The rise of AI has fast become one of the most pressing and intractable challenges the energy sector has ever faced, affecting every stakeholder from grid operators, to energy providers, to urban planners.
Data centres, especially AI data centres, are some of the largest and most demanding consumers of electricity that have ever been connected to the grid.
While a conventional data centre can draw as much power as 100,000 homes, the IEA estimates that some AI campuses now being built could require up to 20 times that amount.
But scale is not the only problem here. AI facilities create highly variable load patterns (sporadic fluctuations in the demand for energy) that can change dramatically depending on whether systems are training large models or serving live applications.
That kind of volatility has left the sector with some tough questions to answer.
