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June 29, 2024
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By Jonathan Thompson
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Data Center Doomsville?
AI, cryptocurrency ‘mining’ and our digital lifestyles imperil the energy transition — and the planet.
In 2018, California utility regulators approved a plan to shutter Diablo Canyon’s two nuclear reactors in 2024 and 2025. Doing so would deprive the state’s grid of 2,323 megawatts of generating capacity, but Pacific Gas & Electric, the plant’s operator, and a coalition of labor and environmental groups proposed replacing the lost power with renewables. The plant kicked out enough juice to light up about 1.7 million homes, but replacing that power seemed feasible, especially since PG&E predicted that demand would steadily decline over time, as more folks put solar on their roofs and slashed their energy consumption.
Pro-nuclear eco-modernists, who see atomic fission as a primary way to avoid the climate catastrophe, mourned the imminent loss of so much carbon-free power. But clean energy advocates hailed it as a sign of the impending energy transition — a move away from gluttonous power consumption into a system where we use much less electricity and generate more of it from solar panels.
Now, however, the whole scenario has been turned on its head: Diablo Canyon’s reactors are poised to continue fissioning atoms for the foreseeable future. Contrary to PG&E’s optimistic projections, society, in general, is growing even hungrier for power.
Diablo Canyon remains a symbol of the energy transition, no doubt, but not in the way people once hoped. Now its continued existence represents a transition gone awry.
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Joe Johnston / The Tribune via AP, File
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An aerial photo shows the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant, California’s last nuclear power plant, in Avila Beach, California. Slated for shutdown, PG&E will keep it running to try to keep up with the state’s ever-increasing demand for electricity.
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If you look at the supply side alone, you could be fooled into thinking that the energy transition is still going strong. Solar-generating capacity in California has doubled in the last six years. On multiple occasions this spring, renewable energy sources supplied more than 100% of the total electricity demand on California’s grid in the afternoon, when solar output peaks. Even more notable is the growth of grid-scale battery storage in the state, jumping from 770 megawatts in 2019 to more than 10,000 now. On one day in April, battery storage discharge became the largest energy source on California’s grid.
On the demand side, however, things have gone haywire. Earlier this month, PG&E CEO Patti Poppe predicted that the utility’s load — or the amount of power consumed — would double by 2040. Poppe is not exaggerating; Texas grid operators expect demand to double there in just six years. Some of this added load was foreseeable. Human-caused climate change is increasing temperatures, transforming energy-intensive air conditioning from a luxury to a life-or-death necessity. And all those Teslas and other electric vehicles you see cruising on the highway? They need to be charged, even as more folks are switching out their dirty natural gas appliances for electric ones.
But back in 2018, few anticipated the incredibly rapid buildup of all the electricity-sucking data centers that we would need to process our credit card payments, all the computing we do, our constant Google searches and the endless movies we stream. Those demands, meanwhile, pale in comparison to the huge power consumption required to mine a single bitcoin or process a generative AI operation. And together they are threatening to overwhelm power supplies altogether, straining the grid and throwing a digital wrench into the energy transition.
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Marissa Garcia / HCN
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A recent report by the Edison Power Research Institute found that U.S.-based conventional data centers alone (not including harder-to-track cryptocurrency mining) consume more than 150 terrawatt-hours of electricity annually, equivalent to the output of 100 Diablo Canyon plants. (A single terawatt-hour, or TWh, is equivalent to 1 trillion watt-hours.) Federal analysts estimate cryptocurrency mining uses up to an additional 80 TWh each year in the U.S. Taken together, it’s enough to keep the air conditioners cranking in hundreds of millions of homes year-round.
And the demand will continue to grow exponentially, especially in a handful of Western states. Since a single AI query uses about 10 times the energy of a Google search, the spread of this technology is projected to mean that, by 2030, conventional data centers will be gulping up about 15% of the nation’s total power consumption, with the highest percentages in Arizona, Oregon and Nevada, where new centers have sprouted rapidly. Throw cryptocurrency mining into the mix, and it becomes clear the nation’s current generating capacity isn’t nearly up to the task.
The technophiles insist that this is a good thing, that data centers’ gargantuan power demands are spurring innovation in, and deployment of, renewable electricity sources, thereby accelerating the energy transition. It’s true that many data center operators purchase enough clean energy from utilities to offset their power consumption, and some cryptocurrency miners have developed their own solar installations or set up remote shops in oil fields to harness methane that otherwise would be flared or spewed into the atmosphere. A few are even working to develop small nuclear reactors to power their operations, technology that could then be used for other applications.
This isn’t enough, though. New clean energy development needs to do more than break even, given our ballooning consumption. In order to mitigate the worsening effects of climate change, the world has no choice but to burn less fossil fuels. Clean energy sources must displace dirty ones. But this only works if new clean energy supplies outpace increases in demand, a near-impossibility given the enormous needs of data centers and other emerging technologies.
As it is, we’re simply building new clean resources on top of the old dirty ones, plastering the desert with solar installations and cluttering our public lands with wind turbines, even as we keep extending the lives of coal and natural gas-fired plants to meet the insatiable demand.
The Information Age promised to be cleaner and less destructive than the Industrial Era, enhanced by cyberspace’s infinite possibilities. Smog-choked freeways would be replaced with electronic ones, enabling the masses to commute to work or go to the movies without ever setting foot in a car or burning gasoline. The roar of factories and mines and drill rigs would be replaced by the muted rhythm of typing on a laptop keyboard, the benevolent hum of an army of cooling fans fending off the persistent heat.
Never mind that electronic highways and Zoom calls and all those fans will demand more and more energy: We’ll simply use the technology to build yet more solar and wind and geothermal and nuclear plants. It’s always about producing more; never about using less. It’s the same old mindset that got us into this mess — our childish belief that our resources are unlimited, and that we can simply grow and consume our way out of any consequences that might arise. Just as early white settlers convinced themselves that rain followed the plow, both literally and figuratively, the techies of today think electricity will magically appear to satisfy the needs of the electronic age. That might seem reasonable as we drift serenely through cyberspace, oblivious to the world outside our air-conditioned domiciles. But what happens in the cloud doesn’t stay in the cloud, and the hunger for growth will have disastrous consequences for everything in the real world.
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