What’s the connection between AI growth and coal-fired power plants?

GridSecCon is the premiere power grid security conference and exhibition, which is sponsored annually by NERC and the E-ISAC. I have only missed two of the onsite events since the first one in 2011, and I was quite pleased to attend the 2024 event in Minneapolis last week. As usual, it was a very informative conference and a great opportunity to interact with a lot of people who are involved with ensuring the cyber and physical security of the North American power grid. I want to thank the corporate sponsors of the event, as well as NERC and the E-ISAC.

Without a doubt, the most memorable presentation during the week was the one by Sunny Wescott of CISA, where her title is ISD Chief Meteorologist. I doubt too many people who saw her presentation – which was to the entire conference in the morning of the first day – will disagree that it was one of the most powerful talks they have ever witnessed. She has given this presentation to multiple audiences (and will continue to, I’m sure). You can find several videos of her presentation from other venues on YouTube by searching on her name, but I also recommend you see her live if you ever get that opportunity.

Andy Bochman of Idaho National Laboratory wrote an excellent post on her presentation on LinkedIn, but my summary of what she said is, “We’re facing tremendous challenges due to climate change. They are coming at a faster pace, from a million different directions, than we ever imagined was possible. At this point, we can’t eliminate those challenges, but there’s a lot that we can do – especially on the local level – to prevent them from leading to unmitigated disaster.”

However, there was another very powerful talk during the conference; this one was by Andy. Since it was in a breakout session, it was only witnessed by a fraction of the number of people who saw Sunny’s presentation, but I know a lot of people considered his talk to be at least the second most powerful of the conference. I certainly did.

Andy summarized his talk (in the same LinkedIn post) as, “about the risk of suppliers putting generative AIs, prone to hallucinations and emergent behaviors in control centers, and I also extended the topic to address ultra-realistic AI-boosted disinformation including deepfakes that could spoof operators into taking harmful actions.” He didn’t say that AI should be banned from grid control systems altogether, but he did say we need to be very careful about deploying it on those systems.

A week ago, I would have said that a presentation on the impact of climate change and a talk on dangers posed by indiscriminate deployment of AI in grid control centers would both be interesting, but they wouldn’t have anything in common. However, I now realize the two topics are very closely linked.

The link between the topics became clear when someone mentioned to me something I hadn’t heard before: that the Coal Creek Station, a 1,000MW coal burning generating plant (which I visited 7 or 8 years ago) in the middle of wheat fields in North Dakota, was purchased by a data center provider in 2022 to power a new data center to be built nearby. Thus, the plant will most likely continue operations for decades to come

Like a lot of people, I had heard of a couple of deals in which output from a nuclear plant (or at least one unit of the plant) was committed to a data center provider – most notably, Microsoft’s signing of a 20-year power purchase agreement that will allow Constellation Energy to restart Unit 1 of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania (Unit 2 was shut down after the famous 1979 incident, but Unit 1 wasn’t affected by it).  Note that Unit 1 has 837MW capacity, which is less than Coal Creek’s capacity.

However, I was startled when I searched for more information on the Coal Creek deal and I found this article from Power Magazine. It doesn’t even mention Coal Creek, but it makes clear that coal-fired plants all over the US are getting a new lease on life for one main reason: The huge power needs of AI can’t be satisfied just by the rapid increase in renewable energy production. Not only must renewable energy increase, but fossil fuel production – especially coal – can’t decrease for the foreseeable future.

In other words, if coal plants continue to close (or be scheduled for closure) at the rate they have over the past decade, the North American grid clearly won’t be able to satisfy both normal power demand (which wasn’t growing quickly before the AI boom) and AI demand. As Power pointed out, coal-fired generation has a new lease on life (and that will inevitably be the case worldwide, not just in North America, although the article doesn’t mention that). While this is good news for people whose jobs depend on coal plants (and who might have to move and take a pay cut, if they want to work in renewable energy), it isn’t good news for the fight against climate change.

Is somebody doing something wrong here? After all, workers in the coal plants, like most of us, would like to keep working in a job we understand and can perform well. The data center operators want to obtain the power they need to fulfill the orders that are flooding in from tech companies. The tech companies like Microsoft are trying to keep ahead of their competitors – and today, that means going all in on AI. The public is already benefiting from AI in many ways; they would be quite reluctant to see those benefits stop growing if AI’s power use is somehow disfavored by the public and private organizations that operate and regulate the grid.

Nobody is doing anything wrong, yet at the same time - as Sunny Wescott’s presentation cogently demonstrated – we need to do everything we can to keep the rate of acceleration in climate change (i.e., the second derivative. We’re beyond being able to control the first derivative) from increasing any more than it already has. Are we all simply SOL, and will our grandkids ultimately end up needing to find another planet to live on?

I don’t think so, because I think there’s one link in this seeming circle of doom that can be broken: AI needs to figure out how to use much less energy than it currently uses, while not cutting back on the substantial benefits it is currently providing and will provide for society. This might be achievable by examining the fundamental assumptions on which what is currently called artificial intelligence is based.

I will do exactly that in a post that’s coming soon to a blog near you. 

Any opinions expressed in this blog post are strictly mine and are not necessarily shared by any of the clients of Tom Alrich LLC. If you would like to comment on what you have read here, I would love to hear from you. Please email me at tom@tomalrich.com.