how can I help save the environment it’s a question someone might ask an artificial intelligence tool like chat gpt which has made serious gains in terms of what it’s capable of and though there’s talk that AI might hold the answers to the climate crisis it’s also part of the problem one that’s only going to get bigger as the technology advances and its use grows if you train on twice as much data it takes twice as much energy running AI consumes real resources water and electricity and so do we when we extract solutions from it
that’s why plans for a Google data center were recently put on hold locals realized it could mean the end of drinking water for their neighborhood and so we’re asking is AI going to help solve the climate crisis or make it worse in this episode of transforming business there’s one thing AI can do that people can’t reading and then analyzing huge amounts of data quickly there’s literally hundreds of thousands of data points coming in from a large building like this one into our system data that can help us make decisions
Optimization
like how to optimize the use of energy in a building so that none of it goes to waste Henri zorf is a chief technology officer of Adian a small startup based in Cologne Germany adan’s product helps facility managers run large commercial buildings like this one as efficiently as possible imagine you have a facility manager in the technical building room and there’s an energy system maybe the heating or Cooling and it’s displaying an error code error code 15 that person would have first to find the uh manual for the heating or the
cooling and look up what is error code 15 or that person could just ask our system hey Adian I’m in the technical building room uh standing in front of a whatever fison heating I’m getting displayed error code 15 how do I resolve it and then our system knows the entire history of that building datawise that combined with the generative AI can actually like search through the history and then just tell that person okay for a code 15 in summer you have to do this and that and by the way he is also the manual aian says it can help a building save up to 40% of energy and CO2 emissions in buildings this large making a small tweak can have a big impact ad Defan uses AI to do a lot of different things to help it structure and analyze the hundreds of thousands of data points it gets from a building’s technical system to factoring in variables like outside climate and building materials each building is individual meaning it has uh different tenants it has different usage behaviors it has also from how it was built different
Thermal behavior
thermal behavior um if you have a wooden building as composed as opposed to a concrete building that’s very that’s very different Adian is capitalizing on ai’s ability to read and analyze data in a sliver of the amount of time it would take the world’s best researchers to do the same this speed is what makes AI so valuable to researchers and scientists looking for solutions to The Climate crisis scientists are now using AI to map Antarctic icebergs 10,000 times faster than humans and to track deforestation in real time to better
predict weather patterns and to suggest more efficient Waste Management Systems there’s no doubt AI has the potential to do good things for the climate but not everything about it is a gift to the environment take this hum for example which residents in Chandler Arizona here 247 it’s the sound of a data center processing the billions of requests it gets throughout the day think of AI as the brain and data centers as the body that supports the brain to work there are more than 8,000 data centers in the
very large amount of electricity these very large amounts of electricity produce very large amounts of heat and also that hum you just heard to keep the data centers from overheating they must be cooled down and this is usually done in one of two ways using air conditioning or water and lots of it let’s say I engageed in a 15 question conversation with chat gbt over how I could be more environmentally conscious experts calculate I would be consuming about a half liter of fresh water and this is where AI can be a little
problematic access to clean water is competing with um let’s say local uses for it this is what got Google into a bit of hot water soon after it announced plans to build a $200 million Data Center in the workingclass neighborhood of cios in Chile we all use uh Google search and other Google tools so initially the neighbors were quite happy that Google had chosen this area for building their their data center this is Sebastian Leed an AI ethics and Society lecturer at Kings College London they saw it as as you know synonymous with
progress development a new poll of innovation in the area but once they took took a look at Google’s environmental impact report for the data center they were startled by what they learned they found out found out at some point that this Google data center was going to use 168 L of water per second in an area facing drought a drought that is now in its 15th year and caused elected officials to ration water in the capital of Santiago but after Fierce protests from the community the permit was put on hold a local environmental
Court told Google it needs to modify how it plans to cool its servers and Google’s plans for a data center in Uruguay also face push back when locals learned how much water it would consume and water isn’t the only natural resource that AI requires it needs a lot of electricity too and most of that electricity still comes from burning fossil fuels which release the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change training a single AI model produces is more than five times the amount of carbon dioxide emissions
generated from a car in its lifetime that’s including the emissions to manufacture the car and its fuel consumption once it leaves the factory it’s an astounding amount training an AI model and then ensuring its continued existence through large data centers is a massive drain on natural resources and also drives up what researchers call embodied carbon so that’s going to be the amount of um carbon it took to let’s say build the hardware just starting by mining the rare earth minerals that goes into the
gpus shipping that across the world to then uh be manufactured into a GPU and then shipping that GPU to its final destination at a data center that does incur a really large environmental impact it’s this impact that companies like Microsoft are trying to take into account as they set climate goals Microsoft says it’s aiming to be carbon negative by 2030 not just neut but negative and one way it’s hoping to get there is through Bolivia more than 9,000 km from Microsoft headquarters in Redmond Washington is a biochar facility
new regulation uh it would be great to be able to hear those communities as well because those communities they are not against technology or AI but that what they will say is that if we want AI it has to be built in dialogue with local communities Singapore’s government was aware of the strain data centers would have on its power grid so it enacted a 4-year moratorium on the construction of new ones that ended in 2022 and they’ve now accepted build proposals from these companies Australia’s air trunk Chinese data.
center operator GDs and Tik Tok owner bite Dan and equinox and Microsoft based in the US Dublin’s power operator placed a moratorium on data centers in 2022 they say the Irish Capital could face blackouts if new ones are built in Europe around a 100 data center operators signed the climate neutral data center pact promising to be what the title implies a climate neutral data center by 2030 but is that even feasible tech companies are experimenting with green Alternatives like this Google facility.
over the last 10 years this dramatic increase in computational cost AI is the new kit on the Block and it’s hard to predict what the future will look like there’s no doubt it can help us make massive gains when it comes to slowing down climate change but in its current state an AI model requires an enormous amount of Natural Resources first to train and then to run and not all data centers are dedicated to AI use but we will need to build more of them as AI advances and become standard use in business research and public.
