The following is an article originally published by Sustainability Magazine on March 6, 2025.

By Jasmin Jessen

Today’s energy demand is big — and it’s only going to get bigger. 

Electrified transport, high-performance computing and data centres all need energy to achieve their decarbonising potential, but using high carbon power sources could cancel this out. 

EcoEngineers is an advisory and audit firm that focuses exclusively on the energy transition. 

Its services include asset development, life cycle analysis, compliance management and regulatory engagement.

Roxby Hartley is the Climate Risk Director at EcoEngineers, working between regulation, methodologies, science and markets. 

Roxby Hartley, Ph.D., Climate Risk Director, EcoEngineers

He writes market reports, develops methodologies for new carbon removal technologies and is based in California, USA. 

Roxby shares his expertise with Sustainability Magazine.

Why is energy consumption increasing so dramatically?

A lot of that has been driven by data centres. 

At the moment, we’re seeing announcements from Google, Meta, and Microsoft about nuclear power. 

As we try to switch away from transportation fuels, we will see more and more electrification of transport — so there’s an awful lot of energy that’s required just to drive people around and move goods around. 

Both of those are the two big drivers.

Why can’t we rely on renewable sources for this?

The demand is growing too quickly. 

One of the claims that many companies want to make is that they’re going to be net zero or carbon neutral. They want to say that the energy they’re using is from renewable sources and has very low carbon intensity. 

Now, if you apply traditional additionality rules to that, you can say that you’re going to build a new solar farm and apply that to a data centre, for example. The problem is that there’s an awful lot of demand now for that renewable energy.

The issue is something called leakage. If you assign that power to a new data centre rather than towards grid decarbonisation, you’re taking from Peter to pay Paul. You are not decarbonising the grid, just simply saying that this person has zero or low carbon electricity, whereas the overall emissions profile hasn’t changed.

If their corporate goal is to decarbonise their data centres, they can’t do so by claiming that they’re allocating traditional renewables to their energy demand.

How could nuclear help?

Building new nuclear facilities or keeping nuclear facilities open that are slated to be closed is a way to show true additional. 

There’s no competition for resources around solar, wind farms, land, permitting or the contractors to build those facilities — it is completely new and therefore there’s no argument about whether it’s additional or not. 

If you want to make a claim that you are using a low carbon electricity, then nuclear is a very good way to do so. 

What about carbon capture? 

You can’t have a boom in carbon removals without having energy sources that are very low carbon. Otherwise you are not helping the environment — you’re just adding to the pile of energy demand that’s going to come from natural gas or whatever fossil fuels have been consumed. 

It’s not so much that we need the energy to come from somewhere where there are very few emissions. It doesn’t really matter where it is, as long as it’s not something that’s already going to decarbonise the grid.  

Download our report, “Powering AI: Additionality and Nuclear Power,” by clicking on the thumbnail below to explore how nuclear energy is shaping the future of clean power for AI and CDR technologies.