Power Generation The Largest Source Of Carbon Dioxide Emissions
Global demand for electricity grew by 2.2 percent in 2023 after a 2.4 percent growth rate in 2022. China, India and several countries in Southeast Asia experienced rapid growth in electricity demand in 2023, while advanced economies posted significant declines.
Global electricity demand is expected to rise at a faster rate over the next three years, growing by an average of 3.4 percent annually through 2026. The gains will be driven by an improving economic outlook, which will contribute to faster electricity demand growth both in advanced and emerging economies.
Electricity demand will be supported by the ongoing electrification of the residential and transport sectors, as well as a notable expansion of the data center sector.
Data center electricity usage will double by 2026, due to power-intensive workloads such as artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency mining. Data centers consumed 460TWh in 2022, a figure that could rise to more than 1,000TWh by 2026, which is equivalent to the electricity consumption of Japan. Data centers are one of the most energy-intensive building types, consuming 10–50 times the energy per floor space of a typical commercial office building. The US is home to 33 percent of the world’s data centers, where energy consumption is expected to rise from 200TWh in 2022 to 260TWh in 2026, some six percent of all power use across the country.
In Ireland, data centers could account for 32 percent of all power consumption by 2026 due to a high number of new developments. This compares to 17 percent in 2022. Calls to limit the number of new data center projects in Ireland because of their energy use were rejected by the Irish government last year.
Electricity demand in data centers is from both computing (40 percent) and cooling (40 percent). The remaining 20 percent is consumed by related IT equipment. Market trends, including the incorporation of AI into software programming across a variety of sectors, increase the overall electricity demand of data centers.
Search tools like Google could see a tenfold increase of their electricity demand when fully implementing AI.
When comparing the average electricity demand of a typical Google search (0.3 Wh of electricity) to OpenAI’s ChatGPT (2.9 Wh per request), and considering 9 billion searches daily, this would require almost 10 TWh of additional electricity per year. Similar power demands will be required across the digital cloud. Hopefully, AI will help corporations, advocates and governments improve measurement and increase resilience, while helping us use energy and resources more efficiently. Better data can promote better plans and better decisions.
“Updated regulations and technological improvements, including efficiency, will be crucial to moderate the surge in energy consumption from data centers,” the report’s authors said.
Meanwhile, electricity demand in China rose by 6.4 percent in 2023, driven by the services and industrial sectors. That figure is expected to slow slightly over the next few years thanks to the rapid deployment of solar electricity.
In 2023, India’s demand for electricity grew by 7 percent. We expect growth above 6 percent on average annually until 2026, supported by strong economic activity and expanding ownership of air conditioners. While renewables will meet almost half of this demand growth, one-third is expected to come from rising coal-fired power. Southeast Asia will see strong annual increases in electricity demand of 5 percent on average through 2026, due to strong economic activity.
Per capita power consumption in Africa even declined in recent years as the population grew faster than electricity supply was made available. Africa’s per capita electricity consumption in 2023 was half that of India.
“The good news is that tech companies are advancing alternative energy sources rapidly,” said Gary Chandler, CEO of Crossbow Communications. “Nuclear power and solar power are experiencing a renaissance on micro and macro scales.”
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