Why Landfill Waste Is the Key to Solving AI’s Enormous Power Demands | Opinion

The world’s top business leaders struggle to find the right metaphor to describe the impact that artificial intelligence (AI) will have on humanity. Some have compared it to the printing press, while others have likened it to the dawn of a new industrial revolution. Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, has even suggested that the AI revolution is akin to the moment mankind harnessed the use of fire.

Superlatives aside, it’s clear that we are in our own Noachian moment—human history will soon be divided between the antediluvian world that existed before AI and the one that takes over in its stead.

But realizing AI’s full potential has one major structural impediment—its massive energy requirements. A recent paper published by the World Economic Forum estimated that the computational power required for sustaining AI’s growth rate is doubling every 100 days. Wells Fargo estimated that, by 2030, the additional power demand generated by U.S. data centers will be nearly seven times that of New York City’s current annual electricity consumption.

So where is all this energy going to come from? And with mounting concerns over climate change, how can we ensure that the race to find new energy sources doesn’t hasten our own planetary demise?

Goldman Sachs projected that nearly half of the supply of new energy must come from renewables, but wind and solar technologies are nowhere near being able to meet the enormous needs required by AI. There is, however, one source of renewable energy that remains largely untapped, although it is garnering increasing interest from Wall Street to Silicon Valley—waste streams.

Maybe you call it trash. The Brits know it as rubbish. Construction companies may refer to it as refuse. But all of us should probably begin calling it by another name—untapped energy.

“Humanity is always going to create waste streams, whether it’s from household trash or large sources of waste from industry,” said Cornelius Shields, the founder and CEO of Kore Infrastructure, one of America’s leading renewable energy innovators that uses non-incineration conversion technology to provide clean energy to public sector utilities such as SoCalGas, the primary provider of natural gas in Southern California.”There will always be massive amounts of refuse on the planet, and compared to wind and solar, waste streams are relatively easy to capture; by using technology that sustainably converts biogenic waste into clean energy, namely renewable hydrogen and biocarbon, we can produce energy at scale while reducing harmful emissions that contribute to climate change,” he said.

If capturing ongoing waste streams for clean energy sounds like a good idea, imagine what that might mean for landfills—a constant headache for regulators. Depending on how one defines “land fill,” the U.S. alone has as many as 2,600 such sites. According to the EPA, “U.S. landfills released an estimated 119.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent of methane into the atmosphere in 2022.” Kore Infrastructure estimated that the potential energy diverted from these landfills could meet up to half of the current estimated power needs required by AI data centers.

And that’s just in the U.S.

“Many landfills are reaching capacity and trash is being shipped further and further away, which generates its own carbon footprint,” said Shields. “But imagine if, instead of being a problem, waste streams that would ordinarily be headed towards landfills actually become a source of energy for powering AI data centers.”

Deploying environmentally friendly waste-to-energy technologies to power AI worldwide could transform massive centers of waste production—places like Mumbai, Manila, and Mexico City—into the energy hubs of the future. The net result would not only power energy-hungry AI data centers around the globe but curb dangerous carbon emissions in the process.

Ironically, global demand for the waste streams needed to power the AI revolution could inadvertently set up the market economics needed to address global warming at scale.

Tech watcher Gene Munster, Wall Street’s go-to analyst for all things AI, agreed. He predicted that, “There is absolutely no question that the current energy supply is nowhere near what it needs to be to power AI beyond 2027, and barring some major breakthroughs in new energy sources, there will definitely be some metering back. But the economics of AI are too tasty to let that happen, which is why I think Silicon Valley’s need for [alternative sources of] power might very well open a backdoor for addressing climate change in a way that makes sense economically. That would be a huge win for everyone. And for the planet.”

Shields agreed, telling Newsweek that “capturing society’s waste streams and using them to power the enormous energy needs of the future in a way that also addresses climate change is not just wishful thinking. It’s an imperative.”

“It may be a somewhat ironic twist when we realize that AI, one of the greatest technological achievements of mankind, may also be the inadvertent force that enables us to save our planet,” he added.

Arick Wierson is a six-time Emmy Award-winning television producer and served as a senior media and political adviser to former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He advises corporate clients on communications strategies in the United States, Africa, and Latin America.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.