The head of Rosneft draws attention to the risks of power grid capacity shortages in Western countries

The United States and Canada are at risk of power shortages as renewable energy has displaced a large volume of reliable generation facilities from the North American market, Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin said at the 27th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.

In his words, over the past decade, Western technology giants have worked hard to demonize fossil fuels, shut down power plants that provide reliable electricity supplies, and promote unreliable renewable energy. “However, as the massive energy crises in California and Texas have shown, neither solar batteries nor wind farms can replace conventional electricity”, added the head of Rosneft.

“Thanks to years of aggressive PR campaigns and lobbying efforts, renewable energy has displaced a large amount of reliable power generation facilities from the North American energy market. As a result, large parts of the United States and Canada are now at risk of power shortages”, he told.

As he said, nowadays, western technology giants are reaping the fruits of their labors. The growing demand for electricity on the part of data centers (DCs), being implemented all over the world, can no longer be met with existing capacity. While global electricity consumption in this segment barely grew until 2019, it has doubled over the last four years, Igor Sechin noted.

According to the data of Investment bank Goldman Sachs, the global power consumption by data centers may grow two and a half times by 2030 per 1,000 terawatt hours, which is equal to the combined power consumption of Germany and France.

Widespread introduction of artificial intelligence will further accelerate the growth of energy consumption, Igor Sechin believes.

“It now takes 10 times more electricity for a GPT chatbot to process a single query compared to a Google search engine. The current burst of artificial intelligence requires a separate analysis. It should be taken into account that artificial intelligence will increasingly use data from the degrading information environment, where everyone has the right to express his or her opinion, even if it is the opinion of a madman”, Igor Sechin stated.

Information & Advertising Department
Rosneft
June 8, 2024