Businesses collaborate using AI for sustainability progress.

Rohan Kelkar, EVP Global Power Products, Schneider Electric

Artificial Intelligence (AI’s) energy demands are escalating at a significant rate, with a recent WEF report finding that computational power is doubling every 100 days. This rate of growth puts increasing pressure on organizations to find new ways to make AI sustainable. Research shows that leveraging AI for environmental applications could contribute over $5 trillion to the global economy in 2030.  However, to realize that potential, AI needs to be more than just intelligent. It needs to become fully optimized to increase efficiency across all environmental applications and add business value through saving time and improving accuracy.

In recent years we’ve seen the development of AI continue to accelerate, and the AI capabilities we have available to us today have been built and deployed in ways designed to generate valuable data. The emphasis here is to contribute to enabling improved decision-making, which in turn boosts productivity and optimizes efficiency across industries. When coordinated effectively, AI can substantially contribute to accelerating reliable and low-cost energy transition by helping us learn and understand the exact usage of energy in every infrastructure so that we can measure and act accordingly to save energy.

The advantages of digitalisation in driving sustainability

Digitalization is improving performance efficiency while playing a crucial role in the energy transition. The opportunity to drive sustainability lies in applying various digital technologies that exist today, including solutions enabled with a full digital twin, across the entire lifecycle, from the design phase to maintenance within a unified digital environment. This gives AI stable and reliable data sets, enabling real-time processing to efficiently manage the design, build, operation, and maintenance of the physical system. Resources and data that were traditionally managed individually are now integrated and managed with the dual goal of achieving sustainability alongside improving efficiency.

We have reached a stage where green policy is ramping up, digital energy solutions are becoming more easily available, and there is increasing proof that sustainability isn’t solely an environmental concern, but also an economic and business opportunity. Investments in decarbonisation technologies are growing and green financing is to grow by 21% per year by 2033, showing the direction where investments are flowing across the next decade. It’s up to us to support that transition and do so in a way that benefits our industry and business ecosystem.

Collaboration is key for sustainable AI development

Businesses cannot develop sustainability strategies alone, there needs to be more industry collaboration and co-innovation. One of the most effective ways to do this is through finding the right partnerships. Collaboration between organizations, suppliers, and customers, is crucial in helping each party build resilience and reduce their overall environmental impact. This means adopting the role of sustainability consultants to partners and suppliers that are on their own journey to decarbonize.

An effective example of this is Schneider Electric’s partnership with leading chip maker NVIDIA to optimize data center infrastructure and build AI capabilities. This partnership saw the development of the world’s first publicly available AI data center reference designs. These designs opened up new doors for AI deployment and operation within data center ecosystems.

Addressing the evolving demands of AI workloads, the reference designs offer a robust framework for implementing NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform within data centers, whilst optimizing performance, scalability, and overall sustainability. Partners, engineers, and data center leaders can then utilize these reference designs for existing data center rooms that must support new deployments of high-density AI servers and new data center builds that are fully optimized for a liquid-cooled AI cluster.

Continuing the deployment journey

Business growth across industries relies on taking advantage of available technologies, and successful AI deployment offers untapped potential to achieve this. As we have discussed, leveraging the right partnerships to address the challenges posed today makes it possible to simplify and accelerate both your businesses and your partner’s sustainability journeys.

When deployed effectively, AI makes it possible to accelerate the energy transition by helping us better understand the role of energy in infrastructure so that we can monitor energy consumption in real time and make data-driven decisions on where energy can be saved by improved efficiency. In order to benefit from this untapped potential, though, businesses need to work together to integrate AI into their sustainability strategies. Doing so effectively will not only provide business value in advancing efficiency but will also provide wider sustainability benefits in our collective journey to reaching net zero.

This article appeared in the September 2024 issue of Energy Manager magazine. Subscribe here.