Feeding the Al beast, with some beauty

Jameson Mendonca, Power Generation Business Leader, Cummins Power System opens up some pistons of carbon hunger of modern data centres while he also shows how Natural gas, Hydrotreated Vegetable Oil, Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) and Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) can weld well in this new era. And why we should we worried about scope 1 and 2 in the race to be no.1 in AI.

- By Pratima H

From steam engines to silicon, from diesel to digitisation, from hardware to algorithms, from horsepower to Al jockeys - the world has been taking one big turn after another. But some questions, somehow, keep haunting every jump, every switch and every revolution. Guzzling energy just changes the straw not the appetite. Carbon footprint simply accumulates in a different form of horse-dung. The pattern continues with AI. Let’s ask someone who can show a full swing from diesel to new energy realities as he shows us the balanced grip on the new world we are moving towards. Can we ever turbo-charge progress without cranking down sustainability? Mendonca tells us why, and why not.

Under realistic scenarios, AI workloads alone could require on the order of 1-1.5 GW of continuous IT power-equivalent to 8.8-13 TWh annually-in India by 2030.

What is your reckoning of some estimates on how data centres face the brunt of Al-appetite: Like the International Energy Agency (IEA) has estimated that global electricity demand from data centers could double up between 2022 and 2026.

Al-driven growth is placing an unprecedented load on data centres worldwide, and India is poised to shoulder a large share of the incremental electricity, real estate, and cooling burden created by rising AI demand. The IEA has estimated a trajectory that AI is accelerating at a rapid pace.

While the low-carbon energy sources like solar and wind have their own downsides like intermittent nature and reliability, Cummins offers solutions like BESS that help overcome some of the issues with these power sources.