I wanted to know how a growth in data centres would affect the climate, but he explained to me that that's quite difficult to work out.

We have thousands of projections of data center growth into the near future.

But the level of variation that you see in these projections makes me almost want to never use them.

And the reason behind that is really because some projections basically take a linear pathway.

You know, it'll grow to maybe 4% to 5% by 2030.

I've seen ones up to like 20% of global energy consumption for data centers, you know, in the coming decades.

And I find that to be a little bit silly.

He also thinks that everyone has a role to play in deciding on what terms we use this technology.

Give us the one to two minute elevator pitch, and then we'll get into it.

Yeah, absolutely.

As you mentioned in your intro, I used to work in the renewable energy industry and that was like eight years of just pure advocacy, right? Wind turbines are the best, right? I was just out there and I was brutal.

I was at war with the anti-wind groups and it was such a wild experience.

And then when we moved to Norway, maybe six or seven years ago, For some reason, it kind of signified this flip for me where I switched to being a curmudgeon, right? Like I switched to being kind of against things, specifically against corporations, right? So I really started focusing on corporate accountability.

Of course, it started with the fossil fuel industry.

But once you get the taste for being like a big old lazy critic, it kind of spreads into other things, right? So I started looking at corporations like Netflix and Shopify.

What's happening to data center? What's happening to power sector emissions right now? And what are the projections telling us?

Is anyone making money?

I have a nice example actually to, to bring up, uh, that I was just reading about a couple of days ago.

Microsoft did a deal with Chevron.

To build a very large gas-fired power station, uh, in Texas.

But then I was kind of just looking at this deal, right? So what, what has happened is Chevron are blasting out the news, right? Like every...

You know, I follow Chevron, um, the LinkedIn algorithm thinks that I love Chevron because I get all their ads, and all of their ads are about AI and this specific deal to build a Microsoft gas plant, and Microsoft never mentions it.

Microsoft pretends like it doesn't exist, which is so fascinating to me because I think probably what happens in a deal like that is that Chevron come out on top.

... like trying to have a conversation about this, um, that they can use it to sort of crack open good conversation about what we're facing?

But yeah, who's benefiting? Yeah.

Yeah, there's actually a great book I think that they might be borrowing that title from by Gil Duran, which I think was out recently, which I'm looking forward to reading.

The money goes to a few different places and it's important to be clear.

So you have to import materials, right? Like a lot of the stuff that a data center is built from has to be imported from another country, particularly the computational hardware, the servers, the memory.

And most of all the chips, which are manufactured in Southeast Asia.

I did some recent work with Greenpeace East Asia on this sort of stuff and a report into NVIDIA, which is the company that manufactures those chips.

And it's so expensive.

How are things there?

What's your perspective on that?

that?My first question whenever I hear those kinds of statements, whether it's from Al Gore or from NVIDIA, is what is the evidence that we are seeing real emissions reductions rather than sort of potential in the, in the distant future? And it's really tough to find examples of where different types of artificial intelligence are actually bringing about deep emissions reductions.

We're not even really seeing small changes thanks to the deployment of these technologies.

The other thing that comes to mind, of course, is that you have to be specific about what type of AI you're referring to.

Traditional AI is this old form of machine learning where you take a data set and you kind of get a computer to predict what's gonna come next in the data set.

When I worked in the wind industry, we used that for predicting wind speeds, so we knew the best time to shut down the wind turbines for maintenance.

But generative AI, which is what we're all familiar with with chatbots, is the thing that is causing the very significant increase in energy consumption from data centers around the world and why we're seeing fossil fuels filling the gap for that new demand.

... tackling climate problems?

Does that make it easier for them to kind of hide their emissions or kind of obscure their emissions, where, you know, they often get TSMC or, or one of these other companies to actually do the manufacturing piece, and then they kind of claim it's off their books or something? Like, h- how are you seeing that?

Yeah, absolutely.

And they, and they ...

It, it is technically on their books, right? Like, they report, uh, what's known, um, in sustainability nerd speak as scope 3, which is basically just the emissions outside the company when you buy something or when you sell it, what happens outside of the boundaries of what you're sort of personally responsible, responsible for.

They do report it, but one thing that's missing, you know, really badly from their report is just, like, where those chips come from and the individual details of how they're dealing with those suppliers.

Um, one company that does this really well is Apple.

Uh, Apple has so much detail in their ...

And so I wonder what has been happening down in Australia and how its existing kind of dominance of the fossil fuel industry has played into the conversation happening down there.

[instrumental music] Does that make it easier for them to kind of hide their emissions or kind of obscure their emissions, where, you know, they often get TSMC or, or one of these other companies to actually do the manufacturing piece, and then they kind of claim it's off their books or something? Like h- how are you seeing that?

Yeah, absolutely.

And they, and they...

It, it is technically on their books, right? Like, they report, uh, what's known, um, in sustainability nerd speak as scope three, which is basically just the emissions outside the company when you buy something or when you sell it, what happens outside of the boundaries of what you're sort of personally responsible, responsible for.

They do report it, but one thing that's missing, you know, really badly from their report is just, like, where those chips come from and the individual details of how they're dealing with those suppliers.

Um, one company that does this really well is Apple.

Uh, Apple has so much detail in their...

And so I wonder what has been happening down in Australia and how its existing kind of dominance of the fossil fuel industry has played into the conversation happening down there.

He had excellent PR then.

Uh, yes.

He used to, he, he used to call fossil fuels, like, the craziest experiment, like, humans have ever done or something.

I think he copied that line from someone else.

Uh, but yeah, now he really likes fossil fuels quite a lot.

Uh, this is an important question, right? Like, what happens, what gets left behind, like the infrastructure that gets left behind, um, if, if the bubble pops, um, and all the money kind of dissipates.

Uh, and I think, you know, I, I mentioned renewable energy before, but I think the fossil fuel infrastructure is a really important one.

So yeah, it's-

Is that something that you've looked at as well?

Yeah, I have, and it's...

So this is an interesting little nuance here is that...

Carbon capture and storage can work in two different ways.

So I mentioned the trees and the big fan.

You can kind of have this third way where you have, let's just say you have a coal plant and you kind of have this chimney that just pumps out all the gases that get generated as a result of you burning stuff.

You can actually attach a machine to that exhaust pipe, right? Hypothetically capture all that exhaust pipe.

So do you want to tell us a bit about, like, why are data centres bad for the environment?

So what have you found looking into those claims?

Yeah, absolutely.

This is really important.

So a nice example is the Cloud Carrier Project in New South Wales.

That's a 700 megawatt facility gas-fired power station being proposed to run a data center to give you a sense of context for those emissions.

It's sort of similar to the Canada story I told before.

If that facility were to come online, as it's sort of written on paper, you would undo the projected emissions reductions for the entire state of New South Wales for 2028 with just the emissions from this one data center.

They

Do you have a feel for it?

It is a bit of an underestimate.

So we use the same figure in our Greenpeace Greenpeace report and it's the Australian energy market operator.

Right.

And I think this is a really useful exercise and I want to write about this soon, which is basically no one really knows what the demand from data centers will be in the future.

because there is a very, very large pipeline of projects and you kind of have to pick yourself using a subjective set of criteria, which ones you think are most likely to go ahead or not go ahead.

So the Climate Council was actually a little bit more, you know, they kind of looked at the whole pipeline um which is you know unadjusted right like basically like let's just assume that everything that's that's you know has like half of an idea uh actually goes ahead whereas we really trimmed it down to what the grid operator has subjectively assessed as being the most likely to go ahead which is about 10 of the projects right so there's like a pipeline of like 40 to 50 gigawatts of new data center demand which is like sort of about 1.5 times the total size of the current power grid to give you a sense of scale.

So

Okay, how does this actually work when it comes to the Australian regulatory context, though? So when projects come up for approval, what does the law actually require governments to consider on, on climate, on energy?

So in the Australian regulatory context, a planning application has to report estimated future emissions, but these reports are not limited by regulation in any way.

So it's not like a, a company can report a very large amount of future emissions and then, and then a planner might say, "No, th-those emissions are simply too high." Uh, this is, of course, has been the context for various court cases in Australia.

So, like, when a coal mine, for instance, is challenged on the basis that the coal that it digs up will be, will be impacting climate change.

So there are efforts to try and make this a greater part of regulation.

What happens in Australia is that the only way a data center might actually end up having any type of regulatory limit on its emissions is if, say, for instance, it installs a gas-fired power station like that Cloud Carrier project.

It falls underneath this policy known as the safeguard mechanism, which implements, uh, limitations on their direct emissions, but they can simply buy as many carbon offsets as they want to comply [laughs] with that regulation.

Um, so I mean, what do you see as the risks here if governments don't tighten the rules and, and what would a kind of a good system look like at this point?

electricity will I require? And just as importantly, what is that going to mean for our power grid?

If you look at it as a sort of percentage change in the potential future total electricity consumption of all of Australia's grids, It's roughly on par with maybe 3% to 4%, that kind of range.

It can sound small, but it's important to put it in the context of the energy transition that's occurring at the same time.

That energy transition is occurring within those small percentage changes, right? So what happens is when you have a large number of new electric vehicles, for instance, competing for space on the power grid because they need to be charged.

When you have new manufacturing facilities that are coming online, making parts for clean energy, for instance.

All of these different things are actually competing for space on the power grid.

And it's in that small percentage that all of these things jostle for connection rights to the grid or cheap access to electricity.

Gautam, given the government is making this huge bet on data centers, does that mean that the dream of us becoming a major exporter of renewables is now dead?

Has there anything that you've published that you would want to direct listeners to, to go and read more about it?

Nothing that I've published, but a few other organizations have.

So there's an organization called the Center for Tracking Multinationals, I think.

It has the abbreviation SOMO, S-O-M-O.

And they recently published a really good piece that was about this exact question, trying to gather up information about who is taking the money in between and who's actually profiting or benefiting from carbon offsetting projects.

I've linked this publication in the episode summary.

And then the second thing that I wanted to mention on offsets is a really interesting trend that I haven't actually seen sort of looked at very much and I think would be worth digging into if anyone wants to do this, which is basically... how carbon removal specifically is being presented as an improved version of a carbon offset.

Do I have that right?

Has there anything that you've published that you would want to direct listeners to, to go and read more about it?

Nothing that I've published, but a few other organizations have.

So there's an organization called the Center for Tracking Multinationals, I think.

It has the abbreviation SOMO, S-O-M-O.

And they recently published a really good piece that was about this exact question, trying to gather up information about who is taking the money in between and who's actually profiting or benefiting from carbon offsetting projects.

I've linked this publication in the episode summary.

And then the second thing that I wanted to mention on offsets is a really interesting trend that I haven't actually seen sort of looked at very much and I think would be worth digging into if anyone wants to do this, which is basically... how carbon removal specifically is being presented as an improved version of a carbon offset.

Do I have that right?