How can the grid help AI, and how can AI help the grid?

Recorded in front of a packed room at NYU’s Kimmel Center during Climate Week NYC, Ed Crooks and Amy Myers Jaffe moderate a debate on the high-stakes topic of AI and energy. They dig deep into the questions raised by the surge of investment in data centers: what it means for grid stability and electricity bills, and how new technologies and market structures can help the power industry adapt.

Climate Week this year often felt more like AI Week, given how many discussions were centred around it. To explore the issues, the team Ed and Amy are joined by representatives of two of the key companies at the heart of the revolution. Josh Parker is Head of Sustainability at NVIDIA, and Craig Sundstrom is Head of Energy & Sustainability Policy at AWS. Xizhou Zhou, Wood Mackenzie’s Head of Power and Renewables, also joins the discussion, to add his perspectives on how the industry is changing

The load shock is real. Xizhou says that more than 116 GW of US data centers are under construction or fully committed to interconnect in the next few years: equivalent to about 15% of US peak load today. After two decades of flat demand, the electricity industry must rebuild its muscle memory for rapid infrastructure build-out. US power prices went up 6% in the past year, with rates in some states going up far more. What is driving that surge? And what can be done to provide some relief for hard-pressed consumers?

One answer comes from rapid progress in the technologies that make AI possible, including the chips. NVIDIA’s Josh Parker notes NVIDIA has cut energy use for inference tasks by 100,000× over the past decade ,and by about 30× in just the past two years.

Craig from Amazon explains how new grid-enhancing technologies could quickly make a difference, pointing to an AWS/RMI study showing that 6.5 GW of extra capacity could be freed up on the PJM grid without building any new transmission lines. He adds that AI is already helping in California, where smart battery dispatch is cutting costs in real time.

Data centers don’t only use electricity for computation: they create a lot of heat, too. Josh says there are ways to use that heat, and describes Scandinavian projects that use it for their local district heating networks. With geothermal and new small modular reactors unlikely to reach widespread deployment until well into the 2030s, the panel agrees that the real solutions in the next few years lie in upgrading transmission, expanding storage, redesigning rates, and building in flexibility.

It's a busy and lively discussion, with a couple of questions from the audience answered by the panel. If you have any further questions or comments on the show, we’d love to hear them. You can comment on Spotify, leave a review on Apple Podcasts, or find us on YouTube and leave a comment there.

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