Alex de Vries
Energy Researcher
Dutch data scientist and founder of Digiconomist whose peer-reviewed research put hard numbers on AI’s electricity appetite — warning that generative AI could soon consume as much power as a mid-sized country.
In his words
It’s energy intensive, so we don’t want to put it in all kinds of things where we don’t actually need it.
Biography
Alex de Vries is a Dutch researcher who made his name quantifying the hidden resource costs of digital trends. As founder of Digiconomist, he built the Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index that reframed cryptocurrency as an environmental problem; he later turned the same forensic accounting on artificial intelligence while completing a PhD at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
Putting a number on AI’s power bill
His 2023 commentary in the journal Joule, “The growing energy footprint of artificial intelligence,” was among the first peer-reviewed attempts to size AI’s electricity demand. De Vries estimated that if Google folded generative AI into every search, it could require roughly 29 terawatt-hours a year — comparable to Ireland’s entire annual consumption — and projected that AI could add 85 to 134 TWh of demand by 2027, on the order of the Netherlands, Argentina or Sweden.
De Vries stresses that efficiency gains rarely help: cheaper, faster models simply invite more use, a rebound known as Jevons’ Paradox. His warning is not that computing is inherently bad but that indiscriminate deployment — bolting a large language model onto every product — squanders finite grid capacity for marginal benefit. His numbers now anchor much of the debate over AI data centres, alongside the environmental critique of Kate Crawford.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/alex-de-vries