Technology Trending: AI energy use and chicken feather fuel cell membranes

The AI energy challenge, a digital currency for clean energy trading in Japan and generating clean electricity with chicken feathers are on the week’s technology radar.

AI – the energy challenge

As artificial intelligence is finding use in an ever-growing variety of applications concerns are emerging – alongside those of its civilisation destruction potential – of its energy consumption.

In a new article, Dutch doctoral candidate Alex de Vries suggests that whereas data centre electricity consumption has been relatively stable in recent years, at around 1% of the global electricity consumption, the rapid expansion of AI in the past two years – not least with the emergence of ChatGPT in late 2022 – could lead to a surge with the computational resources necessary to develop and maintain such AI models and applications.

De Vries comments that much of the focus on AI energy consumption has focused on the ‘training’ phase, which is when AI models are fed the datasets from which they ‘learn’ and which has been considered the most energy intensive.

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However, the ‘inference’ phase, when the models are deployed and generate outputs based on new data, also can be significant and potentially significantly higher.

As an example, he investigates that if Google were to integrate generative AI into every search, the energy consumption per search could increase by 10 times and in a worst-case scenario annually could total up to 29.2TWh, which is similar to a country such as Ireland.

De Vries notes that the exact future of AI-related electricity consumption remains difficult to predict but scenarios suggest tempering both overly optimistic and overly pessimistic expectations.

He also suggests that while developers should focus on optimising AI, they also should critically consider the necessity of using AI in the first place, as it is unlikely that all applications will benefit from AI or that the benefits will always outweigh the costs.

A digital currency for clean energy trading in Japan

Japanese digital currency business DeCurret in partnership with the telco company Internet Initiative Japan have announced their intention to launch what may be a first with a digital currency for trading on the country’s Electric Power Exchange.

IIJ is joining the JEPX as a non-fossil value trading member and plans to start offering a service to procure clean energy certificates.

From July 2024, the service will utilise the DeCurret’s network to convert environmental values into digital tokens and start settlement using the digital currency, tentatively named ‘DCJPY’.

Currently, in Japan environmental value transactions are generally handled by issuing analogue certificates and managing transaction information in centralised systems. With DeCurret’s DCJPY network the issuance, transfer, etc. of such certificates would be enabled as digital assets, with automated settlement through programmed transactions using digital currency and smart contracts.

In the future, the companies intend to promote the distribution of a series of environmental value transactions on the blockchain with the participation of electricity retailers, power generation companies and environmental value exchanges.

Seiichiro Hamada, Executive Officer and deputy General Manager of the Innovation Promotion Division of Kansai Electric Power, says the company is working to promote carbon neutrality through the use of digital currency.

“Digital currency has great potential for trading environmental values, and the fact that this first social implementation is the settlement of non-fossil certificates at IIJ’s data centre is a major driving force for the future.”

Generating clean electricity with chicken feathers

With all the chickens consumed around the world, some 40Mt of feathers are believed to be incinerated annually, with the adverse environmental effects that result including the emissions of CO2 and other gases such as sulphur dioxide.

But that may become something of the past, with new research from ETH Zurich and Nanyang Technological University Singapore (NTU) demonstrating that a simple and environmentally friendly process can be used to extract the protein keratin from the feathers and convert it into ultra-fine fibres known as amyloid fibrils. These keratin fibrils can then go on to be used in the membrane of a fuel cell.

In conventional fuel cells, the membranes have so far been made using chemicals, which are expensive and don’t break down in the environment. The ‘chicken feather’ keratin membrane, on the other hand, is environmentally compatible and with the abundance of such keratin is already up to three times cheaper.

“[This] latest development closes a cycle,” says Raffaele Mezzenga, Professor of Food and Soft Materials at ETH Zurich.

“We’re taking a substance that releases CO2 and toxic gases when burned and used it in a different setting: with our new technology it not only replaces toxic substances but also prevents the release of CO2, decreasing the overall carbon footprint cycle.”

The next step for the researchers is to investigate the stability and durability of the keratin membrane and to improve it if necessary. A joint patent has been filed and the search is on for investors to develop the technology further and bring it to market.