carbon emissions

3 Articles

AI Might Kill Us All (With Carbon Emissions)

July 3, 2025 by 36 Comments

So-called artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage right now between your grandma asking ChatGPT how to code in Python or influencers making videos without having to hire extras, but one growing concern is where the power is going to come from for the data centers. The MIT Technology Review team did a deep dive on what the current situation is and whether AI is going to kill us all (with carbon emissions).

Probably of most interest to you, dear hacker, is how they came up with their numbers. With no agreed upon methods and different companies doing different types of processing there were a number of assumptions baked into their estimates. Given the lack of information for closed-source models, Open Source models were used as the benchmark for energy usage and extrapolated for the industry as a whole. Unsurprisingly, larger models have a larger energy usage footprint.

While data center power usage remained roughly the same from 2005 to 2017 as increases in efficiency offset the increase in online services, data centers doubled their energy consumption by 2023 from those earlier numbers. The power running into those data centers is 48% more carbon intensive than the US average already, and expected to rise as new data centers push for increased fossil fuel usage, like Meta in Louisiana or the X data center found to be using methane generators in violation of the Clean Air Act.

Technology Review did find “researchers estimate that if data centers cut their electricity use by roughly half for just a few hours during the year, it will allow utilities to handle some additional 76 gigawatts of new demand.” This would mean either reallocating requests to servers in other geographic regions or just slowing down responses for the 80-90 hours a year when the grid is at its highest loads.

If you’re interested in just where a lot of the US-based data centers are, check out this map from NREL. Still not sure how these LLMs even work? Here’s an explainer for you.

Fueling With Ammonia

March 3, 2021 by 68 Comments

There’s a major push now to find energy sources with smaller carbon footprints. The maritime shipping industry, according to IEEE Spectrum, is going towards ammonia. Burning ammonia produces no CO2 and it isn’t hard to make. It doesn’t require special storage techniques as hydrogen does and it has ten times the energy density of a modern lithium-ion battery.

You can burn ammonia for internal combustion or use it in a fuel cell. However, there are two problems. First, no ships are currently using the fuel and second most ammonia today is made using a very carbon-intensive process. However it is possible to create “green” ammonia, and projects in Finland, Germany, and Norway are on schedule to start using ammonia-powered ships over the next couple of years.

Continue reading “Fueling With Ammonia” →

Reducing Carbon Emissions With Coal

March 4, 2019 by 112 Comments

It might seem like a paradox, but coal might hold the answer to solving carbon emission problems. The key isn’t burning it, but creating it using carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  While this has always been possible in theory, high temperatures make it difficult in practice. However, a recent paper in Nature Communications shows how a special liquid metal electrocatalyst can convert the gas into a solid form of carbon suitable for, among other things, making high-quality capacitor electrodes. The process — you can see more about it in the video below — works at room temperatures.

It isn’t that hard to extract carbon dioxide from the air, the problem is what to do with it. Storing it as a gas or a liquid is inefficient and expensive, while converting it to a solid makes it much easier to store or even reuse for practical applications.

Continue reading “Reducing Carbon Emissions With Coal” →