The day before several major tech leaders appeared before Congress, begging for ways to get more energy for the nascent American artificial intelligence industry, Donald Trump signed an executive order offering a solution: increased coal production.
As part of a series of executive orders released Tuesday designed to promote the rapid growth of the coal industry — opening federal lands for mining, designating coal as a critical mineral, and using his emergency authorization powers to relax environmental regulations on coal — Trump signed one explicitly aimed towards powering energy-hungry AI data centers using America’s “beautiful clean coal resources”, as Trump described it. The order directs the Commerce, Energy, and Interior Departments to conduct studies determining “where coal-powered infrastructure is available and suitable for supporting AI data centers,” as well as whether it would be economically feasible.
“You know, we need to do the AI, all of this new technology that’s coming on line,” Trump said on Tuesday during a signing ceremony for all four executive orders. “We need more than double the energy, the electricity, that we currently have.”
It’s an inelegant and Trumpy solution to a real, looming problem that escalates with America’s rapid adoption of AI technology: how to power all the data centers needed for computing demands. Wednesday’s hearing at the House Energy and Commerce Committee only underscored how much AI would be integrated into everyday life, from national security to household tasks, and largely focused on the sheer amount of power that would have to be poured into supporting this infrastructure. And according to the witnesses, which included former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Micron Technology EVP Manish Bhatia, and Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, the industry is in dire need of consistent, reliable energy.
“We need energy in all forms. Renewable, nonrenewable, whatever. It needs to be there, and it needs to be there quickly.”
”[W]e need energy, and the numbers are profound,” Schmidt said in his opening testimony. “We need energy in all forms. Renewable, nonrenewable, whatever. It needs to be there, and it needs to be there quickly.” Indeed, a study from the Electric Power Research Institute, cited in the Committee’s announcement of the hearing, projected that data centers could consume as much as 9.1 percent of all energy in the United States by the end of the decade.
Bhatia cited a separate study in his testimony suggesting that due to this development, overall energy consumption would increase by 15 percent within the next five years — a huge jump from the traditional 0.5 percent rise in energy consumption per year over the past several decades — and warned that without an approach to energy that leaned on multiple fuel sources to keep costs low, “the US risks losing leadership in AI.”
But even though Trump has been a longtime booster of coal, dating back to his attempt to save coal plants from shuttering in 2018, the American coal industry has been on the decline over the past several decades as consumers move towards alternative forms of energy such as oil, natural gas, and green energy. Coal currently accounts for 15 percent of American energy supply — a steep fall from 2011, when it provided nearly half of it — and as the demand for coal decreased, so too did the capacity to turn it into energy. According to a New York Times report from February, only 400 coal plants are operational in the US today, down from 780 in 2000, and nearly half of those remaining are slated for retirement within the next several decades. However, nearly a third of those plants have either had their lives extended past their scheduled retirement, or saved from retirement altogether, thanks to a rapid increase in energy demands — though experts warned the Times it’s likely not enough to reverse coal’s decline.
At the same time, leaning on coal could pose an ethical conundrum for AI leaders, to say nothing of the tech industry, which has long promoted itself as a proponent of green energy. In particular, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has made a huge push for sustainable energy as a data center power source, investing in everything from solar to nuclear fusion to a carbon-capture startup offsetting current emissions, as a way to rapidly scale the supply of cheap energy. But with Trump locked in an international trade war that’s already threatening the future of the tech industry, it’s unclear whether they may have to indulge Trump’s obsession with coal — as he said during the signing ceremony, “Never use the word ‘coal’ unless you put ‘beautiful, clean’ before it” — to remain in business.
