It’s all about energy!
Energy - surely a word that’s overused? Or, at least, overloaded? Of course, the word ‘energy’ and ‘environment’ have become synonymous. We can’t talk about the environment without talking about energy and energy use. Renewable energy options are cropping up to solve some of the problems of non-renewable fossil fuel options. We want cleaner, more sustainable energy options to replace the less clean coal, oil and gas burning options. In Jambot’s Guide to Technology there is a whole chapter dedicated to renewable energy. It’s important. We need to discuss it. As more and more people on the planet move out of poverty, energy needs across the globe will increase. They need more electricity to power their homes. They need cooling and heating options for their homes. And like the middle classes of the western world, they will aspire to having a nice car. A car is a symbol of wealth and a symbol of freedom in the western world. This aspiration should be available to all, but of course, it comes at some cost.
If you mention the word ‘energy’ to a physicist, they might have an alternative explanation for its meaning. Einstein once said – “Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it.” The universe, it appears, is made up of energy. Scientists will explain that 5% of the universe’s energy is matter – that’s planets and stars and the things we can see and feel. 27% of the energy in the universe is made up of dark matter. This energy behaves a bit like matter, but it’s not stuff we can see or feel – hence the name ‘dark’ matter. The rest, making up 68%, is not very well understood. We call it dark energy. So, of the 100% of energy in the universe, there’s only 5% that we can relate to – we understand it. Well, kind of! You see when scientists look at matter, they see that matter is made up of these things called molecules. And molecules are made up of things called atoms. And atoms are made up of electrons, protons and neutrons. But when they looked closer again, they see that electrons, protons and neutrons are made up of quantum particles called quarks and leptons. And some of these quantum particles have no mass – they are just energy. It’s hard to comprehend. The closer we look we find it’s all just energy. I guess, that’s what Einstein was saying.
So back to clean energy. As we all know, transportation is going through some very big changes. We now have electric scooters, electric bicycles and electric cars. These vehicles are powered by large battery packs which drive electric motors. Electric cars don’t burn petrol, gas or diesel like combustion engine cars. They produce less CO2 – right? This is true while they are driving but these cars must be charged. Where does our electricity come from? In most western countries most electricity still comes from fossil fuel sources (coal or gas-powered stations). While countries are trying to reduce the dependency on fossil fuels by building wind farms and solar powered farms, it’s not as easy as it might first appear. Wind farms can only produce electricity when the wind is blowing and the more wind, the greater the amount of electricity produced. When it’s too windy, many wind turbines must be shut down as the forces can destroy the wind turbine.
Solar farms can only produce electricity when the Sun shines. They are most efficient in places where Sun shines all year round consistently through the day. Even in these locations, the Sun doesn’t shine at night.
We use most of our electricity at night. That’s when we are home from school or work. We need lighting, we cook, we watch TV. If there’s no wind and no Sun then what can we do? Oh, you can’t cook tonight or have a hot shower as there’s no wind and the Sun went down 2 hours ago! I don’t think that will work for most of us.
Wind and solar energy need an energy storage solution. When the wind blows or the Sun shines, the energy can feed the electricity grid and any extra capacity can be stored in energy storage. That energy storage can then feed the grid at night when we need it. The obvious storage solution would be large battery packs. Like the battery pack in an electric car but much bigger. This will require lots of Lithium-ion batteries and this will be costly.
Other renewable energy options that are being researched include wave and tidal energy generation. Waves are created by winds so they might have similar shortfalls to wind energy. Tidal energy shows some promise as tides are guaranteed to occur twice per day.
We love our technology and there is nothing we love more than our smart phones. In Jambot’s Guide to Technology there is a chapter dedicated to the smart phone. Obviously, our smartphones need charging and that’s energy – right? Our smart watches too. It’s energy but it’s not big energy. A full re-charge might take two hours with a 20 Watt charger. That amounts to a small fraction of electricity – 0.04kWh to be precise (kWh or kilowatt hour is the unit of electricity that the electricity companies use to measure electricity usage, and they charge per kWh). For reference, the average usage per household in Ireland is 12 kWh per day. So, phones don’t use lots of energy directly. But have you ever thought of all those apps on your phone and what they connect to? Social media apps, entertainment streaming apps or gaming apps - some are used by billions of daily active users. To support these apps, these companies build giant buildings full of computer servers. These building are called data centers. Data centers can contain thousands of high-powered servers. These servers contain all the software that enable the apps to run on your phone. They store your personal details like pictures, videos, posts, contact lists. They enable you to make a post that can be seen in almost real-time by your friends. They also enable the immediate streaming of your favorite movie or series at the touch of a button. This technology is amazing. Today, we take it for granted. But it requires a large amount of energy to maintain these very large applications.
Large companies such as Meta, Amazon, Google, Apple, Netflix will have many data centers located around the world. Data centers are best built in cool climates with a rich source of available water. The servers in these data centers generate large amounts of heat and must be cooled via air conditioning. If this was not done the servers would overheat and fail. Air conditioning uses large amounts of energy so locating data centers in a cool climate makes sense – less air conditioning is needed and, as a result, the data center is cheaper to operate. Water is needed for the large air conditioning operation. Large data centers can use up to 500,000 litres per day for cooling purposes. Some of these data centers are enormous – over 1.5 million sq ft in size.
Ireland has a cool moderate climate with no shortage of water. Ireland hosts many data centers today and more are being built as we speak. In 2022, data centers alone used 5.2 GkWh or 5,200,000,000 kWh of electricity. That’s the same amount of electricity needed to power 1.2 million average homes in Ireland for a year. That’s a lot of energy! For the year 2022 data centers used over 20% of the total electricity needs of the whole country of Ireland. As more data centers are built in Ireland that number is expected to rise significantly by the year 2030. The price of things go up as demand goes up. Economists call this concept ‘supply and demand’. As the need for energy increases, the cost increases. We’ve seen very large increases in energy prices over the last five years. We might expect that trend to continue.
I like robots. In my book Jambot’s Guide to Technology, Jambot is a cute and clever AI robot that loves music and loves to dance. It seems that many other companies also love robots. There is a robot race going on between several high-tech companies. With the integration of OpenAI these robots are becoming very clever and even those in the know are surprised by how fast AI robots are advancing.
All this AI technology runs high powered software in data centers. As AI becomes more ubiquitous, the energy need grows further. AI is not free. It will come at a cost. It will require energy and lots of it. More servers, more cooling and larger power-hungry data centers. Compute power (i.e. computers of all types) globally has increased 1000 times in the last 8 years. That trend is set to continue and it’s an exponential one!
People may fear that robots will take our jobs. General AI will take more. That may be true or at least partially true. Some jobs will be easier to replace than others. But we humans are experts at adapting. We always have been. We will continue to adapt. Robots are better at storing, recalling and processing information. But there is a lot more to being human than processing information. To be human is to dream, to imagine, to create, to share, to laugh, to cry, to get angry, to feel pain, to love, to lose, to not be perfect. Being goofy is a human trait! Maybe we need goofy robots! We are not robots and robots are not humans and they never will be. They may take some jobs, but they will require energy to operate – lots of energy. The biggest fight we have with robots might not be jobs. It might be energy! I, for one, welcome our robot friends but please go easy on our energy!