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Households consume the most electricity in the UK. That's why the huge surge in global energy prices following the expansion of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 prompted the government to invoke price caps and handouts to protect consumers (and businesses) from bankruptcy, along with private energy providers who failed to manage their market exposures. Yet few have noticed that the world's computing data centres, including those hosting artificial intelligence platforms, already consume enough energy to power entire countries and compete with humans for vast amounts of fresh water. Crypto-currencies also require huge amounts of energy to 'mine'. So, not only are you paying for many 'free' online services with your personal data, you're also paying through your energy and water bills. And based on the advertising and other revenues from your participation, Big Tech can afford to outspend you. To illustrate the challenge, the UK government just announced a massive new Microsoft AI facility in London, even as Thames Water circles the drain and lack of capacity in the UK's national grid is delaying the construction of new homes, renewable energy projects and electric vehicle charging points. Given these costs and shortages, should we be speculating in bitcoin and using generative AI (either for fun or to do things we could do for ourselves)?
How much power does the latest consumer technology use?
While consumer electronics only account for 6% of household usage, that doesn't account for the centralised data processing among digital media and gaming platforms, for example, when you participate online. As a result, households are responsible for 35% of electricity usage, services 29% and industry 30%. You might argue that much of this data centre capacity is used by businesses, but many of them do so ultimately to serve consumers - from online search, shopping and social media services to powering giant credit card networks.
Artificial intelligence, however, operates at a whole new level above the more traditional digital media. A Netflix fan would have to have watched 1,625,000 hours of content to use the same amount of power it took to train OpenAI's ChatGPT 3.0 during 2022, according to a Dutch researcher. Generating a single image from text on other AI platforms costs the same amount in energy as charging your smartphone.
The same Dutch researcher has estimated that the AI sector alone will use as much power as the Netherlands by 2027, while the International Energy Agency predicts that the world's data centres (including AI and other digital media) will consume the double the amount of electricity in 2026 that they consumed in 2022 - about as much as Japan (the 5th largest electricity consumer in the world, behind China, the US, India and Russia).
Bitcoin mining - an activity whose sole purpose is to feed the world's first and largest distributed Ponzi scheme - absorbed nearly 1% of the world's electricity in 2023 - enough to power Greece or Australia. That's up to 5 times the cost of legacy payment systems that process vastly more transactions (though they also use enough to electricity to power Portugal or Bangladesh).
How much water does the latest consumer technology use?
Data centres also consume vast amounts of water (not counting what they recycle) to cool the computers and humidify the internal air. But even the process of generating the electricity they use also consumes water.
In 2021, for example, Google's data centers consumed approximately 4.3 billion gallons of water (16.3 billion litres), an average of 450,000 gallons (1.7m litres) of water per data centre each day. Microsoft reckoned that it consumed 1.7 billion gallons (nearly 6.5 billion litres) in 2022.
Gridlock
The surge in energy and water usage by future-gazing tech providers comes at a time when Britain's infrastructure is already failing to support the construction of new and more energy efficient homes, renewable energy sources and the switch away from diesel and petrol vehicles.
“Nationally, we’ve got an absolute crisis in all infrastructure.” Plans by Michael Gove, the housing secretary, to build 150,000 homes in Cambridge to create a British Silicon Valley were already being hampered by lack of water... “And where’s the power coming from? Something fundamental has to change...”
"...90 new homes in the Littlemore district had been meant to have heat pumps. “The National Grid basically said ‘we won’t have enough power to connect them’ so half the houses are going to have to have gas boilers instead – it’s so frustrating.
Great Britain’s power stations together generate 75 gigawatts of electricity, and the mainland is expected to need about twice as much by 2050 as people switch to electric vehicles and heat pumps.” The Guardian
Dissatisfaction with Britain's electric vehicle charging network is running at about 70% of EV drivers, citing a lack of public charging stations and unreliability. The government is targeting 300,000 charging stations by 2030, with only 53,677 available at the start of 2024 (an increase of 45% in 12 months) and the majority to be provided by private investors.
Meanwhile, Britain's water problems flow partly from the risk of drought and party from its combined sewage system which takes rainwater through the same pipes as the grey water from sinks and baths, as well as the raw sewage from toilets. Any excess of rainwater simply overloads the sewerage system of pipes that normally takes sewage to local treatment works, and the overflow goes directly into the waterways...
Crisis? What Crisis?
Who's to blame for Britain's sagging infrastructure involves lots of finger-pointing and misinformation.
When challenged over delays to connect new systems to the electricity grid, the National Grid's system operator complains that the queue of projects waiting to connect would add 800 gigawatts of electricity - "more than more than four times as much as the country would ever need." There are even delays in the time it takes to get an estimate of when a project will be connected, as well as 'zombie projects' that were approved but have been abandoned due to connection waiting times of 5 to 15 years.
Yet this hides the fact that more renewable projects/systems will be necessary to reduce Britain's reliance on fossil fuels, since energy systems that generate electricity from solar and wind don't all contribute to the grid at the same time, unlike a gas-fired or coal-fired power station where the energy source to create the electricity is under human control.
As for water - well, none of England’s rivers is classified as being in good ecological health and Britain is already failing to produce enough fresh water to meet its needs year round. The country's 'combined sewage system' should be replaced by separate systems for rainwater and sewage, yet modernisation efforts have merely doubled-down on the combined system.
UK Government Distracted by Culture Wars
Britain's energy sector is self-evidently poorly prepared for the future. Here is a good description of the alphabet soup of bodies involved and the problem of every additional significant energy system creating the need for some change in part of the network. Here's a good overview of the challenges facing sewerage reform and here is a discussion of drought risk.
There is undoubtedly a need for reforms and there are plenty that have been announced with targets of, say, 2035 and 2050, but where are the plans that had a target of, say, 2023? And if we had them, why weren't they being updated?
It's hardly surprising that a country with 5 prime ministers in 8 years and as many Cabinet reshuffles has failed to find the time or dedication required to overhaul the energy sector and water industry. Too much control over the maintenance and renewal of Britain's creaking infrastructure has been left to private interests. Had the income from customer bills gone into public coffers instead of draining into investors' pockets, it might have been a different story - or at least the money might have been used to bolster the many other public services that are in such a dire state.
Choices, Choices
All this brings us back to scarcity and the need to make careful choices over how we develop, protect and deploy our energy and water resources. This is largely a question of politics and intervention by a responsible government to balance out the many competing interests. Areas in which Brexit Britain has been - and continues to be - very poorly served.
It must be doubted that a new government will be able to make much progress after 15 years of under-investment and poor decision-making by its predecessors.
In these circumstances, it seems unwise to devote enormous amounts of power and water to mine bitcoin for speculative purposes or to support generative AI systems that are either used merely for entertainment or to render people jobless (if the hype is to be believed).
Certainly cash-strapped consumers should think about their utility bills and water shortages before speculating in bitcoin, playing online games or using open AI systems for entertainment or to do things that they could do for themselves.
