle Electrification’ (May 2024)
China’s DeepSeek chatBot has, they claim, been trained at a fraction of the cost of chatGPT and Claude sparking a stock market selloff of about $600 billion, some of which has been recovered.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/chinas-deepseek-sets-off-ai-market-rout-2025-01-27/
Any yet just yesterday Charles confidently stated that RCP 8.5 was flawed bacause:
“Coal consumption is declining in many major economies, while renewables are expanding rapidly. Even in countries like China and India, where coal use remains significant, cleaner energy alternatives are gaining ground.”
See
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/01/29/projected-increase-in-heat-related-deaths-in-europe-misleading-models-and-statistical-fearmongering/
So in less than 24 hours we can go from confidently predicting that coal use will fall to saying that
it will increase. And everyone here seems to agree with both comments. Talk about doublespeak.
Different author different opinion. I think my IT background gives me insight into what is about to happen, and so far I’ve gotten some of it right.
Of course if CO2 did rise like crazy, to 1000ppm+, it would just mean more beach days.
If it warms up, the oceans, which have 60-70 times as much CO2 as the air, won’t be able to dissolve as much CO2 and will release some of their CO2 into the air.
So? There is no paleo evidence this would be a problem.
Different author different opinion.
A difficult concept, apparently.
Coal is declining in the US and Europe but it is also growing massively in China, India, Indonesia and the wider SE Asia..
The IEA recently listed 95 coal mining for export projects that are underway all around the world. 46 of those projects were in Australia alone and 54 were new projects in 11 different countries.
IEA ‘Coal 2024 Analysis and Forecast to 2027’ (Dec. 2024)
Trump likes coal a lot. He was promoting coal the other day when he announced the $500 billion investment in Artificial Intelligence. He said AI Data Centers should build their own power plants and coal would make a very good fuel for the power plants, and the United States has a lot of coal.
Trump can use his emergency powers to streamline the construction of power plants.
Trump gets it. That’s why his tour through Silicon Valley was such a win, he knows what they need.
We need to distinguish between “the green movement” and environmentalists.
Extreme left-wing ideologies have co-opted the green movement to promote broader social and economic changes beyond environmental protection.
True environmentalism focuses on practical measures to preserve natural habitats and reduce pollution, without tying these goals to other political agendas. This more balanced approach considers both environmental and economic factors in decision-making.
Fair point. A few of them have found the courage to split with the renewable energy mob, I agree we should encourage this.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/06/12/aussie-green-insurrection-build-coal-plants-to-save-the-koalas/
This article is outdated, because the Chinese perform high rates of machine-learning classification tasks at very low power.
That news has caused NVIDEA and other AI stocks to drop $Trillions off their market value
The power requirement won’t drop, the processing capacity will rise.
The green movement is finally being relegated back to its proper place in society – a fringe movement of
ignoredignorant radicals.