This blog post was inspired by the Center on Foreign Relations’ post
“Artificial Intelligence’s Environmental Costs and Promise”
AI (artificial intelligence) has traditionally been viewed as both beneficial and detrimental to human development, according to the Center on Foreign Relations. AI is often portrayed as the devil by the film industry, but some find it to be very resourceful and fun. As an example, DALL-E 2, a machine learning model developed by OpenAI, an AI research laboratory, generates images from text. Furthermore, AI is now here to rephrase your texts, whether you are a journalist, blogger, or student. In addition, studies highlight AI’s potential in healthcare, manufacturing, but also in tackling climate change, either by improving our understanding of the issue or by helping us combat it more effectively.
The Boston Consulting Group leveraged on AI’s ability to track one’s carbon footprint and created a tool that combined with the Group’s consulting services can help firms to optimize their footprints. AI may also be used to model energy consumption of buildings on a larger scale, since it provides faster and more accurate estimates based on historical data as showed by this article.
Thus, planning for future energy requirements can help city and community managers become more energy-efficient by anticipating their future energy needs. Another study has demonstrated that AI can assist in monitoring agricultural crop conditions during global warming-induced weather changes by analyzing massive amounts of satellite images. As a result, it can improve early warning systems, as well as forecast agricultural yields on a large scale. Last but not least, according to the same study, AI can also be used to predict quantities like wind power by analyzing historical data patterns, thus enabling power optimization.
However, let’s take a look at some of the downsides of using AI. Can we talk about solutions to combat climate change when AI requires supercomputers that emit massive amount of carbon-dioxide? According to this article, supercomputers do indeed consume a lot of energy, comparable to the energy consumption of small cities. Using AI requires a lot of data, and datacenters consume 200 terawatt hours (TWh) every year, which is more than some countries consume in a year according to some estimates. Therefore, we must ask: how can we continue to use AI to fight climate change while decreasing its energy consumption at the same time?
AI’s energy consumption has gained attention from academic research, so a number of recommendations have already been made to the tech community and policy makers. Our goal here is to highlight a few of them, acknowledging that they are applicable not only to AI and climate change but also to other industries.
Renewable energy can power AI technology, but relying exclusively on solar or wind power, for instance, would be risky due to their availability in the event of no sunshine or wind. Energy storage solutions, however, may soon be available to resolve this issue. Gravity is one example of this effort. Energy Vault has developed a crane tower that holds concrete blocks to solve the storage problem for renewable energy.
We shouldn’t forget to mention Li-ion batteries that have revolutionized the way we use energy, offering us a cleaner and greener alternative to fossil-fuel fueled batteries, but they also come at a high cost. An essential component of their batteries is lithium, which must be mined from the ground in an eco-unfriendly way.
We must also mention water. Globally, hydropower dams have mushroomed along our great rivers, enabling developing countries, such as Laos, to export hydropower and alleviate poverty. Sadly, hydropower dams have caused unexpected problems like floods and droughts along the river, and created tensions internationally.
In summary, scientists are developing innovative clean energy technologies that can help decarbonize further, but there will always be critics of these novel methods of generating or storing energy. Gravity batteries are no exception: some cited concrete block production as a process requiring a lot of energy. Ultimately, we should embrace these advancements in technology in order to meet the world's ever-growing energy demands, and critical comments may even lead to improvement..
