Distinguished Hariri Institute/CISE Seminar: Andrew A. Chien, University of Chicago

How Can We Decarbonize the Power Grid and Meet AI’s Exploding Power Demands?

AI and Cloud computing is growing rapidly and projected to increase US electric power consumption by as much as 2% by 2026. This is an explosive increase against a backdrop of zero growth in US power consumption from 2007-2020 (EIA). Such rapid power consumption growth presents a significant challenge to power grid stability and decarbonization. In several power grids, datacenter load exceeds 15% of total with many more grids to follow. This is a problem because datacenter load retards renewable absorption, so in effect, datacenter growth is browning the grid. In short, AI and cloud growth threatens grid carbonization. Computing must change. We will discuss how computing flexibility could help the grid decarbonize (Zero-carbon cloud), by aligning compute load to curtailed and stranded power (a rapidly growing challenge), and show an example of generative AI applications such as ChatGPT. Today, datacenter loads view power as an “on-demand” service, a difficult model for renewable-based grids to support. We will show a new framework that creates cooperation between datacenter loads and power grids with continuous matching. Critically, these new approaches address the fundamental conflict between loads and renewable power grids, supporting both corporate goals (efficient computing) and societal goals (power grid decarbonization). We encourage computing community to solve this problem by shaping power growth to support grid decarbonization, not retard it. Current carbon accounting and cloud practice (long-term PPA’s and RECs) transfers carbon emissions responsibility to other grid customers (eg you). We will discuss how to move beyond current transactional frameworks for carbon-emissions to metric framings that are more fair. More information available at http://zccloud.cs.uchicago.edu.

Dr. Andrew A. Chien is the William Eckhardt Distinguished Service Professor of Computer Science at the University of Chicago and Senior Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory. He has led the Zero-carbon Cloud project since 2015, and is well-known for his research on datacenters, renewable energy and sustainability, cloud resource management and software, large-scale system architecture, and graph computing architecture. He is leader of the IARPA funded “UpDown System Project”, designing breakthrough scalable graph analytics systems. Chien has received numerous recognitions for his research. Dr. Chien currently serves on the NSF CISE Advisory Committee, NSF Advisory Committee on Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, and DARPA ISAT. He is a Fellow of the ACM, IEEE, and AAAS. He served as EiC of Communications of the ACM, 2017-2022, and Vice President of Research at Intel Corporation from 2005-2010. He has served on the Faculty of the University of Illinois and as SAIC Chair Professor of University of California, San Diego. He received BS, MS, and PhD degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Faculty Host: Ayse Coskun