“I could not keep paying such an invoice,” says a woman from Baltimore. In the areas of the United States close to large concentrations of data centers, the wholesale price of electricity has risen up to 267% in the last five years. To anyone’s surprise, consumers are assuming these costs in the light bill.
Short. An exhaustive Bloomberg analysis He has crossed the prices of 25,000 points of the American electricity grid with the location of the country’s data centers. The result is devastating: more than 70% of the nodes that registered large price increases are less than 80 kilometers from a Data centers cluster.
AI and the price of light. According to the International Energy Agency, the electricity consumed by data centers will double up to 945 twh from here to 2030overcoming the demand for entire countries like France or Japan. The AI will be the main engine of this increase.
While large technological ones defend that their data centers bring investment, high quality jobs and tax revenues that benefit the adjacent communities, the residents of these large energy monsters have been suffering less debated consequences.
A matter of supply and demand. The energy demand of the AI data centers is so high that it is carrying the auctions of electrical capacity at record prices. The phenomenon is especially visible In the accounts of the largest network operator in the United States, PJM Interconnection, which covers 13 states. In its last annual auction, the load of the data centers fired the sale of PJM capacity In 7.3 billion dollars, 82% more.
The reason is simple: energy demand grows much faster than the ability to generate new electricity. But the consequences go beyond simply encouraging the installation of new energy sources. The wholesale price that electricity pays to guarantee the future supply affects both the invoices of the companies and the households.
David against Goliath. To understand the conflict at street level, it is enough to travel to Virginia, home of the largest concentration of world data centers. It is estimated that Between the 3rd and 40% of world Internet traffic Go through your servers. Here, the Dominion Energy electric company expects demand to grow 85% by 2039.
If they were not the data centers, the growth would be only 10%. But here they are, so new infrastructure will be needed, such as high voltage towers and electrical substations, which will have to be paid. And who pays? Today, these expenses are distributed among all the clients of the electric company, from a small apartment to the gigantic data center.
It does not happen only in the US. Although the epicenter of the crisis is in the United States, due to its leadership position with AI, the problem is global. Technology companies seek to expand their infrastructure throughout the world, and voltage in electrical networks is replicated.
In the United Kingdom, the greatest demand from data centers could Electricity prices more expensive 9% by 2040. In Malaysia, the government has had to Increase electrical rates of the data centers as the new facilities test the country’s supply capacity.
The social cost of technological progress. Data centers are not born by spontaneous generation. Someone has to build and maintain them, which generates employment. In Virginia, they contribute 9,100 million dollars to state GDP. The career of giants such as Microsoft, Amazon or Google is reviving investment in renewable energy and more efficient chips.
But as long as the electricity grid does not supply and the light invoices continue to rise, the debate on the cost of AI for citizens will continue to fueling.
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