by James A. Bacon
Luddites, unite! You have nothing to lose but your fossil fuels!
Concern among environmentalists is growing in Virginia as it dawns upon them that Artificial Intelligence creates demand for data centers, which in turn boosts demand for electricity… which in turn emits carbon dioxide… which in turn drives global warming.
A case in point can be seen in an op-ed, published today in the Daily Progress, by Eric Bonds, a sociologist who teaches human rights, climate change and environmental justice at the University of Mary Washington. Writes Bonds:
There are limits to how much electricity we can produce for data centers without also shattering our commitment to shift away from fossil fuels. Ultimately, a transition to renewable energy will require that we slow or stop the current data center boom in order to get there.
Bonds is absolutely correct that there are limits to the amount of energy that can be economically produced in a Net Zero electricity regime. But has it occurred to him that AI can be part of the solution?
Let’s think this through.
A week ago Governor Glenn Youngkin announced plans by Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) to build the world’s first commercial nuclear fusion reactor in Virginia. That project must overcome innumerable obstacles if it’s to become reality. The company has devised magnets capable of containing 150-million-degree temperatures, but the engineering of scaling from the lab to a commercial-scale facility is daunting. Artificial Intelligence can help with that.
Nuclear fusion will be the ultimate green fuel, producing limitless electricity without emitting CO2 or other pollutants. Greenies should be willing to move heaven and earth to make it a reality.
Admittedly, fusion power is still years off under the best of circumstances — CFS is aiming for the early 2030s. Meanwhile, we need renewable energy such as solar and wind to bridge us to the future. AI potentially can help engineers squeeze more energy out of solar power cells and design turbines that extract more energy out of the wind (and stand up to hurricanes and, who knows, maybe even save the whales).
AI might even help solve another barrier to renewable fuels — the inability to store excess electricity that solar and wind generate for when it’s needed. Using batteries to store energy is still very expensive. Batteries are economical only in limited situations such as tweaking the electric grid or, most ambitiously, short-term load shifting. Perhaps AI can help scientists explore new, more powerful battery chemistries — or accelerate the development of alternative energy-storage mechanisms such hydrogen storage and flywheels.
Maybe AI can accelerate the development of deep geothermal technologies. Extracting the heat stored beneath the earth’s surface could cleanly power human civilization for thousands of years.
Then there’s the vast realm of energy conservation: heat recycling, better insulation, precision agriculture that uses less energy, more walkable human settlement patterns that rely less upon automobiles. The human imagination (bolstered by AI) is the limit.
There are enormous downsides to AI if it spins out of control (as it inevitably will). Some apocalyptic scenarios seem frighteningly plausible, and humanity will have to develop institutional mechanisms to prevent them from occurring. But I would argue that AI is far more likely to help humanity solve the climate-change issue than make it worse. Here in Virginia, let’s be part of the solution.
There’s one more factor that Virginians need to take into account as this debate evolves. Halting construction of data centers in Virginia won’t halt construction of data centers — it will just shift the location of data centers to other states and jurisdictions. Luddite interventions won’t prevent the release of one molecule of CO2 into the atmosphere. We’ll just deprive ourselves of the economic benefits of maintaining our status as the data-center capital of the world.
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