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In the race to develop new uses and applications for powerful artificial intelligence technologies, the issue of air pollution sometimes seems to get lost in the mix.
It’s not something that innovators like to talk about, particularly. They may like to tout all of the gee-whiz capabilities of their exciting new systems. It’s also not something that needs a ton of explanation. That’s compared to all of the questions that people have about things like neural nets and quantum computing, for example.
No, the air pollution itself is more of a public health issue. It’s a potential crisis coming from our efforts to up the ante in computer science.
By the Numbers
A piece in the San Francisco Examiner and other sources shows that AI is likely to account for 12% of new energy demand by 2030.
The above article also shows how researchers looked at the impact of this energy demand in terms of public health.
What researchers found was that in 2023, air pollution related to data centers contributed to 360 premature deaths. That’s in addition to health costs totaling $5.6 billion. Including power plant emissions, those numbers became 490 premature deaths and $7.6 billion in health costs. The Examiner piece cites a report from UC Riverside and the California Institute of Technology called “The Unpaid Toll: Quantifying the Public Health Impact of AI.”
In addition, the same study projected that the electricity demand for models could mean as many as 1,270 premature deaths and 600,000 cases of asthma nationwide by 2030.
Part of the issue is the diesel backup generators that are handy for many of these power setups.
“To ensure that AI services are available even during grid outages, data centers rely on large sets of backup generators that usually burn diesel fuel,” write Adam Wierman and Shaolei Ren at IEEE Spectrum. “While the total operation time of backup generators is limited and regulated by local environmental agencies, their emission rates are high. A typical diesel generator can release 200 to 600 times more NOx than a natural gas power plant producing the same amount of electricity.”
But aside from those generators, which are presumably mostly good in emergencies, there’s also the burning of coal and fossil fuels for regular and routine energy production.
We like to think that we’ve made headway in offering consumers renewable energy options. Still, we’ll need much more if we want to avoid the kinds of health tolls that these scientists discovered. It can be scary stuff. We should pay attention.
Power Alternatives
There’s another power alternative in the mix, though, and that’s nuclear power. Bill Gates has publicly weighed in on this option. A company called Terra Power that’s linked to him is already looking to increase nuclear capabilities within the United States for generating electricity.
Small nuclear plants could theoretically head off the need for new emissions. They could also decrease the air pollution from higher energy production levels.
But that’s if we find ways to do this kind of energy production more safely. That’s still rather up in the air.
Moving Winds Shift Contaminants Around
Another aspect that the scientists talked about in the study is that the public health cost isn’t limited to the communities where the energy is generated.
Even if it was, it wouldn’t be fair to people who live in those communities. However, in addition, the science found that public health risks will exist dozens of miles from the actual plants.
They identified a handful of counties in states like Pennsylvania and West Virginia that could see more of an impact.
They also pointed out that there are no safe threshold levels for things like PM 2.5.
What is PM 2.5?
In many of these blog posts, we’ve explained to readers how small particle matter can harm your lungs.
PM 2.5 means that microbes are around 2.5 µm in diameter – these are small bits that can evade some types of filtration.
As for what causes PM 2.5, it comes from industrial emissions, vehicle emissions, and all kinds of fossil fuel burning, as well as wood-burning. That means everything from campfires to massive wildfires, causing major damage in regions of the U.S. now.
So those are very disparate sources you can think about when it comes to this type of air pollution.
Another big pollutant is nitrogen oxide. This mainly comes from vehicle emissions. It also comes from other sources as well.
Impact on Your Indoor Air
There’s only so much you can do about the air outside. These pollutants can also make their way into your indoor air as well. That’s something to keep an eye on.
Inside your home, you can use an air monitor to see what’s hiding in the air that you breathe much of the time when you’re inside your house.
Then you can install systems to filter the stuff out of your air. A modern HEPA filter will take care of many of the above-mentioned pollutants and contaminants.
Choosing an Air Purifier
When you’re shopping for an air purifier to cleanse the air that you breathe at home, you have a lot of choices. Different models have a range of new technologies and features built in: some offer different levels of protection that others, and each is rated for a certain number of air changes per hour with a certain number of square feet to clean.Check out the Airpura C700DLX for a system that really moves air, and has a lot of the bells and whistles you want for this kind of scrubbing. It’s a good idea to use an indoor air monitor to see what you’re trying to get out of your air.
Let US Air Purifiers LLC help you with everything related to picking out the air purifier models that you want. We help customers to navigate this complex market and get the right confidence in their indoor air, as we see more of these types of concerns come up around the country.