A new study from Georgia Tech’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School of Public Policy is one of the first to estimate how changes in productivity due to AI will affect energy consumption.
The paper, written by Anthony Harding and co-author Juan Moreno-Cruz at the University of Waterloo, suggests that greater productivity due to AI will result in a 0.03% annual increase in energy use in the United States and a 0.02% increase in CO2 emissions. That’s about equal to the yearly electricity use of a mid-sized U.S. city.
“If AI is as transformational as some expect it to be, it makes it even more important to think about the knock-on effects throughout the economy, beyond just the demands of the technology itself,” Harding said. “U.S. energy demand has stabilized since the mid-2000s. There is potential for AI to disrupt this, but there is also large uncertainty.”