Wireless Creators // Shutterstock
How to empower the AI economy while supporting local communities
America's leadership in artificial intelligence promises large-scale economic opportunities and transformation across industries. AI systems are poised to drive breakthroughs in drug discovery, enable critical infrastructure, and revolutionize sectors from healthcare to finance.
AI requires a huge amount of energy to drive these shifts. By 2028, AI data centers are expected to account for 12% of national electricity demand. A study by US data center operators at power provider Bloom Energy shows that median data center size will more than double over the next decade. Some require more than gigawatts of power. This is enough for the average American home.
Balance between AI growth and community happiness
Many Americans are worried about whether AI is hunger for energy. Communities across the country are being pushed back to building new data centres nearby, despite the potential to create jobs and boost the local economy.
The best concerns among the community are rising energy costs and how new data centers can further boost them. Increased pressure on the grid also increases the risk of power outages, with communities wary of potential data center pollution, noise and water and land use.
Empowering the AI economy without a local community bearing the brunt of a higher energy bill, blackouts and pollution is certainly a challenge. However, certain types of on-site power can create “yes” to promote AI growth and support the community.
What is on-site power?
On-site power means physically producing electricity where it is used. For example, a fuel cell is a type of in-house power that converts natural gas, hydrogen, or biogas into electricity without the use of combustion. Other power sources that data centers can deploy on-site include natural gas engines and turbines.
Using certain types of on-site power by data centers creates several benefits for both local communities and AI growth.
- Reduced impact on consumer energy costs. Some facilities use onsite power to move to “off-grid.” This means that it is not connected to an electrical grid. Therefore, energy costs do not affect utility bills for local residents. Others use onsite power as their primary source, while maintaining a connection to the grid.
The utility can work directly with onsite power providers to generate energy for the data center in the service area and “fence off” its coverage, preventing data center costs from being passed on to consumers.
This approach stabilizes consumer utility bills and provides reliable AI-fueled power to data centers.
- There is little contamination. Some on-site power technologies, such as fuel cells, do not use combustion, and thus produce significantly lower emissions than traditional energy sources. Fuel cells also reduce local air pollution that forms smog by more than 99% compared to traditional energy generation technologies, and use only a small portion of the water required by legacy combustion generators.
- Smaller footprint. High Power Density – Producing relatively large amounts of power in a given space is a major advantage of some on-site power supplies. Gas turbines and round-trip engines offer up to 50 megawatts of power per acre, while fuel cells can double that. Up to 100 megawatts on less than acres. This small footprint will help alleviate community concerns about the visual impact of data centers and the loss of open space.
- It's quiet. Excessive noise is a major concern among many communities near the data center. On-site power supplies, like fuel cells, are much quieter than other energy sources, and run at about 70 DBA for normal conversation sound levels.
We aim to be a win-win for AI and the community
There is growing interest in data centers on-site power generation. By 2030, nearly 40% expect to use on-site power, while 27% say they will provide all the power.
This will help data centers realize the promised local economic benefits and broader transformation possibilities of AI, with the exception of higher energy costs, power outages, and the negative impacts of increased pollution and noise in the American community.
This story was produced by Bloom Energy Reviews and distribution Stacker.
