AI pushing companies, big banks to prioritize energy abundance
Last Friday, Microsoft, in the middle of an historic race for artificial intelligence dominance, announced it would purchase more than $15 billion worth of electricity from Constellation Energy in a 20-year deal
Constellation will generate the power by reviving the 835-megawatt Unit One nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, which had been shuttered just five years ago.
Then Monday, at the kick-off of the UN General Assembly meetings in New York City, 14 of the world’s largest banks and financial institutions said they will prioritize lending to support a tripling of global nuclear capacity by 2050.
Just 10 days ago, we wrote about Mario Draghi’s wake-up call for the European economy, where energy poverty depresses innovation, and also BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s reversal on intermittent “renewable” power sources, which he now admits can’t power A.I. data centers.
Microsoft, BlackRock, and the United Arab Emirates also just launched the Global Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership (GAIIP) to invest $100 billion in U.S. data centers and energy infrastructure.
Many of these announcements are filigreed with ‘net zero’ emissions goals and other climate language, but forgive us if we detect a shift in attitudes.
As the Biden-Harris White House clamps down on coal and even super-clean natural gas power generation with its Clean Power Plan 2.0, utilities and grid operators across the nation warn of growing shortages in coming months and years.
The normally quiet grid operators are so alarmed that four of them just filed an amicus brief challenging the Administration’s climate rules.
PJM, which runs the Mid-Atlantic grid, estimates anti-hydrocarbon policies will by 2030 force retirement of more than 13 percent of its installed capacity. Around 30 percent of those policy-driven retirements will be natural gas plants, which makes little sense if you’re worried about carbon dioxide emissions.
Over the last two decades, the U.S. natural gas boom replaced huge amounts of coal-fired power and thus reduced CO2 emissions more than any other factor.
(In a global context, however, the emissions superiority of natural gas over coal may not matter. As Doomberg recently noted, last year alone China added “22 New Zealand’s worth” of coal power.)
“For the first time in recent history,” the grid operator concludes, “PJM could face decreasing reserve margins.” Most of its new capacity will come from wind and solar, but it won’t be nearly enough to make up for the simultaneous demand-boost and forced supply-decline.
In fact, under one scenario, its capacity reserve could fall from around 20 percent to just three percent by 2030, severely jeopardizing grid reliability.
Voracious A.I. tech companies are thus scrambling for reliable power, and paying large premiums, up to $115 per megawatt-hour, as Microsoft just did.
Several months ago, Amazon Web Services bought a $650 million data center from Talen, situated at the 2.5-gigawatt Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, nuclear plant. Big Tech’s new rush for power will only exacerbate the coming grid disruptions.
Financial leaders are thus finally taking note and revising, if not reversing, the scarce energy mantras too many of them lazily broadcast over the last decade. Their pledge to help triple zero-CO2 nuclear power is of course consistent with emissions targets, as was always obvious.
It’s notable nonetheless because the ‘net zero’ crowd had inexplicably vilified nuclear for so long, and there seems to be a new attitude. We notice, for example, that Apple just revised its own guidelines to include nuclear as an approved source of “green” energy.
Will the welcome endorsement of nuclear in particular lead to a more robust embrace of energy abundance in general?
There are only so many decommissioned nuclear plants to revive, and even with a radically pro-nuclear regulatory shift, new plants will take many years to plan and build.
Whatever your politics, you can’t make American manufacturing great again or build back better, or contend with China on security or A.I., without abundant, affordable, reliable energy.
The A.I. revolution, among other crucial consumers of energy, is too important as an engine of productivity growth, budgetary healing, and general prosperity to subjugate it to the pure climate pretense of Washington’s out-of-date scarce-energy policies, which by the way are likely unconstitutional.
See more here substack.com
Please Donate Below To Support Our Ongoing Work To Defend The Scientific Method
PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company 
incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX.
Trackback from your site.
Jerry Krause
| #
Hi PSI Readers,
The simple solution to this problem I just read about is to shelve AI. We got here without it.
Have a good day
Reply
Jerry Krause
| #
Hi PSI Readers,
A simple solution to this problem, about which I just read, seems to be to shelve AI. We got here without it.
Have a good day
Reply
Howdy
| #
“shelve AI. We got here without it.”
No we didn’t. Is an old calculator AI? Yes, if you refer to it as it is used now, it displays traits of an intelligence due to the functions it provides.
Before the electronic means was the mechanical machine such as the adding machine. The mechanical has no intelligence, as is the case with AI. It’s been there for as long as such devices have existed, but It’s just become a glorifying buzzword for people who think they literally, are god.
Reply
Jerry Krause
| #
Hi Howdy,
The electronic calculator, to which you refer, is NOT AI. A person had to punch the keys to do the calculation that could be done with a pencil and paper and in some cases one also needed tables of certain numbers like sine, cosine, tangent tables. And the energy required was less than that to operate the previous mechanic calculators.
Have no idea why you commented as you did, For I consider that you are reasonably intelligent.
Have a good day
Reply
Howdy
| #
AI needs telling what to do. It cannot make decisions that are not within it’s programming, regardless of what you think, or machine learning promises etc. It is all programmed from a another machine, which in other words, means using a keyboard.
Your veiled appraisal of my intelligence level interests me not. It is you who has no understanding. The readers know the truth about intelligence level on display and I’ll leave that there.
Like last time, stop leading thought for your own benefit by grasping at straws in an attempt to boost your own credibility.
You need such things, I don’t. That’s why you reinforce your PH.d at every opportunity, while I claim the status of a nobody.
Every time you do this you damage yourself. Self destructive in the extreme.
Reply
Howdy
| #
One other thing:
When a calculator is switched on, it displays all zeros. How does it do that when no keypresses have occurred to tell it to do so?
Kent
| #
Adam Curry and John C. Dvorak have discussed extensively on the “No Agenda Show”. Curry convinced Dvorak that AI is not sustainable. Plus, it often produces questionable (and oftentimes humorous) results. So, it is entertaining.
Reply