Why Cool Ain’t That Cool at All

 

“The reality is we can keep adding renewables until we’re blue in the face, and it won’t be enough.”

Sumant Sinha, chief executive of ReNew, one of India’s biggest renewable energy companies.

Even as rising levels of heat reach life and health-threatening levels, literally killing millions a year, even if we could reach all those people, we cannot provide air conditioning with renewables sufficient to save those lives even if we wanted to. Modernity may have dispensed with lots of smokestack industries, but engineering applications, ranging from crypto mining and cooling technologies to expanding the computing power necessary to enable the high demand for artificial intelligence, tell us our energy needs may become increasingly reliant on fossil fuels. Catch-22: the more we rely on fossil fuels for power generation, the hotter this planet will get, and the more AC we will need… not even addressing the loss of water resources and arable land.

Think about construction and farm workers who cannot shelter from the heat, traffic officers directing vehicles amidst sizzling streets and automotive effluents. Old folks dying in de facto oven-like apartments. There will be literally entire regions of earth, now populated, that will wither away and die as temperatures rise. When I was a child, air conditioning was still a luxury… moving to the Middle East and spending time in Greece, AC was still elusive. I remember sleeping in a water-filled bathtub in my uncle’s apartment in Athens when summer heat made slumber impossible. But today, those locations routinely post air conditioning for all but the bottom rungs of their economic ladders. One of the first luxuries people with rising incomes buy, even before getting a car, is air conditioning. It is viewed more as a necessity than the luxury it once was.

But it is not just a desire to stay cool that is pushing electrical demand steadily upward. The April 26th Wall Street Journal took a hard look at how improving technology alone is rapidly becoming the power demand miscreant that keeps moving the bar increasingly beyond the grasp of our ability to provide that electricity without reigniting our fossil fuel engines: “Renewable electricity is growing fast. The trouble is, it can’t keep up with growing power demand.

“In the U.S., the new driver is energy-guzzling artificial intelligence. Demand was already on the rise to power electric vehicles, heat pumps and other devices designed to reduce fossil fuel use… In the developing world, the boom is driven by industrialization and basics like lights and air conditioning. That means more fossil fuels, including coal, the worst emissions offender…

“America’s power-sector emissions have declined as natural gas and renewables supplanted coal. But renewable electricity that is soaked up by new drivers of demand can’t be used to clean up polluting sectors such as transportation and industry… Factories producing microchips, electric vehicles and batteries are fueling demand growth. That shows little sign of slowing. Samsung will more than double its semiconductor investment in Texas to $44 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported this month..

“The wild card is AI, which uses more energy than conventional computing… Precise data on AI’s power usage is scant, and it isn’t clear how the technology will evolve. But a 2023 paper by data scientist Alex de Vries estimated that AI servers worldwide could use about as much power as a midsize economy such as the Philippines or Sweden by 2027…

“India encapsulates the challenge. Power-demand growth has been running above 8% a year, outpacing gross domestic product growth, as industrial activity explodes… Hundreds of millions of Indians whose homes have been connected to the grid this century are also buying appliances. By 2050, Indians’ air conditioners could use more power than Africa currently consumes, the International Energy Agency says… Since Covid-19, India's electricity demand has been growing faster than its economy…

“The government’s renewables push is part of a broader effort to keep up with demand. India has 30 gigawatts of coal plants under construction, with more in the pipeline, according to Global Energy Monitor… Moving coal to power plants is straining India’s infrastructure. The government said last year it envisions adding 100,000 railcars to India’s congested railroads by 2030—a fourth of the existing stock—just for coal... ‘If anybody was expecting India’s coal to peak anywhere before the mid-2030s, they were probably unrealistic,’ [says Karthik Ganesan, a power-market expert at India’s nonprofit Council on Energy, Environment and Water].”

Even as power hog China surpasses the US in rolling out alternative power generation (still quite coal heavy), the aggregate picture of global fossil fuel power consumption remains on the rise. We’re as guilty as anyone. The entire energy platform of the Republican Party is to reemphasize coal, oil and natural gas extraction to fuel our economy, while attempting to repeal those elements in Biden’s infrastructure and inflation reduction legislation (passed by Congress) intended to contain greenhouse gasses generated by burning fossil fuels and to provide alternative renewable energy. As our youngest generations, those who will be saddled with vastly more climate change misery than their parents and grandparents, feel betrayed by governments more interested in sparing taxes for the rich than in saving the lives of their children, the GOP is hellbent in amping up that betrayal.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we cannot have it both ways: health and prosperity versus accelerating the impact of saving taxes for the rich, hence expanding income inequality on steroids.