By Caspar Birk, AAU Communication and Public Affairs

Denmark is about to hit a serious bottleneck in the energy supply. Companies are queuing up to electrify their production, large energy projects have been put on hold, and the coveted data centers risk waiting for years before the electricity infrastructure can support the development. 

In short, we need more power than our network of wires can handle.

But now, a researcher from Aalborg University has developed a technology that makes it possible to utilize the power-producing devices that are already part of the infrastructure to also perform AI calculations that would otherwise be sent to data centers.

Reduces energy consumption and cooling costs

The technology is called P2C — Power to Compute — and the basic idea is simple to understand, even though the technology behind it is complex:

Instead of only using the electricity grid to transport power from one place to another, you can also use some of the many components that are already connected to the electricity grid to contribute to calculations. For example, with P2C, you can get a solar cell system to calculate what the square root of 81 is and send the answer "9" back to the data center that asked for the calculation on behalf of the 13-year-old who is doing math.

Early calculations show that the potential of the new technology can lower energy consumption from data centers by about 10 percent and somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of the cost of cooling the servers, but it is still too early to conclude definitively.

Can be tested on a larger scale

The technology has so far been tested in the laboratory, but Subham Sahoo sees good opportunities to test it on a larger scale.

Several Danish companies have already shown interest in joining, and the researcher believes that the technology can be brought closer to practical use relatively quickly if the right partners and data are in place.