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Energy Gang
How can the grid help AI, and how can AI help the grid? Live from NYU at New York Climate Week, featuring leaders from Nvidia and Amazon | Energy Gang Live from Climate Week
01:08:25
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- [00:01]
Josh Parker
One of the things that I'm taking away from Climate Week this, this year is that there seems to be broad consensus that having electricity demand driven by something valuable like AI is actually really good for, number one, the greening of the grid, number two, economic development.
- [00:17]
Xijo
We absolutely need SMR and nuclear to be deployed in the future as carbon free energy. But I also just want to say the timing issue of all of this 116 gigawatts of data centers that are ready to be connected. We need that energy, like right now.
- [00:34]
Craig Sundstrom
I think I ended up suggesting that rate design is now the spiciest issue in data center development as far as energy goes. And there was some laughter because I don't think a lot of people would agree that thinking about the way utilities design rates or tariffs is that exciting. But it certainly has been, I think, a central avenue by which, you know, certainly for Amazon, we are trying to help answer this question.
- [00:59]
Xijo
That's the biggest question facing the power industry in this country right now.
- [01:09]
Ed Crookes
Hello and welcome to the Energy Gang, a discussion show about the fast moving world of energy from Wood Mackenzie. I'm Ed Crookes and welcome to this special live edition of the Energy Gang, which we're recording at New York University in this rather wonderful setting of the Kimmel Building at NYU with these fantastic views out of the New York skyline, we can see Washington Square park down below us. It's really a great place to be having this discussion and we're talking here as part of Climate Week. Climate Week has been going on here in New York all week, but that's not exactly the focus of the discussion we're going to be having here today. Because as I've been meeting people and having lots of conversations through Climate Week, and some of them you may have heard already on the Energy Gang, it struck me that Climate Week was something of a misnomer and it possibly should have been called AI Week, because that's been the subject which has been obsessing people really throughout this week. As we've been talking here, it struck me. It's very interesting in that I've had a lot of great conversations about AI in Climate Week in New York, but in the country at large, there's also been a very lively debate about AI going on. And a couple of things I thought were very interesting in terms of incidents that have been hitting the news. One was there was a case in Indianapolis where there was a big tech company wanted to build a data center. Important to note, not one of the big tech companies represented on this show here Today. But a big company wanted to build a data center and there was a lot of pushback from local residents. And just this week the company announced that the data center would not be going ahead. They canceled the project. And there was a clip that went viral of hundreds of people in the city council chambers in Indianapolis kind of clapping and cheering and being very pleased that this investment wasn't going to happen, even though this was a billion dollar investment into their city. And the other thing I was really struck by was a post on x by Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, Republican governor, obviously someone probably still with ambitions to be a future Republican president. And he posted in a very critical way about data centers. He said there isn't even close to enough grid capacity for these data centers. Consumers will see electricity rates spike. And to what end? And that struck me as really interesting, again, evidence of this general sort of public concern about what AI means and AI's relationship to energy and the implications of that for the future of the US and I guess for the world as well. And that's really then the subject we're going to be talking about today. And to do that, it's fantastic then to have representatives of two of the world's most important companies in the fields of AI and data centers. It's a great pleasure to welcome Craig Sundstrom, who's the head of energy and sustainability at Amazon Web Services for the Americas. Hi, Craig. Welcome to the show.
- [04:03]
Craig Sundstrom
Thanks so much.
- [04:04]
Ed Crookes
Thanks very much for joining us. And it's also a pleasure to welcome Josh Parker, who's the head of sustainability at Nvidia. Josh, welcome to the energy gang.
- [04:11]
Josh Parker
Thank you. Happy to be here.
- [04:12]
Ed Crookes
And I gather it's a return home for you here back to nyu. You're an NYU grad, right?
- [04:17]
Josh Parker
I am, yeah. I went to law school right next door. And it does feel a little bit like coming home. So thank you in particular for that invitation.
- [04:23]
Ed Crookes
Fantastic. Very good to have you back again. And it's also a pleasure to welcome back two old friends to the energy gang. Xijo. Joe is a colleague of mine at Wood mackenzie. He's our global head of power and renewables. Xijo, welcome to the show.
- [04:35]
Xijo
Thank you for allowing me to come back. Second year Indeed.
- [04:38]
Ed Crookes
Yeah. As USA here a year ago and it was such a success. We've wanted you back again. So thanks for being able to do that. And also, of course, our host here at nyu, Amy Myers Jaffe, who's head of the Now, I always get this wrong, but I'm going to get it Right now, the Energy, Climate, justice and Sustainability lab at nyu.
- [04:56]
Amy Myers Jaffe
Okay, shout out from the students for the lab. Yay.
- [05:02]
Ed Crookes
Yeah. As I say, Amy, fantastic to be talking to you again and fantastic to be hosted by you in this wonderful location. So, as I said, I've been sketching some of the kind of concerns that people have had about AI and data center investment. I mean, Craig, maybe to kind of get you to respond to that a little bit. When you hear about these things that worry people about AI and the future of it, how is the industry responding?
- [05:29]
Craig Sundstrom
Well, you know, so for my part, Ed, where I lead the energy and sustainability public policy team at aws, our goal and our remit is to support the energy infrastructure business for the company. And so what does that mean? Well, we know that we have challenges, certainly, to be sure, but we also have pretty ambitious commitments that we're looking to deliver on for our customers as we build out this next wave of data center infrastructure. And so a few years ago, we actually put out a public commitment called the Climate Pledge, where we committed to being 100% renewable energy matched across the business by 2030. We accomplished that by the end of 2023 now with over 600 renewable energy projects worldwide. And the next goal for us is to hit net zero carbon across the business by 2040. And this is really the central challenge I think that we are trying to address at AWS as it relates to our infrastructure build out. And so we're doing that now by moving even further, really leveraging our role as a large but also sophisticated customer of electricity. And that is helping to deploy the next wave of carbon free energy. And so at the end of 2024, we announced a very large investment in small modular reactor company X Energy with a commitment to deploy 5 gigawatts of new advanced SMRs to support the AWS business, ideally by the mid-2030s. And we did that knowing that it's going to take a lot of time and effort to get the rules right and get the regulations right and get this technology deployed. But if we don't now, we're not going to be able to hit those targets in the future. And so that's the type of work that we're doing at AWS to try to help answer the question, how are we going to make sure that we're powering our data centers as sustainably as possible?
- [07:23]
Ed Crookes
Right. And so to be clear about that, when you talk about achieving your emissions goals, getting the amount of low carbon, zero carbon power you need, you said that's the central challenge because I think sometimes probably there's a sense out there that emissions goals are not being prioritized the way they were. You could talk about this kind of in general across the global economy. You could talk about it particularly in the United States, obviously, where we now have an administration that's taken the US out of the Paris agreement, is not prioritizing climate change as an issue. But you're saying it's still a priority for you as AWS and Amazon, Absolutely.
- [07:57]
Craig Sundstrom
Nothing has changed about our commitment to the climate pledge and certainly to hitting net zero carbon by 2040 across the entire Amazon business. But we also know that things are changing rapidly. Right. And I think it's requiring us to be even more nimble, certainly as a large electricity customer, but also as a corporate buyer of electricity where we are helping to enable new carbon free resources at scale. And so Ed, maybe just like one example of how we're seeing this in real time, certainly we're doing a lot on the buying front. I mentioned all the wind solar storage assets that we have already deployed worldwide and we're moving into the nuclear space, particularly through smrs. But thinking back to a recent investment that we announced, $10 billion investment in data center infrastructure in the state of Mississippi. It is the state's largest economic development project ever. And we are working with the local utility there, Entergy, as part of our agreement to grow on their system today. And we'll be scaling over a number of years. We're also bringing 650 megawatts of new utility scale solar with us to Entergy System. And we know that it's going to take partnerships like that across the United States and certainly across the world in order to achieve both our goals in terms of our climate commitments, but also serve our customers that frankly are the ones that want to be on the cloud and want to innovate in AI and want to do more with machine learning.
- [09:27]
Ed Crookes
So Josh, how are you thinking about this at Nvidia then? When you hear about the concerns people have got about AI, what's your approach to trying to reassure them that this is an industry that can grow in a responsible way?
- [09:41]
Josh Parker
I'll start by saying it's absolutely fair to ask the question. And as you think about AI and have new technologies, new changes generally in society that are leading to a higher energy footprint, of course we should be looking at it, thinking about, okay, how do we manage the impact? What are the long term effects? My first reaction to that, my first recommendation to anybody who's looking at that issue, though, is to make sure you're looking at the long time horizon. So in the near term, we do see we're in a period of constrained supply for energy, and that's not just because of AI. And got to put this in context a little bit. The International Energy Agency estimated last year in 2024, that all data centers worldwide used about 1.5% of global electricity. And AI was a small fraction of that 1.5%. So if we look globally, it's a tiny fraction, tiny contribution to the overall load. And if you look at emissions, it's actually even a better story. Even under conservative estimates, AI probably accounted for far less than 0.1% of global emissions. So putting it in context is important. Absolutely. It's growing. And in the United States, the numbers are higher because we have a lot more data center deployment here. We're leading in AI. And so we have this near term supply and demand challenge. That's actually not a bad thing. And the way we look at it is load growth is a very powerful economic driver in the economy. And this has been one of the things that I'm taking away from Climate Week this year, is that there seems to be broad consensus that having electricity demand driven by something valuable like AI is actually really good for, number one, the greening of the grid, number two, economic development. That's especially true when you have companies, to be honest, like aws, that are investing very heavily in clean energy. And aws, I don't want to toot your horn too much, but the largest off taker of renewable energy in the world, again, going back to the iea, they estimated that half of the renewable energy contracts in the United States over the past three years were from data centers. Even though data centers represented a tiny fraction of overall energy, they're responsible for a lot of the greening of the grid that we're experiencing right now. So this is an opportunity for the country to, number one, modernize the grid using AI in ways that actually, and happy to get into the details of this, how AI is really helping us with the grid. Modernize the grid, improve capacity, bring more clean energy online and, and produce economic development at the same time.
- [12:16]
Ed Crookes
Yeah, absolutely. And I'm very keen to get into that issue of how AI is changing the grid in a moment before I do, Xijo, maybe just to bring you into this. So when you look at the impact of data center investment and what's happening, let's focus specifically on the United States, what's happening in this country, and the way that that is changing the electricity industry and it's changing the grid. What are the key issues that stand out for you?
- [12:42]
Xijo
Yeah, I think when you look at all of the data from around the world, but also specifically in the United States, the latest data we're tracking is we have about 116 gigawatts of data centers that are either under construction or fully committed through a utility to be connected to the grid. So this is low. That's committed. It's coming probably in the next two to three years at most. If you compare that to how much power we use in this country, that is about 15% of the peak load in the U.S. 15%. So we're talking 15% of the peak load growth. What has U.S. power demand grown the past 20 years? Barely anything. For 20 years, load has barely grown in the United States. And so there's a giant mentality shift for the industry because we kind of lost a little bit of the muscle memory of building new infrastructure for rapid demand growth. If you think about the other side of the Pacific, the AI competitor of the U.S. it's China, and also more broadly, emerging Asia. I was just in the region. That region has been dealing with very rapid demand growth the past 20 years. And the power industry there kind of knew how to cope with it. They knew what to do about large loads here. I think from developers to regulators to EPC engineering firms, everybody's sort of still catching up with that reality of much faster build of infrastructure. And that is why we feel this tension in the industry as we try to build everything up. But it's also at the same time when everything got so expensive and when Woodmeck looked at the cost of building, for example, a utility solar facility, the United States is by far the most expensive place to build a facility, 40% more than Europe, double that of emerging Asia. So this is why this affordability conversation has become very, very pronounced across the country.
- [14:53]
Amy Myers Jaffe
Let's go into that a little bit because really, even though the United States historically has had low energy prices compared to other places, we're in an economy where people feel under pressure. The average statistic is that electricity prices nationwide just in the past year, up 6% in some states. It's more like Maine, I think was up 40%. In some places, it's up quite significantly. And so some people are thinking it's going to be a political issue for the midterms. And then we all know what happens in the United States. We're looking for someone to blame. So in some political circles, we blame the retirement of coal or the retirements of natural gas and other places we're blaming the utility. But of course, it's easy to make a hyperscaler the bookeyman when you have this giant thing and it's in the news and everybody's talking about AI and it's AI, AI every minute. So I think that part of the challenge here is to deconstruct the way utility systems work in the United States, which is if a utility wants to build new assets, they have to do a rate case and they have to show that to build those assets, they're going to have to do the following thing. And this is what's going to happen to rates and that brings more and more local attention to it.
- [16:18]
Ed Crookes
Yeah, absolutely. And when you say you think it's going to be a political issue in the midterms, I'm sure it's likely that it will be. It's already becoming a political issue. That's very clear. If you look, for instance, at the.
- [16:27]
Amy Myers Jaffe
Governor'S race in New Jersey, show of hands. I mean, is electricity going to be the new gasoline? You know, gasoline has always been a big problem for the president of the United States. You know, you always get like the bat phone to Saudi Arabia to try to get the oil price down. Like, is the new future as we electrify the economy, Is the new future going to be that electricity prices are the new gasoline?
- [16:53]
Ed Crookes
And of course, one of the things that happened when oil prices rose was that everybody blamed the oil companies and they were the ones who really became unpopular, regardless of whether or not that was a fair thing to do. But people did blame the oil companies. And I think one of the things that's quite interesting that's developing here is you're seeing this kind of multifaceted kind of blame passing thing where some people are blaming the renewables industry and the some people are blaming the administration, some people are blaming the tech companies, some people are blaming the local utility. And everyone seems to be kind of passing. But there's going to be quite a lot of blame to be shared around. I think it's going to be a general thing. Sorry, Xija, do you want to say anything about this?
- [17:31]
Xijo
I was just going to say that rate cases and the electricity prices are highly complex. I've been in the industry for 20 years. Every country, everybody's trying to dissect what contributed to the power price increases. And one thing we track in this country is rate cases. This is utilities go to a regulator in the state and say, I need my power prices to go up because I built a new transmission line. The regulator says, yes, power prices go up. This year we've tracked $29 billion worth of rate cases that have been approved in the US the first six months. Last year during the same period, it was only half of that amount. A lot of this is before even data centers kick in. So you can't say this is all data centers. Some of it is we have electrification efforts that being underway EVs, we have heating electrification, or we just have very old infrastructure that needs to be upgraded and that money needs to be spent. So it's really hard to say which bucket that went to.
- [18:33]
Amy Myers Jaffe
And you're having, because everything's done against peak load. You're having everything from all the heat waves and all the storms. And so that also adds to the what do I have to do to build redundancy or to bring in new assets to meet new demand that's coming just from weather.
- [18:53]
Ed Crookes
So, Craig, what do you think about this? I mean, is this an issue that you're wrestling with, presumably the question of electricity prices and whether you kind of catch the blame for it and what you can do in terms of kind of making your.
- [19:04]
Amy Myers Jaffe
What are the options in the regulatory framework? I mean, is this something that's like, is there a policy fix?
- [19:10]
Craig Sundstrom
Yeah. So actually I was at a Climate Week event earlier this week and was sitting on a panel and this question came up and I actually, I think I ended up suggesting that, you know, rate design is now like the spiciest issue in data center development as far as energy goes. And there was some laughter because, like, I don't think a lot of people would agree that, you know, thinking about the way utilities design rates or tariffs is that exciting. But it certainly has been, I think, a central avenue by which, you know, certainly for Amazon, we are trying to help answer this question, you know, so for our part, you know, we are very much committed to not only paying our fair share, but ensuring that we're paying the full cost of service where, you know, in many places we typically are the largest electricity consumer on the system. And so what we're seeing now in a number of these regulatory forums, primarily at the state level at the moment, are utility proposals that are trying to help answer the question, who's going to pay for the infrastructure going forward? Right. And you know, one example that I would commend to you, when you need some late night reading, look at AEP Indiana Michigan. They are an American Electric Power affiliate in the state of Indiana where we have announced another sizable investment in data center infrastructure. And we actually helped tackle this question head on. And what the utilities like AEP are beginning to put before regulators include things like minimum demand charges. So basically when a large customer comes and says I'm going to need X amount of megawatts in the next five years, that customer has to also commit they're going to use at least 80 to 90% of that minimum demand or otherwise pay for it. Things like much longer contract terms. Right. We are in a moment now where regulators are looking at certainly large customers like us and saying, tell us how much power you're going to need in 10 to 12 years. That's never been done before. I don't think anyone, any customer has been able to, with any level of certainty, project that far out. But we're trying to get as good as we can on that question.
- [21:24]
Ed Crookes
Yeah, I was going to ask, are you able to do that? I mean, so would you like to say with confidence where the AI industry is going to be in 12 years time from now?
- [21:32]
Craig Sundstrom
I mean, I think we're going to have to continue to work with our utility partners on getting those forecasts right, but these are the types of mechanisms that we're starting to see and frankly we are party to those conversations.
- [21:45]
Ed Crookes
I'm not sure I'd like to say with confidence where the AI industry will be in 12 days time, never mind 12 years. But yeah, so clearly it's difficult, but.
- [21:54]
Amy Myers Jaffe
So I got a question the other day from a student, in fact, and I thought, okay, layperson, it stumped me slightly because you just made a statement, very interesting about AWS sort of committing to the large bulk of these extra costs for the new infrastructure. So is that a commitment to just the build of the infrastructure cost or is that the ongoing energy consumption that you would have where you're going to pay for the energy cost as well over the number of years?
- [22:25]
Craig Sundstrom
It depends on the state or the regulator. But I mean, I think by and large what we're trying to do through the tariff design is essentially help the utility identify how much infrastructure will be needed to serve the load. And then we're still a large customer and paying for energy through rates, both.
- [22:45]
Amy Myers Jaffe
The infrastructure cost and some commitment to a tariff that you pay over time.
- [22:50]
Craig Sundstrom
That's right.
- [22:51]
Xijo
One thing I'll say is in this country, I don't know if anybody's actually read their power bill. You might need a degree to read it. It's very convoluted for somebody who understands power. You go into the different lines in your Power bill. It's fascinating. I invite everybody to read it because we're all going to be participating in this debate about affordability and tariffs and it's just fascinating to read which parts of your bill are these fixed charges that's attributable to all the infrastructure bill and which part of the bill is attributable to more generation cost which goes up and down and that has influence over time on overall system cost and how much people are going to pay and also what large loads like Amazon or any other tech companies, how much they're contributing. And when you're saying this rate making process being convoluted and needs a revisit, it's true. My question also for you is when you go to different states, it's a very fragmented system, then you have to negotiate very differently and everybody has a.
- [23:59]
Craig Sundstrom
Different approach just by nature. Utilities essentially report to their state regulators and to the extent we're interested in growing in pick the number of states today you have different venues sort of weighing different issues.
- [24:16]
Ed Crookes
Okay, so you've been talking quite a bit about contractual and regulatory fixes to these issues around affordability. I wonder also about technological solutions and what can be done in terms of improving kind of everything in the whole kind of AI ecosystem to ease these problems, for instance by reducing power demand. I mean, maybe Josh, bring you on this. I know this is something you're very interested in at Nvidia. It feels like kind of every month or so we get a new announcement about how much more efficient kind of each generation of chips is compared to the one that went before. Is that do you think an important part of as I say, kind of easing the concerns that people have about affordability and how much burden AI is going to place on the grid.
- [25:02]
Josh Parker
If you look again at the kind of long term time horizon, then it is critical if you're looking at where are we going to be in 10 years to factor in really profound variables like energy efficiency in the data centers. Just taking the data center load, as you mentioned, energy efficiency trends have just been mind blowing to be honest. Over the past decade we've at Nvidia reduced the energy consumed for a particular inference task by 100,000 times in the past decade. And just in the past two years, in the past one and a half generations of our product, we've reduced the energy consumption for the same inference workload by 30 times. So that's a 97% reduction in energy for the same exact inference workload in just two years. So that's a very Very strong trend, and it's important to take that into account. But you still have the net, the absolute energy requirements of AI growing because there's just so much demand for it. So putting that in context is important. But there is still net growth.
- [26:06]
Ed Crookes
Right, and the famous Jevons paradox, of course, which is that if your energy use becomes more efficient, you actually end up using more energy because you can do more with it. And I'm very clear, it seems to me that that's exactly what's going on with AI, right? Which is that as the chips become more powerful and more efficient, people think of new things to do with them. The technology develops very rapidly, but you have to. And as you say net, we end up actually using more energy rather than less.
- [26:29]
Amy Myers Jaffe
But you also have the flip side, which CSIS just have a report out. I had a piece in the Wall Street Journal. IEA has done a big study on this, looking at the computational trade off between AI's energy use, which we've been talking about the burden on electricity grids versus what it can do to create energy efficiency. And that's in a wider range. So CSIS went through everything it can do to solve the electricity problems, including helping speed up interconnection queues and permanent processes by just speeding up what human beings can process in a day or model over time. But even in the fuel system. So having to do with freight and trucks now apparently there's a new program that if you have a large container ship company can use, it's like the ways for shipping, so that you're not waiting at port for birth, which can be very carbon emitting, sitting and idling at port. Across the whole spectrum of the economy, buildings, transportation, et cetera, you're going to have a lot of energy savings. And the trade off is that those energy savings might be something like two, three or four times the energy use in training the models or doing inference activity. So it's really kind of like a mixed bag. You don't have people talk about that part because there's been so much focus on the electricity usage itself.
- [28:08]
Josh Parker
Yeah, and I'd love to talk about that part all day long because I think that is the critical missing piece. People are starting to talk about it more. But again, if you're looking at the net, that's what matters, right? You can look at AI's footprint, it's important. But the more important thing is to look at what are the broader impacts. Where do we end up, given AI's second order impacts in other industries? I'll give you two data points to take home with you. One of them is in manufacturing and one of them is in buildings. The two largest energy consuming sectors in the world in manufacturing. We have a manufacturing partner in Mexico. They make Nvidia Systems and they used Nvidia Omniverse Digital Twin to optimize the facility for energy before building it. And they're projecting a 30% reduction in energy over the lifetime of the manufacturing facility because they used a little bit of energy and used some AI on the front end to optimize it. Similarly in buildings, a company I was on stage with earlier this week, trane, they do H vac heat management buildings. They said they're seeing 30 to 40% reduction in energy just by using AI to optimize how the building is heated and cooled. When you put those in context, those two sectors account for about two thirds of overall energy consumption in the world. And again, AI, we're down at 1.5%. So if we use a little bit of AI to reduce the huge footprint that we have in manufacturing and in, well, transportation as well and buildings, then we end up very, very quickly getting to a net benefit to energy from AI. And that's where we see everything going very rapidly.
- [29:51]
Craig Sundstrom
Yeah. And if I may, I mean I think we're also seeing lots of opportunity to tangibly impact the way the grid itself operates and particularly with AI. So like one example, AWS customer Grid Unity recently entered into a partnership with the Southwest Power Pool. It's a regional transmission organization headquartered in Little Rock, runs all the way through Oklahoma, Kansas up to the Dakotas very large transmission planning region. They are using AWS cloud and AI now to help expedite the interconnection queue at spp. So this is the way that new generation projects are studied on the grid and upgrades to the grid are identified in order to integrate them. They were previously happening basically on manual PDFs in an exchange between engineers at a generator company and Southwest Power Pool. Now we're automating a lot of that and drawing in those timelines in a way that is going to allow those projects to interconnect far more quickly and using AWS and AI as a solution to make that happen.
- [30:54]
Amy Myers Jaffe
So I have a question. I have to be like the AI skeptic in the sense that I tried teaching with large language models as the textbook this summer for an energy class. The idea was we'd learn about what kind of things AI could do to improve optimization in energy. Then we would try to do some of those things in Class I had guest lecturers come and someone working in a company that does permitting research and permitting for large utility scale solar came and taught us how you would use the tool and then use the tool to do your own information about the process and how to make a petition more efficient and do it faster, but then also to compare the regulations when you go to meet with the regulatory body. And it was a super interesting exercise. One of the things that we found in class is that because all of us, or not everybody, but probably most of us are using these tools alone in a room. And you never ask a person sitting in another room, did you get the same answer? But when you're doing it 10 people together, what we found is we're not getting the same answers. Then I would try putting some elaborate prompt in students. Computers still didn't give it the same answer that I got, which in my opinion was the correct answer. A question I have is, are we far enough along in the technology? In some functions I think it'd be incredibly speedy, but in other functions, do we have to worry that we don't have enough guardrails?
- [32:25]
Ed Crookes
Yeah, no, that's a great point. And actually I'm going to put that in a slightly different way as well, which is with quite a few of these things, it often feels like there is a lot of potential there and a lot of exciting stuff that could be done, but the results in a material sense are often not so evident. When I thought that was a very good example you had Josh, about your plant in Mexico, right? That's something that really happened. Those are real savings you've achieved there. How common is that kind of example, I wonder? I mean, is a really making a material difference now? Or as I say, are we mostly talking about things that could maybe perhaps be done if we can get the technology to work Right?
- [33:04]
Josh Parker
So you have to remember that our kind of retail experience, our consumer experience with AI is a tiny, tiny piece of what AI actually is. The industrial commercial applications of AI typically are really effective, especially at things like optimization, prediction, maintenance. So in driving efficiency, it's excellent. It does that very reliably. And also something I'll say. I mean, I use AI every day. It is very useful, but it's not perfect. They say in Colorado, if you don't like the weather, wait 15 minutes with the chatbots. If it's not giving you a great response, if it's not consistent enough, reliable enough, wait six months. The pace of innovation is so rapid, I continue to be just shocked by how capable it's becoming how quickly. But again, we got to remember that that is one small piece of AI. The industrial applications that are really driving very significant improvements in emissions and energy are reliable and very real already.
- [34:03]
Xijo
If I can also just tie it back to energy a little bit. Related to some of these discussions about AI and manufacturing, we're starting to hear about more facilities, warehouses, manufacturing becoming much more automated. So basically more robots operating in these facilities, which actually increases your energy consumption as well for those. So we've seen examples of facilities asking for more power provision because of that automation. So that's also one angle that we have to manage. The other angle is also just the data centers coming into the power markets in such big load does change the way that we operate the grid and the markets. I want to use the privilege of being a host to show one slide. Excuse me, for the folks that are just listening to the podcast, one of the things we do in woodmac, we install thousands of EMF sensors and other sensors in the nation's grid. We have real time monitoring of how power grid is operating. So this is an example of a sensor that's pointing to a transmission tower. We get every 15 minutes a data feed on whether or not there's power being going through that, if there's congestion. This has traditionally been how we monitor generation facilities. Starting last year we started installing these sensors at large load locations to monitor how much their energy they're using. And the traditional sort of wisdom, conventional wisdom, is that generally a lot of data centers don't flex and run a flat load. So this year, does everybody remember the heat wave we had at the end of June in the east coast? So I was in dc, it was really hot end of June. So I asked our team, can you find me a data center in the D.C. area? I want to see if they're changing their load. So this is the power price in PJM Dominion specifically. So you'll see in the early evening hours when the sun has set, power prices went up significantly. So on the 23rd of June, it went from $30 per megawatt hour to $1700 per megawatt hour because of that evening demand. And then we overlaid the load change of a data center in Virginia. This data center belongs to Meta. If you look at the load change during that peak power price hour on the 23rd of June, if just look at that data, it went from 200 megawatt load to 20 megawatt load. So it dropped 90% during that one hour. The reason is simple. Power prices are really high. So during that one hour alone, if they're paying wholesale power prices from that data center, they probably saved between 300 to $500,000 during that one hour. What this has led us to believe is that probably data centers are more flexible in some cases than we traditionally believe. We've already seen cryptocurrency facilities do the same thing in Texas. But as more and more data centers come into the market, we'll probably see more of this kind of behavior. And this actually helps make the power markets more efficient. If this data center does not flex during that hour, the power prices would be even higher. Right, so there's something related.
- [37:42]
Ed Crookes
It's fascinating. I mean, it's a shame for podcast listeners that might not be able to see this job. Well, we should make sure we put it on the web so people can go and look it up, because I do think here it's a really fascinating graphic there and well worth a look.
- [37:53]
Josh Parker
Yes.
- [37:55]
Ed Crookes
So following up on that, as a general point about the importance of flexibility, this is a subject we've covered a few times on the show already this year, talking about the work of Tyler Norris at Duke University, obviously putting a lot of emphasis on this in terms of the importance of data centers being flexible load. And Josh, this is something which you're working on, Right? So we had Varun Sivaram of Emerald AI on just very recently, a couple of weeks ago. So Nvidia has a relationship. You are part owners, you have an investment in Emerald AI.
- [38:27]
Josh Parker
Yeah, yeah, we invested in them and they're part of our startup program.
- [38:30]
Ed Crookes
Right, and what are they doing then? Because they're working in this area. Right. What's their goal and what is the benefit potentially of what they trying to do?
- [38:38]
Josh Parker
Yeah, it's a fascinating company. Really good business model, I think if you care about AI and if you care about sustainability, both they're basically finding ways to do kind of what you're talking about, Xuzhou, in terms of making data centers grid assets because they're flexible. The thesis of Emerald AI is that there are very few AI workloads that are truly non preemptible and so they can flex based on the Norris study at Duke, just for dozens of hours per year. So 1% flexibility per year. If you can ramp down by 25%, potentially unlock 100 gigawatts of energy, that's just there and not being used. Because as you mentioned, Amy, we're planning for peak load and when we're not at peak load, there's a ton of energy available, potentially to be used. And what's a great thing to do with that energy, if it's available, you just convert it into intelligence. You match it with some data, convert it into intelligence when it's there, and then you're making great use of that. And that, of course, does lead to more efficiency and in the grid, because you're able to make much better use and get paid for the energy that's actually available, rather than having it go to waste. And it really does turn these data centers into grid assets. And it also helps normalize the pricing between dispatchable power and variable power, because no longer do you have to prioritize dispatchable power necessarily to the same extent that you did before, because the variable power is really valuable. And so it actually can help drive greening of the grid, because those variable assets like solar and wind end up becoming relatively more valuable compared to dispatchable power.
- [40:16]
Xijo
Exactly. So during those evening hours, usually in PJM in Virginia, it's the gas plants ramping up. And so if we don't use as much power during those hours, you basically don't burn nearly as much natural gas, at least given the grid generation mix today.
- [40:36]
Amy Myers Jaffe
And let me just point this out, because I have a group of students here at NYU who've been working with the outage data, the US Official outage data. And you would imagine in your minds, everybody's thinking in their minds, watching the headlines, that California, Caiso and Ercot in Texas have the greatest record of outages, constant outages. But actually, the data does not show that. The data shows that the highest rate of outages by a wide, wide margin is actually in pjm, where they do have the concentration of natural gas peaking plants. It's really interesting because what's the difference? The difference is in the last two years, Texas has put in probably more batteries than almost any place in the country, and California has had a steady, ongoing deployment of batteries. It really does bring up this question of new technologies, some of which could be driven and enhanced by AI, like virtual power plants, where a utility is using some combination of battery storage and people who are willing to have the utility reach into their thermostat and change it slightly, or tell them to turn off their washing machine or what have you, or bidirectionally charge their car at a different time to actually, again, take those moments where there's too much demand for an hour or two hours or a couple hours and remove that demand in other ways or meet that demand in other ways. It's so effective that my recent conversations with people in Texas, the actual natural gas industry is thinking that they need to actually add batteries to their peaking plants to get that efficiency.
- [42:24]
Ed Crookes
That is amazing. I hadn't heard that yet.
- [42:27]
Craig Sundstrom
So I was actually just going to I think build on something that you mentioned, Amy, and that was sort of, I think you were mentioning VPPs, but also just the opportunity for new technologies to sort of help with some of the challenges that I think we just laid out. And one area that we've been really excited about at AWS is grid enhancing technologies. And this kind of gets back to similar sensors, I think like to the way that woodmac is getting their data. But types of automated technologies on transmission systems that use real time sensing, weather data and the like to essentially determine how can we best optimize the lines that we have today in order to get more out of them. Right. We actually did a study with rmi, I think it was last year, looking specifically at PJM because we I think all understand the challenges in the mid Atlantic. Right. And we found through that study that we could unlock six and a half gigawatts of new energy projects with the deployment of GETs alone. That is without building another transmission line. Now we know we need to build more transmission. Right. We need more energy infrastructure in order to reduce congestion, serve economic development and help with the continued integration of new generation assets. But fascinating that we could have technological solutions that are available today to get that level of new power onto the system without actually having to build another power line to connect it.
- [43:53]
Ed Crookes
Yeah, that is indeed fascinating. Where are you on this question of data centers as flexible load? Is that something you're working on at aws?
- [44:00]
Craig Sundstrom
So certainly very hot topic. Right. And we're hearing it from I think regulators and policymakers alike across the U.S. i think for our part I do want to say that there is no one size fits all solution here, particularly across the data center industry. Like at aws, we are hosting lots of customer workloads that demand high uptime. They are built on the back of the AWS cloud. And so we're talking about hospital systems and government agencies and others that I think might have concerns about what we mean when we say flexibility. And so we are in conversations with all of our utility partners and trying to figure out what might make the most sense. But I would just caution it's just not a one size fits all type of solution.
- [44:48]
Ed Crookes
And something that often I think there's confusion about and I think probably I'm confused about it as well is the question of when we talk about Flexibility at a data center. To what extent are we talking about kind of compute operational flexibility and the kind of things that you've been talking about, Josh? To what extent are we talking about actually just having some kind of backup generation on site? And whether it's diesel generators or some gas engines or gas turbines or batteries or whatever it might be, both are options, right? Is there one that's kind of more viable than the other?
- [45:19]
Josh Parker
There's also spatial flexibility too. And this is something that's a little bit unique to AI workloads is that typically they're a lot less sensitive to latency than traditional data centers. So if you have a hospital that's running critical things off a data center, you probably really care about the latency. If you're asking AI to write you a research paper, it's already going to take you a few minutes. Probably having a few extra milliseconds of latency in there isn't going to be noticeable. And that's especially true of training. Our CEO Nvidia Jensen, likes to say AI doesn't care where it goes to school, meaning that you can train your AI model wherever you want to. You could train it in Alaska, nobody cares. And then you bring it to wherever you need to use it. And again, the latency isn't that sensitive. Flexibility in time, flexibility in space is also useful. And then, yeah, having the batteries there to absorb some of the shocks is also useful. So you combine all those together and it's pretty powerful. I like to be optimistic, and I think we have more reason to be optimistic than ever before. So for an energy focused audience like this, I want to just put a hypothetical. What would we like to see ideally, in terms of modernization of the grid? What do we want to get out of the grid in the future and what conditions might create that grid for us? And I think we're actually in a perfect storm of incentives that could drive us to that place where we want to be. And the things that I would say are, number one, being able to take full advantage of variable energy sources, especially clean ones like solar and wind, being able to, of course, provide reliable service to consumers, being able to invest more in our grid because there's value there, and being able to serve the workloads like AI that are going to drive economic opportunity. And if we look at where we're going, we see more batteries coming online through electrification, we see more variable, renewable, variable energy. And AI is perfectly positioned to help match those together because that is a huge, complex data problem. Trying to figure out where should electrons flow back and forth, not just unidirectional and trying to pull electrons from batteries when you need to and then pull it from solar when you need to. And managing that complex problem is something AI is perfectly poised to do.
- [47:31]
Craig Sundstrom
I think you're spot on. And, you know, this is something that we're also working on at aws. I mentioned earlier our renewable energy program and projects that we have deployed around the world. We now have a solar and battery storage project in California that is using AI built on AWS to optimize charging and dispatch of that battery in real time. And it's actually driving down the cost of operation and improving the cost of power for that project that is grid connecting and helping to serve customers in the region. And I think that is just going to be one of many examples where we're leveraging this technology to optimize, particularly our battery storage projects.
- [48:13]
Amy Myers Jaffe
Josh, when you and Craig talk about sort of like this moment of opportunity, instead of having it be like a social problem, we have this moment of opportunity that makes me think about first of a Kind. So, Craig, I have you here on the stage. I mean, first of a kind, Amazon AWS has been one of the companies that have said, okay, we're going to give a serious look to first of a kind with SMRs. But the flip side is it seems like you found a utility that's willing to work with you on that. Because when I talk to people, there are a lot of utilities that are thinking about it. But getting a utility to actually say, yes, I'll build First of a Kind, they're very conservative organizations. Where are we on that? You think that someone will, we're really going to get there and have some first of a kind facilities.
- [49:00]
Craig Sundstrom
I mean, the short answer is yes. And so what we're doing is we are. You mentioned utility partners for our first deployments of small modular reactors. We're working with Energy Northwest, which is a public power consortium in Eastern Washington state, with the goal of deploying X Energy SMRs to support our Eastern Oregon data center campus, which is essentially grid connected to the Washington site. But I think to your question, though, around first of a Kind, Amy, it really brings up what most would acknowledge in the nuclear industry right now, and that is just the risk profile of first of a Kind. And so I think that's why, as a corporate buyer of clean energy, we decided not only to work with the utility partner and work with a SMR company in X Energy, but we actually took an equity investment in X with the goal of standing up a manufacturing pipeline of 5 gigawatts. That is one way that we can help with the risk profile and then work with the local utility to actually develop and deploy on that site.
- [50:08]
Amy Myers Jaffe
So the interesting thing, from my recollection reading some of the press on it, because one of the things that people have had in other locations, no names will be mentioned, is that it requires specialty fuel. But you're actually making an investment in producing the specialty crude. You're also making the investment to manufacture the specialty fuel as well. Correct.
- [50:31]
Craig Sundstrom
Through X energy. That's right.
- [50:32]
Amy Myers Jaffe
Right, right. So that's unusual because the federal government has had to try to stand up getting that fuel built in the United States. So again, high risk. No.
- [50:45]
Craig Sundstrom
We'Re excited about the opportunity. We can just acknowledge. Yeah, I mean it is first of a kind. We are trying to do hard things, but we also know if we don't step up now, we're not going to realize the ultimate deployment of these new and exciting technologies. And so that's what we've decided to do.
- [51:05]
Xijo
We absolutely need SMR and nuclear to be deployed in the future as carbon free energy. But I also just want to say the timing issue of all of this, if you recall the number I just cited, 116 gigawatts of data centers that are ready to be connected. We need that energy. Like right now. In the WoodMac forecast, our first SMR unit in the US comes online in 2031. I don't know if that's reasonable to you.
- [51:37]
Ed Crookes
Did you say 2035?
- [51:39]
Xijo
2031 is the first unit? Right. And you're talking like maybe 100 megawatt. So 116 gigawatt, you know, 100 or fewer megawatt in 2031 and maybe scaling up. You can do that in the2030s if we believe in the technology. But we still have the problem of the next five years. What are we going to do about all this new demand that's coming online and where's all of the new power supply going to come from? That's the biggest question facing the power industry in this country right now. And I think it's not too scary to call that we might have a power supply crisis if we don't do something differently. But that's sort of the 5 year to 10 year time frame is really what we are worried about. And it has the potential to send energy prices much higher when these peaks become more and more frequent and disruptive. And consumers are not going to like it when these prices go up. So somewhere in the policy making circle and in the industry organization, we have to wake up to this and really think about what's going to happen.
- [52:55]
Amy Myers Jaffe
So are we in a hype? Cycle is electricity, as Ron DeSantis kind of implied, you know, is that the it can't happen because we're just not going to have electricity. Like where are we going?
- [53:07]
Ed Crookes
Well, those are great questions. I think we should let the audience have a chance to ask a couple of questions just before we do just Craig, just to go back to just that factual point about timetable for maybe these X Energy SMRs coming online. Did I hear you say that 2035 was your target date for having the first one up and running?
- [53:27]
Craig Sundstrom
What's the so for the entire 5 gigawatt pipeline, we would like to see that deployed by the end of the2030s, but certainly for the first units we're moving as fast as we can.
- [53:37]
Ed Crookes
Right, Right. Yeah. And just I mean I hear what you say, Xiju. Absolutely agree with everything as you say about this kind of short term time horizon. Five to ten years is important. We're still going to need more power by the end of the 2000 and 30s. Right. I mean it's still worth starting those kind of operations, getting that research and development done in order to get the technologies that we need to be commercially deployable in the future, even if it's 10 years plus off.
- [54:06]
Xijo
Because yeah, we absolutely need the technology as one of the technologies of the future.
- [54:11]
Ed Crookes
Yeah. So as I said, let's take some questions from the audience then. I think we've got some mics which we can send around the audience if anyone has a question they would like to ask.
- [54:20]
Amy Myers Jaffe
If you want, be shy, put your.
- [54:22]
Ed Crookes
Hand up and introduce yourself. Yes. One down the front here. Thanks very much.
- [54:27]
Mary Beth Mandanis
Sure. Hi. Mary Bethmandanis, CEO of Onyx Renewables. So the question I have is it feels like we're still in an eight track tape environment. I would think about eight track tapes. I don't know, maybe I'm dating myself going to digital assets. And how do we turn around the structure of the industry? We're still. And when I say eight track tapes, we're talking about centralized utility systems. We're not talking about localized utility systems or localized solutions. Everything you guys have been talking about is localized. So why don't we turn it on its head and the main source of power become all the localized. They become the data centers. It's a storage asset. We use renewables. We don't have to build big transmission lines. We can use we can automate everything you talked about in terms of AI usage. We can optimize things. It's a prime time to go from eight track to digital.
- [55:34]
Ed Crookes
Yeah, so that is a great question. I'm actually going to go one better and say in some respects you could say it's like the wind up gramophone power system because some of the industry structures and the regulatory structures go back to the 1920s. Right. So I don't know, anyone want to take that on? I mean, in terms of, I guess question, do we need some kind of radically different industry structure to meet the challenges of the future? I don't know.
- [55:57]
Josh Parker
I would just say that that's the beauty of the moment that we're living in now is that we have all of these incentives coming together at the same time. We see real desire on the part of the government right now and there's actually bipartisan support for expansion and modernization of the grid. We've never, at least I don't remember seeing this much motivation to cut through the red tape, the regulatory processing as we've ever seen before because there's such value potentially to be delivered. So we seem uniquely aligned to try to solve this problem right now, especially because we have huge economic incentives behind it. So I think if we're ever going to do that, now is the time and AI I think is going to help us.
- [56:37]
Amy Myers Jaffe
I would just say that not only is the technology there, but part of what's happening out there, maybe somewhat even in the hyperscaler world, but definitely at the retail level is people are stepping up and just doing it themselves. One of the problems that the utilities have is they have no visibility. On the fact that someone somewhere said, you know what, this is not working for me. I'm getting my own backup system for my house, or I'm getting my own backup system for my apartment building. Here in New York City we had a whole program on sustainable real estate and we had really phenomenal speakers, private equity firms and other real estate investors that have built what they call circular buildings where the building itself generates all the energy that it uses and they really don't need to take from the grid or very little from the grid. So I do think there's some momentum to having these solutions come. And you're seeing that even we're seeing it in the United States, but you're seeing it even more so in countries where the central government's not really delivering solutions. You're seeing that in Africa, you're seeing that in Southeast Asia where individuals or manufacturing plants or other kinds of entities are literally doing a behind the meter solution and then that's. It solves the problem. I feel like behind the meter solution is something that a company would go and threaten a utility with right now. But you think people really go in that direction?
- [58:12]
Xijo
I'll just add in woodmac we have a micro grid tracking service looking at all the microgrid development. We also look at what's called co location of of data centers with generation, which is essentially sort of behind the meter arrangement. We look at all the data centers we're tracking, only 6% of them are going for colocation.
- [58:37]
Amy Myers Jaffe
Oh, interesting.
- [58:38]
Xijo
And we can talk about why. It's a much bigger conversation I think out there. There's regulatory issues, there's power supply issues, but the fact is that currently most data centers are still opting to be connected to the grid for many different reasons. So there is something there. Obviously a few data centers opted for colocation, but it's not sort of widespread phenomenon that we're seeing yet.
- [59:06]
Ed Crookes
Yeah, as you say, grids exist for a reason. They do have lots of advantages. And yeah, it's no coincidence that most data centers still want to be connected. But I think it's also interesting to think about whether that could change and how far that will go. Let's take another question though. Who else? You got one there?
- [59:24]
Columbia University Student
First of all, thank you so much for the impressive panel and I'm a student at Columbia University and I also had experiences to do the energy optimization for data centers at Tencent. So actually I have two questions. The first one is about the geothermal. So when we're talking about the nuclear, it's more like the energy sources for the 202030 as you mentioned before. So how about the recent five years? Do you think that geothermal would be a good alternatives to power data center or at least to do the cooling and the heating process for data centers. And my second question is about the Chinese data center overseas business. So from my observation, most of the Chinese tech companies like Tencent, Alibaba and Biden's, they are planning to have new available zones all over the world, like in the Middle east, in Southeast Asia and also in Latin America. So basically they can build a data center campus is of half of the price and also offer cheaper deals to the customer. So how's your opinion about that? Thank you so much.
- [60:25]
Ed Crookes
Two interesting questions. Well, should we take them in order? Geothermal? Who wants to? In principle. I'm personally very excited about geothermal. I think it has enormous potential. To me it's not really a next five years technology, these kind of enhanced geothermal projects, technologies that we're seeing at the moment, just the first few pilots are really coming into service kind of now and over the next couple of years, I think before we see large scale deployment that's going to be into the2030s. I don't know.
- [60:55]
Josh Parker
Yeah, that's my experience as well. Really exciting technology. Hopefully it'll help us in the long term. And there's a lot of potential in the United States for geothermal, but it'll take several years. So we do have an energy crunch right now. Xijo, to answer your question, I think we're going to need an all of the above approach in the near term in order to continue to deploy AI to meet consumers growing demands through electrification and everything. So we need to do that to expand the grid. And for those of us who care about the emissions associated with that and the potential for natural gas to play a critical role in the next few years, I would say it's an investment that is going to pay off very, very quickly because AI's second order impacts on emissions, there's growing consensus that they are going to be. AI will be a net contributor to emissions reductions very, very soon. And I personally think that's within the next three years.
- [61:44]
Ed Crookes
And what about the question on international competition then? I don't know if anyone wants to take that on, but this question of whether it's going to be possible to build data centers elsewhere in the world outside the United States that you can build and power at significantly lower cost. What do you say, like half the cost that you can. That was half the cost that you can in China, right? Was it which, which is already probably, I guess lower than the cost you can build in the U.S. i don't know.
- [62:10]
Craig Sundstrom
Yeah, I would just suggest, and I'll offer what I focus on and that is how do we get this done in the U.S. right. And that is, you know, I think some folks will call it energy dominance, some will call it winning the AI race for us. We call it meeting customer demand. Our customers want to be on the cloud and they want to innovate in AI and we need to build data center infrastructure to make that happen. And at the end of the day, I think from an energy perspective, we see energy infrastructure as being the linchpin to making this all happen. Transmission infrastructure, in particular high voltage inter regional transmission, to be even more specific, is going to be critical not only for serving new data center demand and other electrification sources like EVs and manufacturing and broader scale economic growth, but also for integrating new generation resources at scale. And that's what we're focused on every day at AWS.
- [63:03]
Amy Myers Jaffe
And ultimately five, 10 years ago I would be on a panel and someone would ask me about the problem of equity in electricity prices or just the problem of electricity prices in general. I used to say that this division between the wholesale market and the retail market is skewed up because in the end people who are low income residential users should not be the interruptibles and they shouldn't be paying a higher price than the wholesale large load customer. People would say, everybody would nod their head and then they'd pull me aside after I was off the stage and say that's not how electricity prices work in the United States, Mrs. Jaffe. But now we're seeing more discussion about companies and entities that have the larger loads, whether that's industrial load or a data center load, wanting to really ensure that the electricity is there and so really willing to step up to the plate with a different pricing structure. Maybe that's the time has come again opportunity because really we need to go in that direction.
- [64:16]
Xijo
On the international angle, I'll just say something very quickly. I was just in Thailand and Malaysia, met with the power utilities in those countries too. There's a rush to meet data center demand in those countries as well. And you heard about Singapore not being able to meet it and you have data center companies or tech companies moving to Malaysia. So across the border in Johor in Malaysia there's a huge boom. But then you also have the question of many of the tech companies want zero carbon power. And when you have a nationally integrated utility, it's really hard to guarantee you're going to have zero carbon power because you're just buying from the grid. So for many countries there are also local regulatory changes that need to happen to allow for either virtual PPAs or other types of green attributes to come to the tech companies. I don't know if the constraint is on data center building cost right now. I think it's much more on the energy provision side to make sure that the local power companies can actually meet the the requirements of the data center companies. Tech companies.
- [65:26]
Amy Myers Jaffe
Some of that, especially in the region you're mentioning, will eventually come from cross border electricity trade. So you're seeing a lot of that in Europe, but now Singapore and other countries are investigating. Right.
- [65:39]
Xijo
It's one line. It's very challenging. All you have in Southeast Asia is a hydro line from Laos going through Thailand, Malaysia to Singapore. The Prices down in Singapore is exorbitantly high. You think New York has high power prices? Imagine transmitting power from through three different countries and every utility along the way charging you a willing charge to get the power to the end users. But people get desperate sometimes and that's what happened. We do see more need for regional grid integration, but when electricity and transmission line cross borders, the level of regulatory complexity is just unbelievable and takes a long time to resolve.
- [66:21]
Ed Crookes
I'm sorry, I think we should just about wrap it up there. Apologies if you had a question and we didn't get to you. Go on then, go on. Just one very quickly, very quickly. And then we're going to wrap up.
- [66:31]
Audience Member
My question is, we've been talking about electricity, but one of the things that data center has is a lot of heat. We haven't talked about any thermal energy network yet. Now, certainly if you are competing for electricity with residents, they may be angry at you, but if you provide them heat in the winter, they may be your friend. So just wondering if there is any discussion about thermal energy networks and basically data center becomes utility.
- [67:01]
Josh Parker
Yeah, this is a really exciting opportunity. A lot of the energy that goes into Data center does get converted to heat. It's used by the GPUs, CPUs, but then it gets converted to heat as well. So we do have partners. One of them I love to talk about is called Eco Data Center. They build their data centers out of timber, they power it with 100% renewable energy, and they use district heating to take the heat from the data center and to heat the local communities. I think we're only going to see more and more innovations here where we're able to reuse that and data centers will actually become not only assets to the grid, but assets to the communities where they're at.
- [67:35]
Ed Crookes
Yeah, that is a really cool idea and definitely something we should be exploring further. Unfortunately, we do then definitely have to leave it there. But it's been great talking to you all. Thanks very much indeed.
- [67:44]
Craig Sundstrom
Josh, thank you.
- [67:45]
Josh Parker
Yeah, thank you.
- [67:46]
Ed Crookes
Great.
- [67:47]
Xijo
Thanks everybody.
- [67:48]
Ed Crookes
Thank you, Amy. And thanks very much indeed for hosting us here.
- [67:50]
Amy Myers Jaffe
Always wonderful to have host the energy gang at nyu.
- [67:53]
Ed Crookes
Absolutely. And thanks to everyone at NYU for being such great hosts and as I say, letting us use your wonderful room here. Thank you all very much indeed for coming. Thanks for your great questions. Please provide a question. And thanks to everyone listening to this podcast, wherever you may be. As you know, we always value your feedback. Please do keep it coming. Leave us a review on YouTube if you want on your podcast platform and we'll be back very soon with all the latest news and views on the energy transition. Until then, goodbye.