{"id":15613,"date":"2025-07-17T05:31:20","date_gmt":"2025-07-17T05:31:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/15613\/"},"modified":"2025-07-17T05:31:20","modified_gmt":"2025-07-17T05:31:20","slug":"trump-and-the-energy-industry-are-eager-to-power-ai-with-fossil-fuels","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/15613\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump and the Energy Industry Are Eager to Power AI With Fossil Fuels"},"content":{"rendered":"

The industry is finding a willing partner in the Trump administration. Since taking office, Trump has used AI as a lever to open up opportunities for fossil fuels, including a well-publicized effort to resuscitate coal<\/a> in the name of more computing power. The summit, which was organized by Republican senator (and former hedge fund CEO) Dave McCormick, clearly reflected the administration\u2019s priorities in this regard: No representatives from any wind or solar companies were present on any of the public panels.<\/p>\n

Tech companies, which have expressed an interest in using any and all cheap power available for AI and have quietly pushed back<\/a> against some of the administration\u2019s anti-renewables positions, aren\u2019t necessarily on the same page as the Trump administration. Among the announcements made at the summit was a $3 billion investment<\/a> in hydropower from Google.<\/p>\n

This demand isn\u2019t necessarily driven by a big concern for the climate\u2014many tech giants have walked back their climate commitments in recent years as their focus on AI has sharpened\u2014but rather pure economics. Financial analyst Lazard said last month<\/a> that installing utility-scale solar panels and batteries is still cheaper than building out natural gas plants, even without tax incentives. Gas infrastructure is also facing a global shortage that makes the timescales for setting up power generation vastly different.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe waiting list for a new turbine is five years,\u201d Williams-Derry says. \u201cIf you want a new solar plant, you call China, you say, \u2018I want more solar.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the ideological split at the summit, things occasionally got a little awkward. On one panel, Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, who headed up a fracking company before coming to the federal government, talked at length about how the Obama and Biden administrations were on an \u201cenergy crazy train,\u201d scoffing at those administrations\u2019 support for wind and solar. Speaking directly after Wright, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink admitted that solar would likely support dispatchable gas in powering AI. Incredibly, fellow panel member Woods, the ExxonMobil CEO, later paid some of the only lip service to the idea of drawing down emissions heard during the entire event. (Woods was touting the oil giant\u2019s carbon capture and storage business.)<\/p>\n

Still, the hype train, for the most part, moved smoothly, with everyone agreeing on one thing: We\u2019re going to need a lot of power, and soon. Blackstone CEO Jonathan Gray said that AI could help drive \u201c40 or 50 percent more power usage over the next decade,\u201d while Porat, of Google, mentioned some economists\u2019 projections that AI could add $4 trillion to the US economy by 2030.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to find any variety of headlines or reports\u2014often based on projections produced by private companies\u2014projecting massive growth numbers for AI. \u201cI view all of these projections with great skepticism,\u201d says Jonathan Koomey, a computing researcher and consultant who has contributed to research around AI and power. \u201cI don’t think anyone has any idea, even a few years hence, how much electricity data centers are gonna use.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The industry is finding a willing partner in the Trump administration. Since taking office, Trump has used AI…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15614,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[184,181,28,4253,12,14841,168],"class_list":{"0":"post-15613","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-anthropic","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-business","11":"tag-climate-change","12":"tag-donald-trump","13":"tag-exxonmobil","14":"tag-google"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15613"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15613\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}