https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-evaluating-increase-electricity-demand-data-centers https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-rep

https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-evaluating-increase-electricity-demand-data-centers https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-eval... > The report finds that data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023 and are expected to consume approximately 6.7 to 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028. Even if data centers went 10x, that would only increase our electricity use by a bit over a third. . But for something more fun: This[1] says global energy use is 186,000 TWh/year. Or an average of about 21.2 TW. The surface area of the earth[2] is 510 million km^2, or 510 trillion m^2. Which works out to global energy use being an average of about 42 mW / m^2. Per Wikipedia[3], the IPCC says that human-caused greenhouse warming is 2.72 W/m^2 . Which is "only" about 65 times global energy use. Which means if we did start using double-digit multiples of our current energy use, it starts to matter whether we're adding that energy to the environment (fission/fusion, fossil, probably geothermal) or just redirecting it (hydro, wind, solar). With the caveat for solar that the panels probably have lower albedo than what they're on top of. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption [2] https://www.universetoday.com/articles/surface-area-of-the-earth https://www.universetoday.com/articles/surface-area-of-the-e... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiative_forcing