U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm offered assurances that the U.S. will be able to meet the soaring demands for electricity to power the surge in data centers driving the tech sector’s artificial intelligence boom.
“The explosive growth of AI is posing this big question: Are we going to have enough energy to power AI?” Granholm told reporters in a briefing Friday. “We emphatically say yes, we will.”
After a long period of relatively flat electricity demand, the U.S. is now experiencing an increase in power needs that the Department of Energy projects will double electricity demand by midcentury. Manufacturing growth and the electrification of more cars and home appliances all add to the growing demand, but the rapid growth of data centers to train and operate AI systems has emerged as a major area of need.
The International Energy Agency has projected that globally, power needs for data centers could consume up to 3 percent of the world’s total electricity generation by 2026. In the U.S., energy demand for data centers could eat up to 9 percent of the country’s electricity by the end of the decade, according to forecasts by the Electric Power Research Institute.
Recent corporate sustainability reports from tech giants Google and Microsoft show that AI’s growth is challenging those companies’ climate goals. Both have set ambitious targets for clean-energy consumption and greenhouse gas emission reductions, but both reported sharp increases in emissions in the past year.
In communities that host new AI data centers, residents are frequently expressing concerns about strains on local electricity systems and water supplies.
Granholm said she is confident that the growing energy demand can be met with clean-energy sources, keeping the country on a path to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation. She pointed to the strong growth in renewable energy investments resulting from the incentives in the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
“We expect more than 60 gigawatts of clean energy and energy storage capacity are going to be deployed this year alone,” she said. “That’s like building 30 Hoover Dams just in one year.”
In some regions of data center growth, the near-term challenge is building sufficient transmission lines to link the new facilities to clean power sources. Granholm said her department is working to speed the permitting process for transmission lines, and she pointed to recent projects investing billions in public and private dollars into new power lines.
In one such project recently announced in Virginia, data center construction and management company Iron Mountain is working with the state’s energy department to add large-scale batteries at a data center to store renewable energy.
Such partnerships show the potential for data center demand to become a catalyst for further investment in renewable energy, Granholm said.
The DOE’s research into greater efficiency also holds the promise to allow tech companies to get more computing power from their data centers, she said.
Granholm said she met recently with tech sector leaders and executives at some of the major utilities serving major data center clusters to discuss ways to meet energy load growth, and she hinted at some major announcements on the horizon.
“We’ve been determined to make sure,” she said, “that America continues to lead the world on technology and on innovation.”
