Data Centers Are Sending Global Electricity Demand Soaring

The global electricity demand is expected to grow exponentially in the coming decades, largely due to an increased demand from tech companies for new data centers to support the rollout of high-energy-consuming advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI). As governments worldwide introduce new climate policies and pump billions into alternative energy sources and clean tech, these efforts may be quashed by the increased electricity demand from data centers unless greater international regulatory action is taken to ensure that tech companies invest in clean energy sources and do not use fossil fuels for power.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) released a report in October entitled “What the data centre and AI boom could mean for the energy sector”. It showed that with investment in new data centers surging over the past two years, particularly in the U.S., the electricity demand is increasing rapidly – a trend that is set to continue.

The report states that in the U.S., annual investment in data center construction has doubled in the past two years alone. China and the European Union are also seeing investment in data centers increase rapidly. In 2023, the overall capital investment by tech leaders Google, Microsoft, and Amazon was greater than that of the U.S. oil and gas industry, at approximately 0.5 percent of the U.S. GDP.

The tech sector expects to deploy AI technologies more widely in the coming decades as the technology is improved and becomes more ingrained in everyday life.

Water use,is defined as consumptive use and nonconsumptive use. Withdraws that are returned as liquid even as waste outflow back into the same watershed is by definition not consumptive use as the water is still present in the basin. Only water lost to evaporation or bound chemically into a product is consumptive use. Most power plants use once through loop cooling they with draw water use it to cool a heat exchanger and then return the same water slightly warmer to the river or lake this is not consumptive use. Having a cooling tower with wet cooling evaporates some but not all of the water injected into heat exchangers there is a 90% or high blowdown rate where the unevaporated water is collected usually treated to.remove metals and salts and returned to the river or lake. Only the water evaporated is consumptive. For data centers they tend to use wet cooling condensers which evaporate 10 to 20% of the water that flows to them the rest is put down the sanitary sewers or subject to a zero.discharge process where it’s recycled until it reaches a TDS level to high for the evaporators and is then spray flashed to vapor and solid for land fill. Only the zero discharge process is 100% consumptive they are super rare because they are very expensive vs just once through and into the sewers which returns the water to the water shed for further use.

Dallas water out of the tap is 40% recycled or more in dry times. Every drop of effluent either flows back to the primary supply lake or into the Trinity River where down stream flow is taken out put in a constructed wetlands and after a week or so pumped back to the primary supply lake. If a company is putting water in the sewers after AC cooling use it will end up back in the supply lake eventually.

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