Jill Mc

YouTube video by re:publica re:publica 25: AI's insatiable appetite: How Big Tech’s energy demands endanger climate goals

Big Tech CEOs are hungry for power, but that can’t come at the expense of the planet.
All new data centres must run on renewable energy, and their growth needs to align with planetary boundaries.
👀 @jillmcardle.bsky.social @re-publica.com 👉
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Fmz...

Washington Is Giving Tax Breaks to Data Centers That Threaten the State’s Green Energy Push In 2019, Washington adopted legislation requiring electric utilities to go carbon-neutral in a decade. Yet lawmakers continued to promote the growth of energy-guzzling data centers with generous tax i...

When it IS clean energy that powers the data centers, it’s nearly always taken from an existing pool that already had customers, so those customers now have to use dirty power.

www.propublica.org/article/data...

Most of this power is fossil-fueled, which means that emissions have skyrocketed. Bloomberg reported in 2024 that without the shell game of Renewable Energy Credits (RECs), “Amazon could be forced to admit that its 2022 emissions are.. three times what the company disclosed.”

archive.is/lBf5H

Today Amazon released its “Sustainability” report. Predictably, what it leaves out is vastly more important than what it says.

Amazon is building a dirty energy empire, spending literally hundreds of billions on data centers that will rely primarily on new fossil fuel infrastructure.

Sharing this via @jillmcardle.bsky.social on LinkedIn because it’s just PERFECT👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻

The Political Economy of Artificial Intelligence: how Generative AI Threatens the Renewable Energy Transition, and who Stands to Benefit from it You’ve read the news: A Three Mile Island reactor will be restarted to power Microsoft's AI operations (this was the site of a nuclear meltdown in 1979), Google’s emissions climbed nearly 50% over the last five years due to AI energy demand, and the only thing impressive about Amazon’s claim that it uses green energy is the chutzpah with which it lies about its creative accounting. Still, if you think you have a good idea of generative AI’s resource demands, think again. The snippets above only present the tip of the iceberg. To show what’s at stake, we will not only present the latest evidence on energy demand for the entire value chain of AI, including hardware production – we will also explain how it threatens the transition to renewable energy and the stability of the grid, aka critical infrastructure. Questions to be answered: - What do we know about resource consumption of generative AI? - What implications does the resource consumption have for the green transition? - What implications does the resource consumption have for the development path of Artificial Intelligence (what alternatives to “brute force” large models and Deep Learning based on very large datasets are on the table)? - What governance tools are needed and available to reconcile AI develpoment with planetary boundaries? Organised by AlgorithmWatch with Matthias Spielkamp (moderator), Jill McArdle, Fanny Hidvégi, Claude Turmes, Boris Ruf More information: https://cpdp.be/4117

The Political Economy of Artificial Intelligence: How Generative AI Threatens the Renewable Energy Transition

Organised by AlgorithmWatch with @spielkamp.bsky.social (moderator), @jillmcardle.bsky.social, Fanny Hidvégi, Claude Turmes, Boris Ruf

More info: cpdp.be/4117
#CPDP2025 #TheWorldisWatching

ICYMI 👀 New @greenpeaceeastasia.bsky.social video on the dark side of AI, featuring @jillmcardle.bsky.social on the risks posed by largely AI-driven data centre electricity consumption in Europe.

YouTube video by Greenpeace International The Dark Side of AI

"The energy consumption of 🇪🇺 data centres is putting local energy transitions at risk, either by expanding gas infrastructure or forcing other sectors to rely on power from fossil fuels," says @jillmcardle.bsky.social in new @greenpeaceeastasia.bsky.social video.

👀 www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySfh...

AI Energy Demand Can Keep Fossil Fuels Alive, Tech Backers Promise World’s Two Biggest Oil Producers An AI-fossil fuel axis is forming in the U.S. and Saudi Arabia as AI advocates pledge an endless need for energy — spelling disaster for the climate.

Tech companies manufacture demand for chatbots and image generation, and then that in turn manufactures demand for coal and gas.

Blistering @desmog.bsky.social piece here detailing this new and disgusting symbiosis

www.desmog.com/2025/04/22/a...

The IEA report on AI & Energy out today contains some eye-popping claims… | Jill McArdle PhD The IEA report on AI & Energy out today contains some eye-popping claims 🤯 https://lnkd.in/ermMrGuA On the one hand, the report confirms what we have said (https://lnkd.in/eeiHpq2f), that the AI...

@jillmcardle.bsky.social points out here the IEA is basically adopting the logic of carbon offsetting into the world of AI and data centres

www.linkedin.com/posts/jillmc...

Today's report on #AI and energy by the @iea.org's largely confirms our analysis published earlier this year, data centre growth is rapidly increasing & leading to more emissions.
Read our report and learn about their impact on emissions & the energy transition.
beyondfossilfuels.org/2025/02/10/s...

Ireland is interesting. Being a nexus of data centre growth it's not surprising to see rising power demand. but much of it is being met by power imports, not new renewables, or fossil fuel output.

bsky.app/profile/keta...

CC @hannahdaly.ie @jillmcardle.bsky.social

The headline you won't read today about the European Court of Auditors report on EU funding for NGOs is that the auditors found no wrong-doing by NGOs, nor any breach of EU values.

An invented scandal to justify cutting EU funding for NGOs and distract from genuine cases of corruption.

You can’t sue a rainbow 🌈

No matter what happens in any courtroom – our global intersectional climate movement will only keep growing stronger and louder 💚🌎

#WeWillNotBeSilenced

As promised, here are the slides I shared with students to convince them to NOT use chatGPT and other artificial stupidity.

TL;DR? AI is evil, unsustainable and stupid, and I'd much rather they use their own brains, make their own mistakes, and actually learn something. 🪄

"AI may exist in the virtual world, but it has real life consequences, and this (BFF) new research should be a wake-up call that sustainable and limitless AI growth is a fantasy," say @jillmcardle.bsky.social & Julia Pazos in latest The Green Fix post 👉
thegreenfix.substack.com/p/ai?utm%5C_...

Data centres to supply electricity under proposed new rules Energy industry regulators to publish decision on Tuesday

This headline sounds positive when in fact the regulator has just proposed that data centre growth can continue as long as energy demand is met by their own oil and gas generation. Any pretence to supporting renewable energy has been dropped.

www.irishtimes.com/business/202...

Behind the Mask: Investigating EPH's coal exit claims This report looks at the relationship between the sister companies EPH and EP Energy Transition (EPETr), both of which are owned by Czech billionaire Daniel Křetínský. EPH was established in 2009 and ...

🎭 A magician never reveals their secrets—but we just did. EPH’s “coal exit” looks like a ruse, shifting polluting assets to its sister company, but behind the scenes it's still turning dirty coal profits.
Read our new research in partnership with Re-set:
beyondfossilfuels.org/2025/02/12/b...

Data centres could strain Europe's power supply by 2030, report warns The AI-driven data centre boom could strain the continent's energy supplies and octuple emissions by the end of the decade, according to a new report.

"If the data centre growth relies on fossil gas, it will fuel the climate crisis. To prevent this, expansion must go hand in hand with the buildout of additional renewable energy," says @jillmcardle.bsky.social on the risks surging data centre electricity demand.
www.euronews.com/next/2025/02...

🧵1/ Between crypto, the cloud & AI, the digital world is growing fast.
Today’s #AIActionSummit is convening world leaders and industry executives to discuss its future.
We're calling on them to tackle one of the tech industry’s biggest threats: its soaring power demand.
👇

Two other possible outcomes - less likely but definitely worth fighting for, I reckon:

- Tech companies must only ever build new clean energy, but that clean energy must itself not be sucking the life from decarbonisation, electrification and energy transition

- DON'T BUILD SO MANY DATA CENTRES

we don't assume it will be, but we see good reasons to worry that it might, in ireland gas is being used for new data centres. Europe has a lot of RE but the demand from DCs could vastly outstrip it

otes: This chart shows the added emissions from the newly added data centres in the EU starting from 2025, with 2024 being the baseline at zero; Lithuania and Estonia’s 2022 GHG emission data are from EDGAR 2023 45 .

Huge new @beyondfossilfuels.bsky.social report - EU's data centre frenzy could enable 121 megatonnes of CO2-e

"New data centre demand alone could consume as much as the added power needed for the electrification of the entire transport sector in the EU by 2030"

@jillmcardle.bsky.social

Report: beyondfossilfuels.org/wp-content/u...

Today we launched a new report on how data centres could derail the energy transition in Europe: new data centres risk increasing emissions in Europe - they must be powered by additional renewable energy or they must not be built 🤖⛽

AI set to fuel surge in new US gas power plants Climate targets in peril as Big Tech turns to fossil fuels to feed energy demand

Another reminder that we are not debating nuclear v renewables for #DataCentre #AI growth, we are talking about fossil fuels v renewables, and one of those options means we may miss our climate and emissions targets. I will let you guess which one 🤨

www.ft.com/content/63c3...

Big Tech's AI bets are driving a nuclear renaissance. Not everyone is buying the hype. As Big Tech pivots to nuclear to power its AI boom, startups in the sector have to grapple with these key challenges.

Big Tech is investing in #nuclearpower to meet AI data centre energy demands, despite it being "completely off topic" as a current solution for powering data centres, @jillmcardle.bsky.social tells @businessinsider.com.
Read the story 👉

Big Tech's AI bets are driving a nuclear renaissance. Not everyone is buying the hype. As Big Tech pivots to nuclear to power its AI boom, startups in the sector have to grapple with these key challenges.

I spoke to Business Insider to dismantle some of the hype around nuclear

Nuclear is "completely off topic" as a solution for powering data centers, particularly if tech companies are serious about the 2030 deadlines they've set to meet emissions targets
www.businessinsider.com/big-tech-nuc...

The Irish Times view on data centres and climate: no more development without a renewables boost Ireland’s ability to reach its legally binding CO2 reduction targets by 2030 would be fatally undermined by the continued growth of data centres

The most sensible headline yet.

#DataCentres growth driven by #AI is costing us the climate.

Growth cannot continue unless a) we make sure DCs run 100% on real renewables and b) we urgently scale up renewables for all sectors

irishtimes.com/opinion/edit...

Our renewables revolution was planned to get our communities off polluting, expensive fossil fuels, not to shortsightedly serve the unlimited expansion of one colossal industry.