As the artificial intelligence boom continues, the significant energy demand that this revolutionary technology may bring has attracted increasing attention.On Monday, U.S. energy giant NextEra Energy Inc., the largest developer of wind and solar power plants in the United States, predicted that with the vigorous development of artificial intelligence, the growth rate of U.S. electricity demand would sharply increase to keep pace with the development of AI, electrification, cloud computing capabilities, and chip factories.
Sudden Surge in U.S. Electricity Demand
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s(EIA) long-term annual outlook released last year, the annual growth rate of U.S. electricity demand is currently less than 1%.
However, according to the estimate of John Ketchum, CEO of renewable energy giant NextEra Energy, under the influence of artificial intelligence technology, this annual growth rate of electricity demand will accelerate to around 1.8%.
Speaking at the S&P Global Energy Week conference on Monday, Ketchum stated, “U.S. electricity demand has been relatively stable for many years, but suddenly, the expected growth rate of electricity demand in the next five years will increase rapidly by 81%.”
Already strained due to extreme temperatures and climate change, the U.S. power grid has faced the risk of large-scale blackouts almost every winter in recent years. With the continuous development of AI, the sharp rise in electricity demand may further pressure the U.S. power grid.
AI Requires Much More Electricity Than Imagined
In fact, Ketchum is not the first business figure to warn of the significant energy demand brought about by AI technology.
At the World Economic Forum earlier this year, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, admitted, “We really do need more energy than we previously imagined… We still haven’t fully appreciated the energy needs of this technology (artificial intelligence).”
Recently, Tesla CEO Elon Musk also predicted that in order to meet the demand for artificial intelligence and electric vehicles, there will be a shortage of electricity in the coming years:
“The limitations of AI computing are very predictable… A year ago, there was a shortage of chips, neural network chips. So, it’s easy to predict that the next shortage will be in power infrastructure (such as transformers). You have to provide energy to these things.”
In September last year, the Boston Consulting Group released an analysis report stating that by the end of 2030, the electricity consumption of just U.S. data centers is expected to be three times that of 2022. This increase is mainly driven by two key demand factors: the training of AI models and the higher frequency of AI queries for services.
The report from the Boston Consulting Group shows that in 2022, data center electricity consumption accounted for 2.5% of the total electricity consumption in the United States (about 130 terawatt-hours), and it is expected to double by 2030, reaching 7.5% (about 390 terawatt-hours). This is equivalent to the electricity consumption of about 40 million American households, or one-third of all American households. The group also predicts that generative artificial intelligence will account for at least 1% of the new electricity consumption in the United States.
