AI is hungry for energy and the companies behind the technology are striving for it stand up nuclear reactors to feed him. But nuclear reactors take a long time to build and the AI will need massive amounts of energy for years before they are ready. So where will it come from? In the US, natural gas. The AI revolution will pump a lot more carbon into the air.
A new report from the Financial Times details the arrival natural gas boom. As climate change worsened, the world turned away from polluting energy sources like coal and natural gas. The U.S. electric grid has advanced in terms of renewables, and gas-based power generation has slowed over the past half-decade.
In 2024, it exploded thanks to data centers and artificial intelligence. According to the Financial Times, the US electricity grid’s dependence on gas will only grow. America will add more than 80 new gas-fired power plants by 2030. This is 20 percent more than was added in the last five years.
President Biden issued on January 14 executive order this paved the way for even greater expansion of AI and energy infrastructure. The order directed the Pentagon and DOE to lease federal land to private companies that want to build “gigawatt-sized AI data centers.”
As part of the bargain, companies that want to build on federal land must do so with so-called clean energy. “To support these efforts, the Department of the Interior will identify managed lands that are suitable for clean energy that can support data centers at DOE and DOD sites, while improving permitting processes for geothermal projects,” the order said . “DOE will take further steps to promote distributed energy resources, advance the deployment of clean generation resources at existing interconnection points, and support the safe and responsible use of nuclear power.”
According to a recent report from the US Department of Energy, data center energy consumption is expected to triple by 2028. “This increase in data center electricity demand, however, should be understood in the context of much higher electricity demand that is expected to occur over the next few decades through a combination of electric vehicle adoption, onshore manufacturing, hydrogen use, and the electrification of industry and buildings,” the report said.
Meta is researching nuclear power, but now it needs power. The tech company is spending $10 billion in Louisiana on a data center and $3.2 billion on three new gas-fired power plants. Microsoft is teaming up with Constellation to turn Three Mile Island’s reactor unit three back on. Last week, Constellation announced that it is buying Calpinea huge gas production company, for 27 billion dollars.
American gas plants pumped more than 1 billion tons of carbon into the air last year. This is the highest value ever recorded. There are ways to reduce the carbon produced by natural gas plants, but many of the 80 planned for construction will not be equipped with carbon capture systems.
According to the DOE, gas power plants and data centers are black boxes. “While US data centers are increasingly engaging in on-site power generation, power purchase agreements, and trading of various carbon credits, the lack of transparency around the details of these activities for all US data center operators prevents inclusion in the overall analysis,” DOE report said.
“While limiting the scope of this report, this lack of transparency highlights that data center growth is occurring with little consideration of how best to integrate these new loads with power generation/transmission expansion or for broader community development.”
In announcing Meta’s data centers in Louisiana, Entergy—the company’s energy partner—he said it would add clean, efficient power plants to its system to meet growing electricity needs. He did not go into the exact details of his gas plants. “Meta is committed to aligning its electricity consumption with 100% clean and renewable energy and will work with Entergy to bring at least 1,500 MW of new renewable energy to the grid through its Geaux Zero program,” the press release said.
The Geaux Zero program is a local tariff that encourages the purchase of solar energy. Buying some renewable energy doesn’t mean carbon will stop being pumped into the sky, just that Meta has promised to buy some solar power to go along with it.
The dream, of course, is that all these new data centers and AI systems run on renewable and nuclear energy. The reality is that nuclear power moves slowly. A traditional reactor can take a decade to start up, and many smaller state-of-the-art systems are untested, unused and unproven.
It is possible that big technology is on the verge of a nuclear revolution thanks to the incentives created by artificial intelligence. But it will have to burn a lot of natural gas to get there before the reactors start up.