Guest essay by Steve Goreham
Since ChatGPT released their AI chatbot in November of 2022, artificial intelligence has exploded. In only two years, the AI revolution became the driving force in the US high-tech industry. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and other firms will spend over $100 billion this year building and upgrading data centers to run AI. Nvidia, the dominant supplier of AI graphics processor units (GPUs), became the most valuable company in the world, its market capitalization soaring from $300 billion to $4.3 trillion in less than three years.
Artificial intelligence requires vast amounts of electricity. AI processors run 24 hours a day, enabling computers to think like humans. When servers are upgraded to support AI, they consume 6 to 10 times more power than when used for cloud storage and the internet. Data centers consumed 4% of US power at the start of 2024 but are projected to consume 20% within the next decade.
The need for new generating capacity for AI now drives US electricity markets. Coal-fired power plant closures have been postponed in Georgia, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, Utah, West Virginia, and other states. Nuclear plants are restarting in Iowa, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Dozens of small modular reactors are on the drawing board. More than 200 gas-fired plants are in planning or under construction, including more than 100 in Texas. Companies building AI data centers are constructing their own on-site power plants, unwilling to wait for grid power. The pursuit of artificial intelligence is rapidly replacing obsolete US Net Zero policies.
For more than 25 years, Europe enacted policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in order to try to “mitigate” dangerous human-caused climate change. The European Green Deal of 2019 seeks to make Europe the first “climate-neutral continent.” The European Climate Law of 2021 provides legal force for the European Green Deal, calling for a 55% reduction in GHG emissions by 2030 and for achieving Net Zero emissions by 2050. Nations have been installing wind and solar facilities and closing traditional power plants to reduce emissions. Today, about one-third of Europe’s electricity comes from renewables.
It’s not clear that Europe’s emission-reduction efforts will have a measurable effect on global temperatures, but it is clear that the policies have reduced energy availability and raised costs. In 2000, Europe produced 56 percent of its natural gas and 44 percent of its petroleum. But the region chose to invest in wind and solar, instead of using hydraulic fracturing to boost oil and gas production. By 2021, Europe was producing only 37 percent of its own gas and 25 percent of its petroleum, with rising imports boosting energy prices.
Denmark and Germany have the highest density of wind turbines in the world but suffer residential electricity prices that are three times as high as US prices. Higher energy prices continue to force fertilizer, metals, automotive, and other industrial companies to build plants overseas, rather than in Europe. Per-person electricity consumption has been falling in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom for the last two decades. Nevertheless, Europe wants to pursue artificial intelligence while continuing to try to achieve Net Zero energy goals.
In February, French President Emmanual Macron announced €109 billion to boost artificial intelligence in France, arguing that his plan was as ambitious as US President Donald Trump’s “Stargate” plan. Macron pointed out that France was the largest electricity exporter in Western Europe because of the nation’s fleet of nuclear plants. But it’s possible that President Macron doesn’t understand the size of the power needed by new data centers. The new Meta data center in northern Louisiana, when completed in 2030, will use as much power as two-thirds of the city of Paris, and future expansions of the site will exceed Paris consumption.
Just last month, Marine Le Pen of the conservative opposition party announced that she would install air conditioning units across France if elected. About three-quarters of French buildings do not have air conditioning, including many schools and hospitals. The per-person electricity consumption in France is down 16 percent since 2005.
Germany exported power two decades ago. But Chancellor Angela Merkel closed more than 30 nuclear plants, making Germany an electricity importer today. Nevertheless, current Chancellor Friedrich Merz plans to provide subsidies for construction of data centers with 100,000 GPUs from Nvidia. Per-person power consumption in Germany is down 19% since 2005.
In June, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer stated that artificial intelligence can create a “better future,” announcing state funding for AI. But the UK is on the road to becoming a zero-electricity society. According to data from the International Energy Agency, the average person in the UK consumes 33% less electricity than they did twenty years ago. Unless the UK abandons Net Zero, the nation won’t have enough power for AI.
In Ireland, data centers are projected to consume 30% of the nation’s power by 2030. But due to a shortage of power, Ireland recently imposed a moratorium on new data center builds.
As part of the Net Zero transition, European nations intend to use green hydrogen as fuel for industry. But green hydrogen is produced from electrolysis of water, using large amounts of electricity from wind and solar. Producing a single kilogram of green hydrogen from electrolysis requires 50-55 kilowatt-hours of electricity, about 20 times as much as used daily in a UK home. Millions of kilograms of hydrogen would be required. There won’t be enough electricity to produce large amounts of green hydrogen.
Unless Europe abandons Net Zero and efforts to convert their power grid to wind and solar, AI will be a failure. Wind and solar are intermittent and AI data centers require 24-hour, 7-day per week electricity. Renewables are low-density systems, requiring vast areas of land for deployment and two to three times as much transmission infrastructure as traditional coal, gas, or nuclear plants. Wind and solar projects wait years for transmission connection compared to gas-fired plants that can be built quickly next to the data center site.
If Europe wants to compete in artificial intelligence, Net Zero policies must be abandoned.
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Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy, as well as author of Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure. His previous posts and mentions at MasterResource can be found here.
The only useful result of the EU embracing AI is that it would give them an excuse to drop Net-Zero. The AI? Forget it. They’ll strangle it with so much regulation that it won’t go anywhere.
While I think that the AI will actually go everywhere(the perfect cover to hide behind an AI that is being sold as ultimate and independent godlike expert while being totally controlled and woke.
And they can put all the blame on AI if things,just as planned, go wrong ),
the additional energy that is required for AI is very appreciated.
Not for the overhyped AI itself,
but it can be eventually be “missappropriated” for real purposes like production and the industry.
The way Europe has achieved is CO2 emission reduction goals is to de-industrialize and ship those energy intensive industries along with the jobs to support them to Asia.
I’ve heard that the jobs that AI is likely to displace first will be the ones in information technology. Does this mean they will increase their energy generation and consumption to eliminate jobs in the IT?
It’s not clear to me at all where this all is headed.
They have also been busy buying goods from forced labor camps in western China produced with a large array of coal power plants and shipped in numerous unit trains via Russia. Not looking helps a lot also.
“I’ve heard that the jobs that AI is likely to displace first will be the ones in information technology.”
It’ already happening. I’d heard that MS is laying off programmers. And personally, I’ve been using “AI” to create wordpress plugins and personal apps. I’ve replaced 5 paid WordPress plugins since July. I have no need for intransigent plugin programmers any more.
A big part of the problem is that Computer Science degrees became very popular goals about ten years ago. Since then, universities have stopped failing students for not completing assignments, abandoned testing and give out As like they’re participation trophies.
The result is a glut of students with freshly-minted CS degrees who couldn’t program their way out of a paper bag. Add in HR departments that view everyone as an intersection of identities, so the candidates at certain intersections always have the right of way.
It’s a recipe for companies hiring a lot of young people who simply get in the way (witness Microsoft’s recent problem with antisemites invading the offices of executives). And there’s no way to know you’re getting a boorish hack who can’t program until you hire it.
AI does not replicate human thought. It is an exhaustive search for the most likely way to complete a task or sentence based on a cultivated history of tasks and texts. It uses a lot of power because search algorithms are expensive. The small set of programmers who develop these algorithms are worth salaries approaching the hundreds of millions because their ability to fine-tune these algorithms can save billions in power costs alone.
However, AI is largely garbage-in, garbage-out. Hence the tendency to get very assertive hallucinations whenever the cultivated data set or algorithms used to search that data set fail.
It has a lot of value, but perhaps not as much as the climate (I mean AI) doom-and-gloomers fear it has.
European leaders have been doing really stupid things for at least three decades. I see AI as a pathway for them to change course without admitting they were wrong. It is true that there will still be some talk of Net Zero and saving the planet but the focus will shift to AI as a better approach to saving the planet. I can’t wait to hear all the blathering needed to justify the change.
The present EU/Indian trade talks include the EU requirements regarding global warming.
Russia and China and all other BRICS countries require none of that.
India will fudge the global warming issue/no firm commitments, during EU talks
If the EU insists, India will walk away.
Just charge extra to the American tourists with climate taxes, climate tips, and climate rental surcharges. Just write it in French and Italian with some mints and pastries to smooth it over.
Not just American tourists. Cruise to Greece, and at every port you disembark, there is a tourist tax of up to €20, plus the port taxes, plus VAT on everything you spend plus any overnight stays off the ship.
Biting the hand…
Like they say out West: Nuke, baby, nuke.
I passed this as a story tip earlier in the week, definitely applies here as well:
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/eu-mulls-10-year-tax-holiday-jet-shipping-fuels-draft-shows-2025-09-01/
The EU may not be using fuel tax to fund anything.
AI Development or Net Zero?
Net Zero is a fool’s errant, a total scam, to enrich/empower the elites and impoverish all others.
Reducing CO2 is an expensive suicide pact.
We need higher CO2 ppm to increase fauna and flora and to better feed 8 billion people
AI, if properly controlled, will enable all of us to live better, more productive lives.
Instead of work dominating our lives, we will have more tools to improve our lives.
” …. if properly controlled ….”
And how do you propose to ensure that?
And going to net zero in Europe (and the U.S.) will not overcome the CO2 from new power plants in Asia.
No question what’s going to happen in Wisconsin …
Inside Microsoft’s Plans for the ‘Most Advanced AI Data Center in the World’The $3.3 billion project in Wisconsin is expected to come online in early 2026, said Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith.
Significant growth in AI is spurring unprecedented demand for new AI data centers. Deloitte estimates that power demand from AI data centers in particular could grow more than thirtyfold by 2035.
(WSJ)
We were all worried about CO2 when it was just about dirty old cars and trucks. Now it’s all “The Future is AI” and Global Warming has been swept under the rug — where it should have been in the first place.
Maybe we’ll start using nuclear power to make electricity again …
It takes ten years to design, build, test, commission, feed power to the grid.
The US will need at least 200 nuclear plants, each with 2600 MW capacity, at $20 billion each (2025$)
Where will the money come from?
wilpost: “It takes ten years to design, build, test, commission, feed power to the grid.
The US will need at least 200 nuclear plants, each with 2600 MW capacity, at $20 billion each (2025$) Where will the money come from?”
I’ve read a recent MIT study of the economics of new-build nuclear power in the United States which concludes that bringing the cost of new reactors down from a current $18,000/kw CAPEX to a more reasonable $6600/kw CAPEX will require that between ten and twenty firm orders for AP1000-size reactors be added to the order books within the next ten years.
The study also concludes that at the current state of the US nuclear construction industry, there is no practical difference between what SMRs will cost per kw CAPEX and what AP1000-size reactors will cost per kw CAPEX.
If there is no difference in CAPEX per kw between SMRs and AP1000s for the next ten years or so because of the withered state of the nuclear construction industry in the US, the argument can still be made that SMRs can be deployed in more places thus possibly reducing power transmission costs.
Anyway, if the choice is for ten to twenty AP1000-size reactors, it will take that many firm orders on the books to reestablish a cost-controlled nuclear supply chain in the US.
The only possible source of the many billions of dollars needed for establishing all those firm orders is the US Federal Government in the form of direct cash outlays from the federal budget.
For those supporting an expansion of nuclear power in the US, those advocates must now build a strong case for adding these many billions of dollars to the federal budget, or else propose cuts in federal spending elsewhere to pay for the new reactors.
“enabling computers to think like humans”
hmmm… not really
Right. Not really even close. They can appear to carry on “intelligent” conversations, but if you’ve ever conversed with one, or tried to code with one, they have enormous difficulty maintaining context.
I haven’t played with AI yet but look forward to it. It might be entertaining. Supposedly few people if any understand how it really works. So, maybe someday it’ll shock us by saying something truly innovative.
I’ve played with it, even used it a bit in my work. It’s a bit like having an extremely confident search engine that gives you only one result at a time.
However, that result is only as good as the cultivation of data that goes into the model and the ability of the search engine to know what to do with that data.
It has trouble (as Jeff said) maintaining context, though the number of “tokens” it uses for context-holding keeps increasing (with a corresponding increase in power needed to get answers). It hallucinates, in that the models refuse to express anything other than 100% certainty that its answers are useful.
But it is a great tool. In the hands of people who don’t know what they have, though, it can also really get in the way. It only replaces workers in that so many young people today aren’t worth hiring.
The Europeans are also into drastically raising their military spending. That and AI, no way they won’t ditch Nut Zero.
Plus the cost to coddle tens of millions of societal-chaos causing walk-ins from all over
France, Germany, the UK, Spain, etc., are terminally incapacitated, can no longer be effectively governed, totally lost control of their borders.
There is no point in talking about the EU and nuclear power plants, AI, expensive US LNG, renewable energy, militarizing. he EU is a dead man walking, and it can go faster than you think. Oh there will be net zero, zero energy, zero economy, zero welfare.
It’s sort of a sophist’s choice.