Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, left, discusses the state’s efforts to fight climate change with Amy Feldman, Forbes senior editor, and Andrew Steer, president and CEO of Bezos Earth Fund, at the 2024 Sustainability Leaders Summit in New York City. (Courtesy of Gov. Jay Inslee’s office)
Washington Gov. Jay Inslee is cautioning that resistance to locating large-scale wind, solar and battery storage projects risks slowing the use of artificial intelligence.
“This is a double-edged sword,” Inslee said Tuesday at the Sustainability Leaders Summit hosted by Forbes magazine in New York City. AI “will help the clean energy revolution. It’s going to help us decide what’s the most effective silicon anode battery. It’s going to help develop fusion.”
While AI may be pivotal to accelerating research and development of new technologies, it demands huge amounts of energy to operate.
“I’m having trouble siting facilities for wind, storage and solar just to feed the AI centers,” he said. “We’ve got to be able to site them because we’re not going to stop this use of technology.”