Check out the full analysis over at The Climate Brink: https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/the-real-energy-use-of-agentic-ai

One potential silver lining: net-zero needs ~3x more clean electricity, and the main barriers are permitting, transmission, interconnection, not tech. If AI's capital and urgency fund firm clean power and grids, it could help clean the grid. Behind-the-meter gas, and it won't.

The biggest lever we have is to decarbonize electricity – and push AI companies to invest more heavily in clean energy like solar+storage, advanced nuclear, enhanced geothermal, etc. Using energy isn't inherently bad, its all about the impacts of producing that energy.

I took a look at my own Claude Code use over the past 8 weeks to calculate agentic energy use. Using three different methods I find that the typical agentic prompt uses 180 watt-hours (45 to 360 Wh). This adds up to around 3 kWh per day, around the energy of running two fridges.