New restrictions on natural gas use in Washington State were signed into law by Gov. Jay Inlsee in April 2024 (see story here).
Democrats, Republicans, progressives, and the building trades council (a mouthpiece for developers) disagree on what the law means. It’s confusing, because after failing in the 2023 legislature, it went through multiple rewrites.
Puget Sound Energy has a fact sheet detailing what House Bill 1589, now law, does and doesn’t do here. It discourages, but doesn’t ban, natural gas for residential and business use. It’s part of what Mother Jones describes (here) as “federal, state, and local attempts to phase out gas and make new buildings electric.”
Some critics complain it will add to housing inflation; others say it was written by PSE lawyers to raise natural gas prices. At the very least, you won’t get rebates for natural gas appliances anymore; those rebates are now banned. (If you can’t ban the stove, you ban the rebate.)
H.B. 1589 seems well intentioned. Save the planet and all that. That’s why Inslee signed it. But artificial intelligence is poised to cancel out its emission reductions.
AI is an electricity glutton. A Chat-GPT request uses 10 times as much power as a Google search, according to Barrons, a financial newspaper (at pg. 8 of the 5/20/24 print edition). And some of that power will be produced by gas-fired generating plants. Consequently, an Israeli tech website estimated (here) that AI server farms could add 14% to global carbon emissions.
H.B. 1589 won’t begin to offset the increase in natural gas use to run AI server farms. It might, however, help counter Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s anti-climate initiatives (read that story here). Thank him for the sacrifices you’ll make.
Photo: Inside a server farm; these will get bigger, and consume immense amounts of power, to run AI applications
