For more than two decades, America has been trapped in a debilitating, partisan energy debate: Republicans eschew renewable energy and support the fossil-fuel industry — including initiatives like the Northern Access Pipeline through western New York — while Democrats rail against fossil fuels and champion green energy technologies.
The old partisan boundaries of this debate are already changing. A growing number of Republicans support US clean-energy dominance, and some Democrats resist the common-sense permitting reform necessary to deploy it.
Yet the extreme power needs of artificial intelligence will completely upend how we discuss energy in this country.
AI demands a lot of power. It’s difficult to conceptualize how much electricity AI will need in just a few years.
A recently published peer-reviewed analysis found that NVIDIA, the biggest player in AI hardware globally, will ship out an estimated 1.5 million AI server units by 2027.
When those servers are up and running at full capacity, they will consume 85.4 terawatt hours of electricity annually — more electricity than the nations of Switzerland and Greece each consume in a year.
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Of course, not all of those NVIDIA servers will end up operating in the United States.
But if America continues to lead in the AI race — a goal President-elect Donald Trump is almost guaranteed to pursue — the US will consume a significant share of the AI chip and server market.
Our nation is blessed with abundant energy, yet our excess capacity still isn’t nearly able to handle the increased energy demands of AI.
And AI isn’t alone. According to the International Energy Agency, cryptocurrency and data centers could also double their 2022 energy consumption levels by 2026.
Further, increasing numbers of electric vehicles will require an even greater need for electricity production.
All these realities mean the traditional energy debate is now fully moot.
American energy consumption has been stable for decades. In a world of relatively predictable consumption, conservatives could argue that increasing domestic fossil-fuel production would make America energy-independent without investments in renewable energy.
This argument was not unreasonable (apart from environmental factors). In 2023, fossil fuels accounted for roughly 84% of domestic energy production — al