Decentralized Energy: Powering the Future of AI and Web3
The Backbone of Sustainability, Resilience, and Cost-Efficiency in the AI Economy
CryptoJeter is your passage to discovering insights within transformative startups and essential topics in the crypto industry.
Blockchain technology will disrupt life’s normalities like finance, social media, and art. If you are curious about how crypto will impact your world, be sure to subscribe.
Follow us on Twitter @cryptojeter
Send an email to Jeter@cryptojeter.com
Support us at CryptoJeter.eth
Topics Covered
Decentralized Energy's Role in Resilience
Emerging Decentralized Energy Providers
Future of Decentralized Energy Solutions
Full Analysis📝
The intersection of AI and Web3 with energy systems presents a transformative opportunity for sustainable and decentralized energy development.
Exorbitant energy is required for AI compute and to run blockchains.
Ultimately, the compute requires electricity to function. While electricity is essential for running compute infrastructure, it becomes increasingly significant as the amount of data processed grows. Efficient energy management is crucial to keep operational costs low, and as data demands scale. More advanced energy solutions or optimizations are necessary to ensure both cost-effectiveness and sustainability.
New forms of energy production will be pivotal not only for the named sector, but also for AI as well. Ben Horowitz mentioned in a recent podcast, “If we put AI on the power grid, it will not work”.
Additionally, the ethos of crypto is widely centered around the concept of decentralization. However, from the enterprise side of things, it is evident how decentralization would have a positive impact on business practices. Earlier this year, the incident between Crowd Strike and Microsoft led to incredible mayhem with regards to the airline and other industries affected.
The absence of decentralized systems in this case led to the loss of over five billion dollars.
Now, let’s imagine…What if all the energy in a country was concentrated?
There could be an instance where certain areas would not have power. In a data-first world that we live in today, productivity could be slashed significantly due to the disruption of energy. That is a possibility, which is why decentralized energy systems are necessary.
CryptoJeter Readers Say….
“CryptoJeter allows me to stay up to date on everything crypto and web3. I use it like a cheat sheet for work!” - Errol, Banker
Errol is like YOU and ME.
He wants to understand how crypto will be relevant to the financial markets, his daily life, and his financial future.
Are you willing to miss out on game-changing insights about the intersection of energy and blockchain?
Click “Subscribe Now” to consistently view premium content weekly.
Decentralizing energy can also drive more safe and more resistant outcomes to adverse forces. The current Russian and Ukraine conflict is a perfect example of why decentralizing energy is important.
Earlier this year, Ukraine Prime Minister Denys Shmyha mentioned “Energy resilience is one of our greatest challenges this year”. As Prime Minister Denys Shmyha mentions this, it brings the point that decentralized energy is very important for economies to have as it can make them more resistant to threats.
With this in mind, AI providers, such as the Artificial Superintelligence Alliance (ASI) which are web3 native, will likely choose decentralized benders for energy producers.
However, centralized providers have a head start on the market.
They probably will continue to sustain your current market share until the centralized options disrupt the industry. Thus, these web3 platforms will be getting ahead of the game but won’t solely rely exclusively on decentralized energy vendors. While that may be the case, adding decentralized energy providers to AI can reduce vulnerabilities and potentially be a cost-effective switch in the future.
Powerledger is a company that has been focused on decentralized energy solutions since 2016. They have over 30 clients globally with seemingly strong traction in the Asia Pacific region (APAC). This traction in APAC may prompt Powerledger to expand into other emerging markets.
There is evidence of Powerledger being interested in expanding in the Latin America region. In 2021, Power Ledger partnered with EBP, SER Patrimonio, and the University of Queensland to launch a project in northern Chile's isolated communities of Mamiña, Parca, and Iquiuca.
As a part of this partnership, the project will implement solar microgrids, water monitoring systems, and sustainable waste solutions to improve resource management in energy, water, and waste. The outcome of this project aims to allow local businesses to trade excess rooftop solar power, optimizing energy use in areas that typically rely on diesel generators over the course of 3 years.
It sounds like the project is still active, which is a positive for the community in northern Chile.
The Powerledger team has also announced that it has expanded into the Solana Ecosystem as well. Solana has made compelling steps into the broader enterprise sector as we’ve discussed with its partnerships in the financial space.
This decentralized energy space is growing.
Daylight is a recent decentralized energy company that has gained investment from top quality investors. The A16z backed project is focused on enabling households to drive power to the energy grid through their full service electrification platform which includes solar panels and home battery installations currently. In the future the company will offer hot water heaters and heat pumps which will all lead to energy savings for adopters.
With this type of energy being sustainable, it could be potentially used as an asset to power data centers that are central to supporting the AI economy.
Glow is also another project that has been recently funded by very reputable Web3 investors such as Union Square Ventures. Glow is focused on driving the progression of solar energy and has contributed to onboarding 63 new solar farms globally which have created nearly 2m kWh of electricity. In India, the onboarded solar farms are powering 34,000 homes.
As big tech AI players continue to compete for market share, they are investing in data centers in India. Microsoft is set to invest $3.7 billion in building data centers in Telangana, South India, with a total capacity of 660 megawatts. Concurrently, Amazon plans to invest approximately $12.7 billion in cloud infrastructure in India by 2030. This significant investment reflects the growing demand for cloud services and data center facilities in the region, as both companies aim to enhance their technological capabilities and support local businesses. Additionally, ST Telemedia Global Data Centres (STT GDC) plans to invest $3.2 billion (INR 26,000 crores) to expand data center capacity by 550MW over the next five to six years. This investment will nearly triple STT GDC India’s current IT load capacity of 318MW across 28 data centers in 10 cities.
As AI innovation begins to evolve and take shape in various forms, companies are looking for markets that will make it easier for large data centers to run with lower costs. For example, building data centers in India as mentioned above is likely more cost effective for infrastructure development as opposed to building them in the United States.
Powerledger, Glow, and Daylight have the opportunity to capitalize on the data infrastructure that is being built in India to further decrease costs for the rising energy demand. These three providers and others provide the ability for people in markets near data centers to not only receive individual benefits, but it also mitigates the opportunity for external threats to impact the AI performance via decentralized energy. Becoming energy resilient is crucial for both the private and public sectors which is a major opportunity for decentralized energy providers. The next steps for Powerledger, Glow, and Daylight will likely involve forging partnerships with local governments and businesses to implement scalable decentralized energy solutions, ensuring that they can effectively meet rising energy demands while fostering sustainable energy growth.