Emerging AI Will Crush Renewable Energy

Cognitive Dissonance is on display among people who advocate both AI and renewable energy. The former is not achievable via the latter -- period. Given that AI is imperative and profitable, and renewables are optional and economically dubious, it's easy to predict that AI will triumph. And so will natural gas and nuclear power.
Energy notes from the edge: AI latest – the energy beast is fully unleashed; and when a Bee gets an A – an insect skill set could benefit humans in an incredible way
From BOE REPORT
Terry Etam
Of interest to BOE Report readers, do note that natural gas is the only solution in the next 5-10 years to handle this crunch. . . .

Many modern industrial western behemoths have pledged to facilitate their growth in a green way, which – the current rate of AI growth – is incompatible with a rapid (or any sort of) energy transition. Renewables have not been able to keep up with rising energy consumption levels before the AI wave, and these cumulative trillions in AI investment only move the goal posts farther away.

So AI developers are doing the logical thing, in the time frame they want their AI up and running (i.e., right now). They are going right to the energy source to build data centres. Some are building near natural gas fields (see: Ohio’s exploding AI demand, right near the massive Appalachia gas field). That’s all well and good, because new wells can be drilled to meet that demand.

But there’s some very sobering news for the country’s other power consumers. AI developers have zeroed in on, logically enough, the only true 24/7 source of emissions free energy: nuclear power. . . .

 

Robert Zubrin discusses the very thing in “The Case for Nukes”. He gets distracted or uses the global warming enhanced CO2 effect hypothesis as a partial justification but the discussion is absolutely relevant to the point thar intermittent green energy cannot meet the demands of future computing energy requirements.

Nuclear energy solves many problems both real and imagined.

 

Here's an example; Google is doing their part to crush renewable energy.
Google’s Net Zero Plans Are Going Up in Smoke
From the Robert Bryce Substack

Robert Bryce

In 2017, Google declared it had reached “100% renewable energy for our global operations.” The company continued, “Google became carbon neutral in 2007, and since then, our carbon footprint has grown more slowly than our business — proof, 10 years later, that economic growth can be decoupled from environmental impact and resource use.”

That “decoupling” didn’t last long.

In fact, since 2017, Google’s environmental reports show that the company’s electricity use, CO2 emissions, and carbon intensity have soared. The most recent numbers came out last Tuesday when the search and advertising colossus released its 2024 environmental report. And the numbers don’t lie. As seen in the chart below, since 2017, CO2 emissions at Google have jumped four-fold to a company record of 14.3 million tons in 2023. . . .

 

The world added 116 GWatts of wind in 2023. The average nuclear plant is 1 GW. It’s horrid to envision all the high level waste that would be forced upon future generations if this power were to be provided by overpriced nuclear energy. With half-lives of hundreds of thousands of years, the nuclear energy proponents want to dump that waste on future generations.

 

And again capacity is not utilization. All adding adding wind capacity does nothing but increase overall cost of energy which is what the Chinese Communist Party wants for the western democracies.

 

Renewables can't do the AI job. Nuclear and natural gas can.

 

Google,Amazon and others have already committed to 100% renewable energy for their data storage. Google statement attached.

https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/cleanenergy/

“
From 2010 to 2022, we signed more than 80 agreements totaling approximately 10 GW of clean energy generation capacity—the equivalent of more than 31 million solar panels. Now, as we enter our third decade of climate action, we’ve set a goal to run on 24/7 carbon-free energy on every grid where we operate by 2030, aiming to procure clean energy to meet our electricity needs, every hour of every day, within every grid where we operate. Achieving this will also increase the impact of our clean energy procurement on the decarbonization of the grids that serve us.”

 

Ooooh! Be still my beating heart! Another opinion piece on a blog! The author appears to be an unemployed “author” of no listed tertiary qualifications in anything as far as I can tell.

 

What is the “enhanced CO2 effect hypothesis?

 

What do you believe has caused the current global warming period we are now in?

 

Your research was inadequate. Terry Etam is a reporter employed by BOE. The source:

BOE Report - Canada's Source for Oil & Gas News

BOE Report
https://boereport.com

The latest oil & gas news, commodity prices, drilling activity, property listings, and jobs for the oil and gas industry in Alberta and Canada.

 

Big Tech's energy requirements make a mockery of their Net Zero posturing.
Big Tech On The Path To Net Zero
July 11, 2024/ Francis Menton

• 
  Among the adherents to the cult of climate change, nobody can claim a higher level of sanctimony than the Big Tech behemoths — the likes of Google, Microsoft, Meta and Apple.
  
  
• These new economic titans fancy themselves to be totally unlike the dirty and grubby industrial companies of the past, like the steel, automobile or oil producers with their belching smokestacks. Each of these new tech powerhouses loudly proclaims its sacred and unwavering commitment to “net zero” emissions by some early date, typically 2030.
  
  
• And each of them puts out an annual report documenting its progress toward the rapidly arriving nirvana. Here is Google’s 2024 “Environmental Report”; Microsoft’s “2024 Environmental Sustainability Report”; Meta’s “2023 Sustainability Report”; and Apple’s latest “Environmental Progress Report” (issued October 2023 covering 2022).
  
  
• But don’t these companies use vast quantities of energy in their operations, not the least for rapidly expanding data centers? Surely, their “emissions” must be increasing.
  

READ MORE

 

Trouble is your article isn’t telling the entire story…Google never said it would be easy, but they are still committed to their goals.

https://carboncredits.com/google-ditches-carbon-offsets-heres-its-new-net-zero-focus/

“
Google Ditches Carbon Offsets, Here’s Its New Net Zero Focus…
By the end of 2023, Google signed three carbon credit offtake deals, purchasing around 62,500 tCO2e of removal credits, contracted for delivery by 2030. Google recognizes this as just the beginning and is committed to accelerating its carbon removal efforts in the years to come, continually evolving its approach to counterbalance its residual emissions.”

 

They literally can't power their business that way.

 

Nuclear is "over priced" due to Malthusian policies.

Zubrin, Robert. The Case For Nukes: How We Can Beat Global Warming and Create a Free, Open, and Magnificent Future (pp. 138-140). Polaris Books. Kindle Edition.

 

AI could design new ways of producing energy

 

Irrational fear of radioactive waste is not an argument. The more radioactive an isotope is, the faster it becomes less radioactive. Long-lived radioactive waste could be disposed of in submarine tectonic subduction zones where it would be sequestered for hundreds of millions of years. All that is preventing it is a treaty that prohibits disposing of radioactive waste in the oceans. Unfortunately, the treaty does not distinguish between waste that could dissolve in sea water and enter food chains and waste that has been made into a permanently insoluble form that will just move down into the earth's mantle over millions of years.

 

More likely, it will design more efficient versions of itself that use far less energy.

 

Coulda, woulda, shoulda…. There is not one repository for High Level radioactive waste in the entire world. Future generations will have to maintain hundreds of thousands of tons of this, and they will reap no benefit. Add that to your cost of already-extremely-overpriced-nuclear energy.

 

Natural gas and nuclear are the future because no other power source can meet the demands of AI.

 

that too, I think AI will help come up with many new discoveries as it improves..... some good, some bad

 

Yucca mountain in the US and the deep ocean for glassified waste in Stainless Steel containers are available. As shown and proven Malthusian regulations are responsible for the high cost of nuclear power plant construction resulting in exorbitant and unnecessary delays.

 

I normally agree with you, but this strikes me as a stupid article, and stupid way of thinking.

"AI" is mostly hype, even though it may eventually have some big implications in the long-term.

Trying to connect AI and renewable energy seems like more than a stretch, like some wacky thinking.

I think this AI investment could turn out to mostly be a bubble, in the near term.

 

Yucca Mountain has never been a U.S. repository. Stainless steel has been known to rust and corrode, especially once pitting starts. I’ve worked in in industry where huge tanks exhibit these problems. Once pitting starts, it gets worse and worse with time.

You want to make “cheap” nuclear plants by pulling back regulations? Glorious!