Are you ready to see salmon recovery efforts on the Columbia River curtailed? Are you OK with once again forsaking Indian tribes who depend on those salmon? Are you eager to pay significantly higher bills for electricity? Are you prepared for brownouts and rolling blackouts?
If you are fine with all of that, then you will be sanguine about the imminent expansion of the data centers that require massive amounts of electrical energy to meet the voracious demands of artificial intelligence.
By 2030, the use of electricity by data centers is expected to double in the United States. Not all areas of the country will be affected equally, though. One region that will face a disproportionate challenge is the Pacific Northwest where, thanks to hydropower, energy costs have been relatively low and, thanks to Microsoft and other tech companies, AI is becoming a very big local business.
It is possible that just four years from now data centers in this corner of the country will require additional electricity equal to the power used by four cities the size of Seattle. A lower projection says it might only be two cities, but, either way, that is huge. The Northwest Power and Conservation Council’s recent Electricity Adequacy Report indicates that the likely hike in demand for electricity will increase the risk of annual blackouts to more than 13%.
If there are power emergencies, various salmon protection measures, such as spilling migrating fish over dams, would be suspended. That is why the tribes are alarmed. They are also worried about the very large amount of water data centers use for cooling. Water diverted to the AI powerhouses could reduce instream flows, while the water they will reintroduce into watersheds will flow back at higher temperatures, possibly degraded by pollutants. As a result, fish runs could be significantly harmed.
And, for consumers, the news is not so good, either. As demand begins to exceed supply, electricity rates will inevitably go up, unless the entities operating the data centers are made to pay a higher premium for their electricity.
The tech companies are making huge investments in AI with the aim of reaping historically massive profits. They desperately need these sprawling, energy sucking data centers as soon as they can be built to make their golden dreams come true. For the rest of us, though, it could be a nightmare that we did not see coming.
See more of David Horsey’s cartoons at: st.news/davidhorsey
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