How can we Decarbonize the Power Grid and meet AI’s Exploding Power Demands?

Abstract

AI and Cloud computing is growing rapidly and projected to increase US electric power consumption by 2% (2026) and 6% (2030) (EIA,GS). Such rapid growth is a significant challenge to power grid stability and decarbonization. With datacenter loads at 15%, even 25% in several grids, datacenter growth is browning the grid by slowing the retirement and even adding new fossil fuel generation. In short, the climate change impact of computing is poised to grow rapidly.

We will discuss how computing flexibility could help the grid decarbonize (Zero-carbon cloud), and how generative AI applications such as ChatGPT can be greened. The key is cooperation between datacenter loads and power grids. Today, datacenter loads view power as an “on-demand” service, a difficult model for renewable-based grids to support. We will show a new framework that creates cooperation between datacenter loads and power grids with continuous matching. Critically, these new approaches address the fundamental conflict between loads and renewable power grids, supporting both corporate goals (efficient computing) and societal goals (power grid decarbonization). We encourage computing community to solve this problem by shaping power growth to support grid decarbonization, not retard it.

Current carbon accounting and cloud practice (long-term PPA’s and RECs) transfers carbon emissions responsibility to other grid customers (eg you). We will discuss how to move beyond current transactional frameworks for carbon-emissions to metric framings that are more fair.

More information is available at http://zccloud.cs.uchicago.edu/.

Speaker Biography

Andrew A Chien is the William Eckhardt Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago and Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. He has led the Zero-carbon Cloud project since 2015, and is well-known for his research on datacenters, renewable energy and sustainability, cloud resource management and software, large-scale system architecture, and graph computing architecture. He is leader of the IARPA funded “UpDown System Project”, designing breakthrough scalable graph analytics systems. Chien has received numerous recognitions for his research. Dr. Chien currently serves on the NSF CISE Advisory Committee, NSF Advisory Committee on Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, and DARPA ISAT. He is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS. He served as EiC of Communications of the ACM, 2017-2022, and Vice President of Research at Intel
Corporation from 2005-2010. He has served on the Faculty of the University of Illinois and as SAIC Chair Professor of University of California, San Diego. He received BS, MS, and PhD degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.