ai

Electricity demand from data centers

February 17, 2025 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Data centers are dedicated facilities containing computers and their related hardware equipment such as servers, data storage drives, and network equipment; they are the physical facilities that store digital data. Data centers are one of the most energy-intensive building types, consuming 10 to 50 times more energy per floor space than a typical commercial office building. With the explosive growth of artificial intelligence technology, data center energy use is expanding rapidly.

A new report by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory outlines the energy use of data centers from 2014 to 2028. The report estimates that data center load growth has tripled over the past decade and is likely to double or triple again by 2028.

Data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023 and are projected to consume between 6.7% and 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028. Most of the increased power demand of data centers is due to the growth in AI servers. Artificial intelligence requires increasingly powerful chips and intense, power-hungry cooling systems.

There have been revolutionary changes in artificial intelligence technology in just the past couple of years and its role in society has dramatically expanded. With that expansion has come a dramatic change in the energy usage by the data industry and innovative solutions are needed to allow data centers to meet their growing demand for energy.

**********

Web Links

Berkeley Lab Report Evaluates Increase in Electricity Demand from Data Centers

Photo, posted August 31, 2024, courtesy of Aileen Devlin / Jefferson Lab via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

The year in energy

February 5, 2025 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Last year saw some major trends in the global energy sector. Perhaps the most dramatic was the shift to renewable power, which continued to outpace the projections of both financial analysts and industry experts. 2024 saw new highs in renewable installation, largely due to China, which accounted for more than half of all the solar power installed globally. Huge solar installations also came online in California and Nevada during the year. On the other hand, the amount of coal burning for the year also exceeded expert predictions, also largely due to China.

A second trend was increasing sales of electric vehicles, which reached a new high, although short of expectations. A major driving force in EV sales is the dropping price of lithium-ion batteries, which fell by 20% in 2024. Again, China was a major factor with roughly half of all its domestic vehicle sales being electric.

Coal’s decline is being slowed by the rising demand for electricity. The increased use of electric heating and cooling along with the increasing use of EVs are major factors. But the proliferation of energy-hungry data centers incorporating artificial intelligence capabilities is driving up the demand for power even more.

Perhaps the clearest indication of the future for global energy comes from investors, who put about $2 trillion into clean energy last year. That is twice as much as invested in oil, coal, and natural gas.

The history of energy has seen the Age of Coal and the Age of Oil. By all indications, we are now heading into the Age of Electricity.

**********

Web Links

The Year in Energy in Four Charts

Photo, posted November 23, 2024, courtesy of Mussi Katz via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Approaching critical global temperature thresholds

January 21, 2025 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

The Paris Climate Agreement is a global treaty adopted in 2015 to combat climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, while striving to keep it below 1.5°C. But according to recent research, the planet is quickly approaching these critical thresholds.

An international research team led by scientists from Colorado State University, Stanford University, and ETH-Zurich in Switzerland combined insights from 10 global climate models, and – with the help of artificial intelligence – found that regional warming thresholds are likely to be reached faster than previously thought.

In fact, the researchers found that most land regions will likely surpass the critical 1.5°C threshold by 2040 or even earlier. Additionally, several regions are on track to exceed the 3.0°C threshold by 2060. Regions including Central Europe, the Mediterranean, South Asia, and parts of sub-Saharan Africa are expected to reach these thresholds faster.

The research team relied on transfer learning, a cutting-edge machine learning technique that leverages pre-trained models to tackle new, related tasks.

The research, which was recently published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, found that 34 regions are likely to exceed 1.5°C of warming by 2040. Of those 34 regions, 31 of them are expected to reach 2°C of warming by 2040, and 26 of these 34 regions are projected to surpass 3°C of warming by 2060.

**********

Web Links

AI predicts that most of the world will see temperatures rise to 3C much faster than previously expected

Photo, posted February 23, 2011, courtesy of 2011 CIAT / Neil Palmer via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Artificial intelligence and lost oil wells

January 2, 2025 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

There have been commercial oil and gas wells across the United States for 170 years. Researchers estimate that there are between two and three million wells that have been abandoned. There are hundreds of thousands of them, across 27 states, that are “orphaned,” meaning that they are uncapped, unproductive, and nobody is responsible to manage their leakage or pollution.

Many are undocumented orphaned wells – UOWs – that are not listed in formal records and are basically out of sight and out of mind. Besides having nobody responsible for them, nobody even knows where they are. But they are potential sources of oil and chemical leaks into nearby water sources and can send toxic substances like benzene and hydrogen sulfide into the air.

Researchers are using modern tools like drones, laser imaging, and advanced sensors to try to locate UOWs. But these wells are scattered over an area of more than three million square miles.

To better predict where to look for undocumented wells, researchers are combining historical topographic maps with artificial intelligence. The US Geological Survey has scanned 190,000 topographic maps made between 1884 and 2006. AI is being used to find the symbols for oil and gas wells on the maps. People can recognize these symbols easily, but there are just too many maps to look at. The problem is equivalent to finding a needle in a haystack; there is just an awful lot of hay to look through.

Abandoned wells are a big problem and it will take lots of modern technology to try to solve it.

**********

Web Links

AI Helps Researchers Dig Through Old Maps to Find Lost Oil and Gas Wells

Photo, posted August 16, 2022, courtesy of Larry Syverson via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Big Tech and emissions

September 23, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Most of the well-known largest technology companies have established ambitious clean energy goals. They are on record for achieving net-zero emissions for all their operations and supply chains in many cases by 2030. As a result, they have been investing heavily in renewable energy in various ways. Despite these lofty goals and sincere efforts, many of them are struggling to reduce emissions. The reason is simple: big data.

A good example is Google, which started investing in renewable energy in 2010 and since 2017 has been purchasing renewable energy on an annual basis to match the electricity consumption of its global operations. However, Google’s greenhouse gas emissions have increased nearly 48% since 2019. This is primarily a result of data center energy consumption.

The expanding use of artificial intelligence technology is consuming large amounts of electricity. For example, a single ChatGPT query uses nearly 10 times as much electrical energy as a traditional Google search.

Google is by no means unique in having this problem. Microsoft’s carbon emissions have risen by nearly 30% since 2020. Amazon is struggling to reach net-zero across its operations by 2040.

All of these companies are entering into large power agreements with renewable energy companies all across the country. The AI arms race for more and more computational power is driving a race to install more and more large-scale renewable energy. Power purchase agreements for solar power, wind power, and even geothermal power are becoming a major activity for most of the largest tech companies.

**********

Web Links

Can Google gobble up enough renewables?

Photo, posted February 12, 2023, courtesy of Geoff Henson via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Penguin detectives

June 5, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Emperor penguins, the tallest and heaviest of all living penguins, are also the most famous, being the subject of a very popular documentary film. The ongoing loss of sea ice in Antarctica has led to unprecedented breeding failures in emperor penguin colonies.

Since 2016, Antarctica has seen the four years with the lowest sea ice extent on record. Between 2018 and 2022, 30% of the 62 known emperor penguin colonies were affected by partial or total sea ice loss. Current predictions suggest that the population of emperor penguins will fall by 99% by the end of the century.

To monitor remote emperor penguin colonies, researchers use satellite images in which the brown stains of the birds’ guano stand out against the white ice and snow.

Researchers at the British Antarctic Survey have launched the ‘Polar Observatory’ on the online citizen science website Zooniverse to recruit ‘penguin detectives’ to help validate the accuracy of satellite images in assessing penguin populations.

The online app contains drone photos taken over the Snow Hill penguin colony. The images have been split into more than 300 10-meter squares. Volunteers are asked to identify any adult and chick penguins in a given picture. The results will be fed into machine learning algorithms to train the AI systems in automatically counting penguins in future surveys.

The project is a fun opportunity for aspiring conservationists and penguin lovers in general to help learn more about the future of the species. Interested people can learn more on the Zooniverse website.

**********

Web Links

‘Penguin detectives’ required for new counting app

Polar Observatory

Photo, posted October 7, 2017, courtesy of Christopher Michel via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Climate change and Antarctic meteorites

May 1, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Researchers from Switzerland and Belgium have investigated the effects of the warming climate on access to meteorites in Antarctica. Meteorites are of great scientific interest because they provide unique information about the makeup of our solar system. Of all the meteorites that people have found, 62.6% of them were found in Antarctica.

Why is this? It is not because more meteorites land in Antarctica. Statistically, they can land anywhere on earth. Most end up in the ocean since the world’s oceans cover 70% of the planet.

Meteorites in Antarctica are more visible because environmental conditions are favorable for their preservation and their visibility. The arid and cold Antarctic environment helps to preserve meteorites and the lack of rocks and contrast with ice makes spotting meteorites much easier. The flow of ice sheets tends to concentrate meteorites in so-called meteorite stranding zones where the dark colored space rocks can be easily detected.

There are an estimated 300,000 to 800,000 meteorites in Antarctica. When meteorites warm up, they can transfer heat to the ice, which locally melts. Eventually, the meteorites sink beneath the surface. A recent study using satellite imagery, climate model projections, and AI predicts that for every tenth of a degree of increase in global air temperature, an average of 9,000 meteorites in Antarctica will disappear from the surface and will no longer be able to be found.

The study estimates that a quarter of Antarctic meteorites will be lost to glacial melt by 2050. If warming continues to accelerate, closer to three-quarters of the meteorites on the continent will be lost.

**********

Web Links

Climate change threatens Antarctic meteorites

Photo, posted April 21, 2005, courtesy of Kevin Walsh via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

AI’s Environmental Footprint

March 13, 2024 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Artificial intelligence is everywhere these days. Some say it is the biggest development since the discovery of fire. There is a lot of hype regarding AI, and it will be a while before the hype is sorted out from the reality. But one thing that is certain is that AI is resource-intensive and has a large environmental footprint.

AI use directly produces carbon emissions from its consumption of non-renewable electricity and is also responsible for the consumption of billions of gallons of fresh water.

Various forms of AI run on many types of devices, but the kind of AI we hear about the most – such as ChatGPT – requires specialized computer equipment that runs in large cloud data centers. There are roughly 10,000 such centers worldwide and more are under construction. Estimates are that electricity consumption from data centers will double between 2022 and 2026 to a total of 1,000 terawatts, roughly as much electricity as all of Japan uses.

These estimates include all data center activities, not just AI. Most operators of data centers don’t reveal what percentage of their energy use comes from AI. One exception is Google, which says machine learning accounts for about 15% of its data center energy use.

Data centers also consume a great deal of water to cool delicate electronics. In 2022, Google’s data centers consumed about 5 billion gallons of fresh water.

AI has the potential to improve the efficiency of systems, improve climate models, and perhaps help develop new ways to help reduce humanity’s environmental footprint. But at the moment, it represents an increasing burden on the environment that cannot just be ignored.

**********

Web Links

As Use of A.I. Soars, So Does the Energy and Water It Requires

Photo, posted January 23, 2023, courtesy of Aileen Devlin / Jefferson Lab via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Chatbots Are Thirsty | Earth Wise

June 19, 2023 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

We hear a lot about artificial intelligence these days. ChatGPT has found its way into education, technology, and many other aspects of life. It and its brethren are a source of fascination, enthusiasm, and even fear. Many of us have given queries to the bot to see what kind of results we can obtain. But a recent study has found out something about AI systems that we probably didn’t know – they use up lots of fresh water.

According to researchers at the University of California, Riverside, running a few dozen queries on ChatGPT uses up about half a quart of fresh water from already overtaxed reservoirs.

Running artificial intelligence systems like ChatGPT relies on cloud computations done in racks of servers in warehouse-sized data processing centers. Google’s data centers in the U.S. alone consumed nearly 3.5 billion gallons of fresh water in 2021 in order to keep their servers cool.

Data processing centers consume water in two ways. They often draw much of their electricity from power plants that use large cooling towers that convert water into steam emitted into the atmosphere. In addition, the servers themselves need to be cooled to keep running and are typically connected to cooling towers as well.

It isn’t going to be easy for AI systems to reduce their water use. The study’s authors noted that people make use of AI at all hours of the day and night. But a significant amount of AI activity is actually the training of the systems. That could be scheduled for the cooler hours, when less water is lost to evaporation.

In an era of scarce fresh water and droughts, it is important to make AI less thirsty.

**********

Web Links

AI programs consume large volumes of scarce water

Photo, posted May 22, 2023, courtesy of Jernej Furman via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Plants Make Sounds | Earth Wise

May 9, 2023 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Some people talk to their plants. It is highly unlikely that the plants are listening, but recent research has found that plants are doing quite a bit of talking of their own.

It turns out that plant emit a variety of click-like sounds, especially when they are stressed in some way, such as being dehydrated or injured. The sounds are actually fairly loud – comparable to the volume of human speech – but occur at frequencies well above the range of human hearing.

The study at Tel Aviv University in Israel monitored plants in a greenhouse that were subjected to various stresses over time. Unstressed plants emitted less than one sound per hour, on average, while stressed plants emitted dozens of sounds every hour.

Recordings of the plant sounds were analyzed by specially developed artificial intelligence algorithms. The algorithms learned how to distinguish between different plants and different types of sounds. Eventually, they could identify the plant and determine the type and level of stress from the recordings. They could even do this in a greenhouse with a great deal of background noise.

The study resolved a very old scientific controversy about whether plants emit sounds. Not only do they, but the sounds contain useful information. We don’t yet know what the mechanism is for plant sounds. It is likely that in nature, the sounds are detected by various animals and perhaps even plants that can detect the high frequencies. And perhaps they react to them as part of seeking food, shelter, or other services that plants provide. Given the right tools, we humans may also be able to make use of the sounds being made by plants.

**********

Web Links

Plants Emit Sounds – Especially When Stressed

Photo, posted February 20, 2009, courtesy of ProBuild Garden Center via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Giant Farming Robots | Earth Wise

April 20, 2023 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

Farmers are perpetually engaged in a battle against weeds, which can strangle crops and destroy their yields. There are basically two ways to fight weeds: spraying herbicides that are bad for the environment and human health or using human labor to pull the weeds by hand.

Both choices are increasingly undesirable. Herbicide resistance is a growing problem facing farms around the world and widespread labor shortages in the agricultural sector are making it increasingly difficult to use human resources to combat weeds.

A startup company called FarmWise founded by an MIT engineering alumnus is providing a third option for farmers. The company has developed giant autonomous weeding robots that use artificial intelligence to cut out weeds without damaging crops.

The company’s first product is called the Titan. It looks like a large tractor without a driver’s seat. It uses machine vision to distinguish weeds from crop plants like leafy greens, cauliflower, artichokes, and tomatoes. It snips off the weeds with sub-inch precision.

Fifteen titan robots have been roaming the fields of 30 large farms in California and Arizona for several years. A newer robot, called the Vulcan, is more lightweight and is pulled by a tractor. FarmWise continues to add new crops to its database so that the robots can be used to fight weeds in more and more kinds of farms.

Weed problems are especially acute for farmers of specialty crops, which grow on smaller farms than corn and soybeans, and have unique growing practices, which limit the effectiveness of chemical and technical solutions.

The overall goal of FarmWise is to turn artificial intelligence into a tool that is as reliable and dependable as GPS is now in the farming industry.

**********

Web Links

Titanic robots make farming more sustainable

Photo, posted August 23, 2021, courtesy of Carol VanHook via Flickr.

Earth Wise is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio

Windows To Cool Buildings | Earth Wise

December 15, 2022 By EarthWise Leave a Comment

About 15% of global energy consumption is for cooling buildings. Because of this, there is an ever- growing need for technologies that can more efficiently cool buildings. Researchers at Notre Dame University have used advanced computing technology and artificial intelligence to design a transparent window coating that is able to lower the temperature inside buildings without using any energy.

The idea is to create a coating that blocks the sun’s ultraviolet and near-infrared light, which are parts of the solar spectrum that otherwise pass through glass and help to heat an enclosed room. Cooling needs can be reduced further if the coating can radiate heat from the surface of the window so it can pass through the atmosphere into space. Designing a coating that does both of those things simultaneously while transmitting visible light is difficult. Coatings should not interfere with the view out the window.

The Notre Dame researchers used advanced computer modeling to create a so-called transparent radiative cooler that meets these goals. The coating consists of alternating layers of common materials like silicon dioxide, silicon nitride, and aluminum oxide or titanium dioxide on top of a glass base and topped with a film of polydimethylsiloxane. The computing method was able to optimize this structure far faster and better than conventional design techniques.

The researchers say that in hot, dry cities, the coating could potentially reduce cooling energy consumption by 31% compared with conventional windows. The same materials could be used in other applications, such as car and truck windows. In addition, the quantum computing-enabled optimization method used for this work could be used to design other composite materials.

**********