It's Greenwashing! It's AI Hype! Wait - You're Both Right! It's Google's "Carbon-Intelligent Computing Platform"

EDIT

Google created its “carbon-intelligent computing platform” in 2020 to assign energy-intensive tasks to data centers when their local grids were flush with renewable energy. Now the company is leveraging the platform — and its ability to shift computing tasks among data centers — to jump to the front of the grid connection queue.Utilities have agreed to power Google’s supercomputing hubs in exchange for the company ramping down energy use at times of peak grid demand. As of last month, Google had integrated so-called demand response into five utility contracts across the South and Midwest, making up to 1 gigawatt of its data centers’ electricity demand available for curtailment.

EDIT

When Google developed its carbon-intelligent computing program, the company was confident it could power all its operations with clean energy by 2030. Today, the company calls that goal a “climate moonshot.” Google’s latest environmental report noted that “external factors — largely outside our direct control — are converging to create significant uncertainty,” including “AI’s energy demands, policy uncertainties, resource-challenged markets and more.”

The same report says that despite a 27 percent increase in electricity consumption, Google’s data centers decreased their energy emissions by 12 percent in 2024, compared to 2023, largely due to the U.S. grid adding more clean energy. Since then, however, President Donald Trump has torn down Biden-era climate policies — including programs to boost renewable energy — and pushed fossil fuels, most recently by invoking wartime powers.Still, boosters of data center demand response programs say they will enable development of more clean energy down the road. Emerald AI CEO Varun Sivaram asserts that data centers can match renewable energy’s variability, using that power when and where it’s available.“If you have flexible energy users, that’s a shock-absorber to the grid so that when you do have more variable renewables on the grid, you have data centers that can respond,” Sivaram said in an interview.

Ed. - Uh-huh . . .

EDIT

While Google has publicized its capabilities, it also says it can’t enter into such agreements in every location. In an interview, Terrell declined to provide specifics, saying he did not want to “speculate about hypotheticals” and noting that each of Google’s demand response arrangements is unique, depending on the data centers in question, as well as the utility and its power generation mix.

EDIT

https://www.eenews.net/articles/how-google-turned-its-climate-program-into-an-ai-booster-2/