Google emissions have increased by 51% while electricity demand derails efforts to go green | Google
Google carbon emissions have climbed 51% since 2019 while artificial intelligence has hindered the efforts of technological society to go green.
Although the company has invested in renewable energy and carbon elimination technology, it has failed to limit its range emissions of 3, which are those below in the supply chain, and are largely influenced by the growth in data capacity required to feed artificial intelligence.
The company declared a 27% increase in electricity consumption in annual shift while it fights to decarbonize as quickly as its energy needs increase.
Datacentres play a crucial role in the training and exploitation of models that underlie AI models such as Google’s Gemini and Openai GPT-4, which feeds the chatbpt chatbot. The International Energy Agency estimates that the total electricity consumption of Datacentres could double levels from 2022 to 1,000 TWh (Terawatt Hours) in 2026, roughly the level of electricity demand from Japan. The AI will result in datacentres using 4.5% of global energy production by 2030, according to the calculations of the semiianalysis research company.
The report also raises the concerns that the rapid evolution of AI could stimulate “non -linear growth in energy demand”, which makes future energy needs and emission trajectories more difficult to predict.
Another problem that Google has highlighted is the lack of progress on new forms of electricity production with low carbon content. Small modular reactors (SMR), miniature nuclear power plants which are supposed to be quick and easy to build and climb on the grid, have been greeted as a means of decarbonizing datacentres. There was hope that the areas with many datacentres could have one or more SMRs and that it would reduce the enormous carbon footprint used by these datacents, which are more requested due to the use of AI.
The report indicates that it was the calendar: “A key challenge is the slower deployment than necessary for large -scale carbon energy technologies, and getting there by 2030 will be very difficult. Although we continue to invest in promising technologies such as advanced geothermal structures and regular and unhappy and unhappy structures by current regular structures.
He added that Scope 3 remained a “challenge”, because total emissions based on Google’s ambition were 11.5 million tonnes of gas equivalent to CO₂, which represents an increase of 11% from one year to the next and an increase of 51% compared to the basic year 2019. This was “mainly motivated by the increase in emissions from the supply chain” and the emissions 2024.
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Google runs to buy clean energy to feed its systems, and since 2010, the company has signed more than 170 agreements to buy more than 22 clean energy gigawatts. In 2024, 25 of them came online to add 2.5 GW of new energy specific to its operations. It was also a record year for clean energy transactions, the company signing contracts for 8GW.
The company has achieved one of its environmental objectives early: eliminating plastic packaging. Google announced today that the packaging for new Google products launched and manufactured in 2024 was 100% plastic. His goal was to achieve this at the end of 2025.
In the report, the company also declared that AI could have a “net potential” net “on the climate, because it hoped that the emissions of emissions perceived by the AI applications would be superior to the emissions generated by the AI itself, including its energy consumption from datacentres.
Google aims to help individuals, cities and other partners to collectively reduce 1GT (Gigaton) of their equivalent carbon emissions each year by 2030 using AI products. These can, for example, help predict energy consumption and therefore reduce waste, and map the solar potential of buildings so that the panels are placed in the right place and generate maximum electricity.
