EU climate chief: AI power demand must be met with clean abundance, not scarcity

Brussels (enr) – The European Union’s climate chief said artificial intelligence brings potentially huge benefits but also significant disruption and cited the emerging technology as one of the drivers behind growing electricity demand over the coming years.

“Even the most conservative of projections of AI will show us that electrification is going to be pushed up by at least some 30% over the next five years or so in the European Union alone, because of AI,” European Commissioner Wopke Hoekstra told the European Newsroom (enr) and other media in an interview in Brussels on Tuesday.

Demand will keep rising, Hoekstra said, also referring to the “one, one and a half, two billion people” who still lack adequate access to energy or have no energy at all. “They will all want to have the same thing that we have, and rightly so,” the Dutch politician said.

According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), at least 1.18 billion people worldwide were energy poor and unable to use electricity in 2020. In the EU, almost 1 out of 10 Europeans was unable to keep their homes adequately warm in 2025.

For Hoekstra, the answers lie in abundance and efficiency rather than rationing and said a shift “to a completely different energy system” is needed. He added that data centres should be required to supply clean power.

Hosting data centres is a prerogative of member states, he noted, but the benefits of AI and a secure energy supply for citizens must go hand in hand. “As much as I’m in favour of reaping the potential benefits of AI and the logic of hosting data centres…we’re not going to allow energy scarcity for our citizens because they have a data centre next door,” Hoekstra said. “It can only work if it is the one and the other,” he added.

On AI itself, Hoekstra called it “potentially the most complicated and dangerous thing humanity has embarked on over the course of its existence” and said it is currently not being treated that way. He praised French President Emmanuel Macron for being clear on risk mitigation and said more politicians should follow his lead.