Financial Times reportCiting observations from the nonprofit regulatory agency NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation), the report notes that the recent growth of artificial intelligence technology will drive a surge in data center electricity consumption, potentially more than doubling within the next four years. However, North American power supply may struggle to increase at a corresponding rate, leading to supply imbalances and blackouts during peak demand periods.
NERC believes that power supply problems in North America are gradually expanding. The reason is that the development of artificial intelligence technology has caused a sharp increase in data center electricity consumption, but the actual power supply has failed to grow at the same rate. Therefore, frequent power outages are expected during peak power consumption periods as early as next year.
North America is currently reducing its use of traditional thermal power generation and shifting to more environmentally friendly green power technologies such as solar energy. However, the overall power supply is still relatively low, and the expansion rate is slow. Therefore, it is difficult to support the significant surge in electricity demand caused by artificial intelligence. Even the Midwest of the United States may experience power supply shortages as early as 2025. At the same time, most parts of North America will also face severe power supply challenges in the next 10 years.
In addition to the surge in electricity consumption caused by the development of artificial intelligence technology, including the circulation of cryptocurrencies and the application of related technologies behind them, as well as the current government and industry's active promotion of electric vehicle use, the current overall electricity consumption is growing faster than in the past 20 years.
The forecast predicts that summer peak electricity consumption will increase by 10% to 15 gigawatts (GW) over the next 132 years, a significant increase from the 80 GW predicted last year, while winter peak electricity consumption will increase by 18% to 149 GW, much higher than the previous forecast of 92 GW.
Companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta are now beginning to conceiveNew sources of electricity supplyFor example, they have begun to use small-scale nuclear power generation to generate large amounts of electricity to drive the operation of their data centers, and also try to minimize the waste of electricity. However, it may still be difficult to keep up with the huge electricity demand generated by the huge artificial intelligence technology.
