How can advanced technology contribute to solving the global energy crisis?

Gillian Tate
Last month, Amazon celebrated the 20th anniversary of its presence in Ireland, and this event was supposed to be a time of celebration After all, Amazon, like other large technology companies, has to invest heavily in the country over the past two decades partly because of the benefits of low taxes, which have supported phenomenal growth,

But in reality, these anniversary celebrations were marred by a degree of bitterness. One reason for this is the ruling issued by the European courts last month, which ruled that the 13 billion euros in tax breaks enjoyed by Apple were illegal. During my recent visit to Ireland, I learned that local business leaders fear that this regulation will deter future investment.

There is another reason that was more urgent, and it is related to energy, because “Amazon Web Services” is currently pumping investments worth 30 billion euros into Europe, in the middle of the boom in artificial intelligence, according to Neil Morris, the company’s CEO. The President of Ireland, announced, but he won’t get… Ireland hasn’t received any of these investment streams, because Amazon executives are very worried about future energy constraints. In fact, reports indicate that the company has already begun to redirect some cloud operations because of this.

Although the Irish government has committed to improving the electricity network, often through wind farms, this is not happening fast enough to meet demand, and we cannot fail to point out that basic the structure of the water also suffers. Yes, this is indeed true, as the country known for its water and winds has difficulty supporting technology through water and wind energy.

There are at least four interesting lessons. First, this issue shows that popular discourse about technological innovation is limited at best, and misleading at worst. In particular, in the context of today’s culture, we tend to talk about the Internet and artificial intelligence as if they were completely intangible things like “the cloud.”

As a result, politicians and voters often overlook the less glamorous infrastructure that allows this “something” to work, such as data centers, transmission lines power, and submarine cables, but this equipment is often overlooked as essential to the functioning of our modern digital economy, and we need it so that we give it more respect and attention.

Secondly, we need to recognize that this infrastructure is increasingly under pressure, and data center power consumption has been fairly stable in recent years, offset by increased energy efficiency higher internet usage rates. However, this situation is changing rapidly, as AI queries require ten times more power than today’s search engines. Therefore, the energy consumption of data centers will at least double by 2026, according to estimates by the International Energy Agency, and it is expected that data centers will consume 9% of total energy in the United States by 2030. In Ireland , energy consumption has already jumped so far. more than a fifth of the network’s capacity, This is higher than the total home consumption.

Thirdly, the scramble by companies and governments to find out how and where to find this extra electricity has the unexpected benefit that technology has become a key driver of mobility. energy

It’s true that more electricity consumption leads to higher emissions, but companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple are making huge investments in innovation in hydro and solar power, as well as wind and batteries Microsoft recently announced that it had reached an agreement with Constellation, a utility group investing $1.6 billion to restart the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania; To meet the demand of artificial intelligence for electricity. Constellation’s market value has since jumped to more than $80 billion, as investors expect more such deals to be concluded.

At the same time, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft, praise the benefits of small reactors. The two, along with others in the technology field, hope that these moves will eventually reduce pressures on energy, especially if future artificial intelligence models use less energy. If true, the current worries about energy supply may turn out to be unfounded, just as the Green Revolution undermined the prospect of a global famine in the 1960s. Therefore, technology itself can solve the problems involved, or so it is hoped.

However, the fourth lesson is that such innovative energy solutions cannot succeed without a unified government policy. Unfortunately, this is not widely available. After all, you need a building permit to build data centers, and that often means government intervention. Just watch as Angela Rayner, Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, enters a local battle in the village of Abbotts Langley in Hertfordshire, where local residents want to stop new digital investments.

Government involvement is also needed to have electricity networks. It is worth noting, for example, that there is a major obstacle to the spread of renewable energy in the United States, which is represented by the real difficulty needed to obtain the permits needed to build transmission lines to connect renewable energy sources in the core. of the country and in energy-starved regions, such as California.

If the pressure on energy rises, we also need the government to decide on the distribution of scarce electricity resources in the future, as well as answer questions such as whether households will be given priority in benefiting from electricity rather than businesses if the grid collapses, and whether the state is free to finance innovation or major technology companies.

Those with a strong anti-individualist, low-government view, and many in the technology sector, would argue that market forces, ie prices, should answer these questions. But this view is politically damaging, something Irish leaders are well aware of. So, let’s prepare for an energy conflict throughout the industrialized world. Threats to the future of AI are not what we need to worry about right now.