Jeb Burleson

Sep 11, 2024 | enverus.com | Erin Faulkner |Carson Kearl |Jeb Burleson |Maurice Smith

The emergence of AI is fueling a rapid expansion of data center capacity, which will significantly increase future energy demand. Enverus Intelligence® Research (EIR) forecasts data center power demand will grow by 14 GW from 2023 to 2030 in a base case scenario, amounting to 2 Bcf/d of natural gas power if fully serviced by gas-fired generation. Through 2050, growth in data center demand will require an additional 153 GW of capacity, according to the latest EIR projections.

Sep 11, 2024 | enverus.com | Erin Faulkner |Carson Kearl |Maurice Smith |Jeb Burleson

The surge in electricity usage fueled by the need for data centers might not be as substantial as originally thought. When examining the log-log relationship between annual information consumption (measured in exabytes) and data-center power efficiency (expressed in exabytes per terawatt-hour), we observe that projecting efficiency gains into our model shows virtually no deviation from the historical trend (with an R-squared value of 0.99) from 2000-23 (Figure 1).