Ladies and gentlemen, we have a battle of epic proportions shaping up in front of our very eyes! Which will be the victor in the race to use the most electricity? Electric cars or Artificial Intelligence?
Electric vehicles (EV) have been on the scene for 15 years. In that time, they’ve gone from a novelty to commonplace.
In the meantime, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has only recently become mainstream. In fact, the first time you may have ever been exposed to artificial intelligence was my January 2023 article Have You Ever Heard of ChatGPT?
So, we’ve all learned a lot about each. But what you probably haven’t heard is how much electricity they each use.
Here’s a clue: it’s an insane amount!
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According to usafacts.org, the U.S. would need to produce 20-50% more electricity annually if all cars were electric vehicles. Sound unrealistic? Remember that in June 2024 the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) issued new vehicle fuel economy standards which effectively will make most new gasoline-powered cars obsolete by 2032.
The New York Times states: “If every American switched over to an [EV]…the United States could end up using roughly 25 percent more electricity than it does today. To handle that, utilities will likely need to build a lot of new power plants and upgrade their transmission networks.”
Reuters gives us a picture of how our electricity production must grow:
But depending on the region in the U.S. this growth in electricity production isn’t uniform. Marketplace.org cites that “Texas would need about 25% more power if all cars were electric. California, on the other hand, would need about 50% more.”
So, how does this growth get paid for? EV proponents don’t often talk about this, almost as if we get our electricity by magic. In 2019 the consulting firm BCG estimated that the average utility “will need to invest between $1,700 and $5,800 in grid upgrades per electric vehicle (EV) through 2030. Given that these grid investments will largely be covered in the rate base, the cost of the investments will ultimately be passed on to ratepayers.” Translation? You and I will pay for EV charging in our electric bills whether we own an EV or not.
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Here’s a tiny picture of the amount of electricity AI can use: According to the International Energy Agency’s recent forecast, projections for electricity consumption associated with data centers, cryptocurrency, and artificial intelligence, usage that is equal to “…almost 2 percent of global energy demand in 2022 — and that demand for these uses could double by 2026, which would make it roughly equal to the amount of electricity used by the entire country of Japan.”
Similarly, Bitcoin mining is incredibly energy intensive. According to a story in the New Yorker, “bitcoin mining now consumes a hundred and forty-five billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year, which is more than is used by the entire nation of the Netherlands.”
Ok, ready to be shocked? This, from coindesk.com: “As of mid-July [2021], a single bitcoin transaction required 1719.51 kilowatt hours (kWh) - where a kWh is the amount of energy a 1,000-watt appliance uses in over an hour. To put that in perspective, that is about 59 days’ worth of power consumed by an average U.S. household.”
Artificial intelligence requires a lot of power for much the same reason. “The kind of machine learning that produced ChatGPT relies on models that process fantastic amounts of information, and every bit of processing takes energy. When ChatGPT spits out information (or writes someone’s high-school essay), that, too, requires a lot of processing. It’s been estimated that ChatGPT is responding to something like two hundred million requests per day, and, in so doing, is consuming more than half a million kilowatt-hours of electricity. (For comparison’s sake, the average U.S. household consumes twenty-nine kilowatt-hours a day.)”
Forbes tells us that “the American electrical grid is already strained due to increased industrial production, buoyed by more manufacturing returning from overseas, and will not slacken.” Also, we need to “update [our] outdated grid infrastructure to keep up. The construction of new transmission lines has decreased from 4,000 miles in 2013 to about 1,000 miles annually today, while the country’s industries and households need more electricity to operate.”
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So, to paraphrase the often-quoted line from a western movie: “This grid ain’t big enough for the two of us.”
Something is going to have to change. Some speculate that AI data centers will need to turn to electricity generated by natural gas or nuclear. (Don’t tell the climate change folks about this!)
The battle of the two power-hungry technologies will continue. I’m betting on AI to be the victor as consumers can opt-out of buying an EV, but they won’t stop watching cat videos on YouTube.