Podcast Appearances
So I have actually gone without power for 24 hours.
I think I probably could.
I think it'd be quite nice, actually, if I had a bit of notice.
Anyway, you or I might not have to live without electricity ourselves, but with humanity's ever increasing demands for the stuff, working out how to budget effectively and get the most out of what we have is becoming more important than ever.
And welcome to Technology Now from HPU.
modern day infrastructure loves energy according to the global energy review in 2025 from the international energy agency or the iea which we will link to in the show notes i think they know what they're talking about data centers are estimated to have consumed 415 terawatt hours of electricity in 2024 that was 1.5 percent of the entire global electricity consumption
And in fact, by 2030, the IEA expects this figure to have doubled.
Technology is advancing at an increasing pace, but it's now starting to come up against the physical constraints of just how much energy we can produce.
Yeah, I'm not a huge fan of my energy bill at the moment, but yeah, very much so.
Whether the electricity is coming from renewables, oil, gas or even nuclear, the soaring demand on our power grids are starting to cause problems for organizations.
So to find out more about how organizations and businesses can try to respond to these changes, I met with Karim Abu Zahab, a principal technologist in the Sustainable Transformation team in the wider Living Progress Organization here at HPE.
And the first thing I wanted to know was from his perspective, why is energy such a hot topic at the moment?
It's a financial issue as well, because if you can use less energy, you can spend less money doing the thing that you need to do with that energy.
because it's basically then become a financial conversation.
So we live in a sort of post AI world, with the explosion of AI alongside the quantity of data centers, the quantity of GPUs in racks, there seems to be some sort of disconnect.
Where is that energy coming from to be able to power those data centers?
So there's an efficiency conversation there with regards to building data centers.
Is there enough energy to go around?