California facilities’ power usage, related carbon emissions, water consumption and public-health costs surging, research finds
Thanks in large part to the training and running of artificial-intelligence models, the amount of power California data centers are using is surging — as are related environmental and health effects, according to a new report.
The amount of power used by data centers in California nearly doubled between 2019 and 2023, and by 2028 could be more than double the 2023 total, according to a study by UC Riverside researchers published earlier this month by public and environmental advocacy group Next 10. Data-center carbon emissions and water consumption are expected to follow a similar trajectory over the 2019-2028 time period, according to the study. Meanwhile, pollution-related health costs linked to the state’s data centers more than tripled between 2019 and 2023. Although such costs will likely continue to grow, they’ll likely do so more slowly than power usage in coming years, according to the report. “The data-center industry in California is growing really fast,” said Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC Riverside who has conducted a series of studies on the environmental effects of data centers. “Even though California has a cleaner grid than many other states in the U.S., even still, the environmental impact is growing very quickly.” San Francisco and the broader Bay Area have served as ground zero for the AI boom. OpenAI and Anthropic — the two most highly valued and best-funded privately held AI companies — are both based in The City, as are a slew of smaller startups. Meta and Google, which offer two of the leading rival models to those offered by San Francisco’s AI giants, are based in Silicon Valley, as is Nvidia, which dominates the market for AI chips. Both Meta and Google have offices in the The City, and Nvidia reportedly just leased space here. The surge in AI development has brought in a huge amount of venture cash to San Francisco, helped to start buoying The City’s struggling real-estate market and boosted revenue at Google and Nvidia. But the Next 10 report joins a growing collection of studies that indicate that AI’s economic windfall has also had a darker side for the state and its residents. Projecting powerIn the report, Ren and his colleagues first set out to estimate how much power California data centers had consumed in recent years, then to forecast how much they would use in the coming ones. To determine that, they looked at figures and forecasts from reports issued last year by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Electric Power Research Institute. Using Berkeley Labs’ national numbers and calculating California’s from them by tapping the ratio of the state’s usage to the national number in the EPRI report, the researchers determined that California data centers consumed 5.5 terawatt hours of electricity in 2019. They estimated that amount rose steadily in ensuing years, hitting 10.82 terawatt hours in 2023. Ren and his team split the difference between Berkeley Lab and ERPI’s wildly different forecasts, estimating that data center energy usage in California would rise between 8.4% and 18.5% a year from 2023 to 2028. Based on that, they calculated that such power consumption by 2028 would grow to between 16.2 and 25.3 terawatt hours. Those projections represent as much as one-fourth of all commercial power consumption in the state last year, according to the California Energy Commission, and up to 8.9% of electricity usage across California as a whole.Water in, carbon outAlthough data centers themselves directly emit carbon when they fire up their diesel backup generators during power outages, most of their carbon emissions are related to the grid-provided electricity needed to run them, according to the report. Power plants using natural gas and other fossil fuels emit carbon when they burn those fuels to produce electricity. Based on its mix of such plants and renewable-energy sources such as solar and wind, each state on average produces a certain amount of carbon per megawatt generated. Thanks to its embrace of renewables, California produces far less carbon per megawatt than the national average. But it’s still a significant amount: between 446 to 503 pounds on average between 2019 and 2023, according to the study, citing figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Multiplying those figures by their estimates for data-center usage, Ren and his team calculated that carbon emissions from the energy used to run California data centers rose from 1.24 million short tons in 2019 to 2.38 million short tons in 2023. Based on their energy forecasts, they projected that such carbon emissions would rise to between 3.55 million short tons and 5.56 million short tons by 2028. A short ton is 2,000 lbs., or about 0.91 metric tons. The state as a whole emitted about 397 million short tons of carbon in 2023, according to the California Air Resources Board. Ex // Top Stories Wet weather conditions won't put a damper on these 18 SF events Events taking place this week in The City include film screenings, theatrical circus performances and a holiday vinyl record swap Silicon Valley startup offers AI-powered way to provide power for AI GridCare is using machine learning to identify and free up excess capacity on the grid for data centers ‘Golden State Killer' prosecutor reflects on victims’ strength in new book Thien Ho, the case’s lead lawyer with roots in the Bay Area, gave a reading in San Francisco of his new book, this week Rising data-center energy usage increases water usage. The chips used inside their computers generate substantial amounts of heat; the facilities typically use cooling systems that rely on evaporating water to prevent them from overheating. Even more importantly, the power plants that provide energy also consume copious amounts of water both for cooling and in the production of the steam that turns their turbines. Based on historical and national total water figures and combining on-site and off-site consumption, Ren and his team estimated that data-center energy use consumed 49.9 billion liters of water in 2023, up from 25.4 billion liters in 2019. They forecast that water consumption would jump to between 74.5 billion liters and 116.6 billion liters in 2028. That’s the equivalent to the amount of water needed to fill between 30,000 and nearly 47,000 Olympic-sized pools. The cost of public healthRising data-center energy usage has an effect on public health, the researchers found. The diesel generators typically used for backup power by such facilities emit a range of pollutants, including small particulates, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. The fossil-fueled power plants on the grid that provide the electricity that usually runs the data centers produce the same kinds of pollutants. Those pollutants can cause asthma, respiratory inflammation and pulmonary disease and other health problems. In turn, those maladies can lead to significant costs, including productivity losses for business, medical expenditures and premature deaths. The effects of pollutants tend to be concentrated in the areas where they are emitted. So, the closer that-burning data centers or a fossil-fuel-powered electrical plants are to densely populated areas, the more health-related costs they’re likely to generate. All told, the on- and off-site pollutants emitted in California as a result of data centers resulted in $44.7 million in health-related costs in 2019, according to the Next10 study. That amount rose to $155.4 million in 2023. That jump was largely due to the large growth in the number of data centers over that period, according to the report. In all, health-care expenditures cost Californians $409 billion in 2023, according to the state Office of Health Care Affordability. The study forecast that the growth in costs would slow in coming years, increasing to between $167.1 million and $266.6 million in 2028. The slowing growth is related to projections from the Environmental Protection Agency that as California shifts toward cleaner energy generation and strict regulations take effect, pollutant emissions will generally decrease. That trend would be counterbalanced by data centers accounting for a growing portion of total energy use, according to the report. ‘Wildly different results’It’s clear that data-center energy usage and related costs are going up, said Alex de Vries, founder of Digiconomist, an online publication focused on technology’s environmental impact. But how much energy they’re actually using and the exact magnitude of those costs is anyone’s guess, he said. The numbers Ren and his team relied on from Lawrence Berkeley Lab and EPRI and other such sources are often based on unverifiable private data, said de Vries, a Ph.D. candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. That can leave a lot of uncertainty and room for error, he said. As reputable as Lawrence Berkeley Lab might be, for example, its projections of indirect data-center water consumption in the United States was larger than the estimate the International Energy Agency came up with for total data center water consumption worldwide, he said.The only way around that problem is for data-center operators to be required to release more data, he said — something Ren and his team called for as well. Regardless, data centers are generating environmental effects and costs, said Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University who focuses on energy policies. Policymakers should be working on ways to power data centers with renewable power sources — or reconsidering them altogether, he said. Such facilities are a waste of electricity, just like bitcoin mining, he said. “We shouldn’t be adding more data centers,” Jacobson said. “Really, all it’s doing is helping a few people. It’s not necessarily helping a lot of people.”
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