Power grab: AI turned New York Climate Week into a Big Tech hunting grounds
Speaking of power: don't miss this week's podcast episode with Commonwealth Fusion System's Bob Mumgaard!
I should probably caveat this note by saying everyone who goes to New York Climate Week likely has a slightly different experience at New York Climate Week. You might be immersed in political action or policy or NGOs or indigenous rights and climate justice. I happen to run with a fairly techie crowd and the two events I was lucky enough to host were about, in order of appearance, fusion energy, and adaptation and resilience.
That said, my impression was that even outside my bubble, there was a lot of talk at Climate Week about AI forcing a hunt for new sources of energy—fusion or otherwise—as well as adaptation and resilience.
"I'm Givin' Her All She's Got, Captain!"
Let’s start with the former: energy use from data centers is expected to more than double between now and 2030 — to 9% of total global power use — or maybe even grow by 160%, depending on which research you read. A single ChatGPT query requires 10 to 15 times more energy than a Google search, best case.
I wrote about all of this a little over a year ago, primarily because I hope we don’t become the batteries for the AI like in The Matrix.
But listen, the hunt for energy to power the machines is getting real. In case you missed it, the fateful Three Mile Island nuclear power plant will reopen in 2028 (pending regulatory approval) with Microsoft as its exclusive customer. As of July, a third of nuclear plants in the US were in some kind of talks with tech companies to generate power for data centers and training AI models.
OpenAI founder Sam Altman has been investing in clean-energy startups including nuclear and fusion energy for the last couple of years.
I hosted an event with Commonwealth Fusion Systems, where I interviewed CEO Bob Mumgaard about the pace and funding and progress toward fusion energy—harnessing the same process that fuels the sun—and we mused that future funding rounds for CFS or other fusion companies could include not just VCs, sovereign wealth funds, or billionaires, but also Microsoft or Nvidia or Amazon. Shameless plug (no pun intended?) alert: you can hear that interview in this week’s episode of Everybody in the Pool!
It’s an interesting development for a lot of reasons: there’s the potential moral hazard if companies can’t find renewable or carbon-free energy sources to meet their projected needs. Heaven knows the crypto industry kept promising that it would spur investment in more and cheaper renewable energy, and instead, led to the re-opening of shuttered coal plants in Montana, upstate New York, and other states.
If the US can’t clear up its interconnection and permitting backlogs, we may find that tech companies do the same thing in the interest of getting cheap power online quickly for AI, and the same or worse could happen in other countries with looser regulations. So the real question is whether corporate sustainability goals and European reporting requirements will win out over power at all costs.
The price of failure
The other event I hosted at Climate Week was an investor-focused conversation about the “unavoidable opportunity” that is investing in climate adaptation and resilience solutions. It builds off research that was produced by the Global Adaptation and Resilience Investment Group (GARI), in partnership with MSCI Sustainability Institute, the Lightsmith Group, the Bezos Earth Fund, and ClimateWorks Foundation.
The unavoidable part, sadly, is best summed up this way, from the report that GARI produced: “Even with solid progress on decarbonization, the scientific community’s latest IPCC v.6 report projects 1.5C degrees of warming in almost all scenarios within the next 10 years, which will highly likely increase impacts on society and the global economy.”
In sum, we didn’t do the work we needed to do, and the climate crisis will, without question, get worse before it hopefully gets better. That everyone who flew to New York for Climate Week flew out ahead of Hurricane Helene, which now ranks as the country’s third-deadliest storm and will cause untold human suffering and economic damage over the next months and even years, was a tragic and poignant bookend to the week.
The GARI event was far from the only conversation about adaptation and resilience in New York. It’s still a tiny portion of investment, spending, and philanthropy dollars, but it’s increasingly imperative and will only become more so over time.
The money needs to come from everywhere. GARI/BEF/MSCI’s work attempts to create a framework for evaluating public company investments in companies that are, in some way, offering adaptation and resilience solutions, even if they don’t market their solutions that way or call themselves climate companies. The goal is to move money toward solutions so more of them are deployed faster and the cost comes down for everything and everyone—and to be clear, this is on top of the massive increase in government spending, philanthropic dollars, and public-private investments we will need to survive the worst effects of the climate crisis.
But while I felt relief that adaptation is becoming a bigger part of the conversation, it’s also an indictment. We didn’t do enough, and now we know with certainty that the effects of warming are baked in for at least the next decade, and that they are a threat multiplier for everything that already plagues humanity, all around the world. I can’t lie: that stings.
A must-read:
How the North Carolina Legislature Left Homes Vulnerable to Helene (gift link, NYT)
It’s one thing to fail to plan for extreme weather and climate impacts. It’s another to actively impede them and even make it illegal to consider climate impacts in real estate planning (don’t look up!). That’s what North Carolina’s Republican supermajority appears to have done over and over, at the behest of developers who wanted fewer regulations, more land to build on, and no guardrails to protect against some of the destruction we’re seeing in that state right now. Not my normal vibe, I know, but just like we need every solution, we also need to understand that our votes matter, that our resilience is local, and that every future decision that doesn’t take climate risk into account is a decision that puts you and your family in danger.
Welcome back. Nicely done.