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JR Jan Rosenow Jan Rosenow Oxford Professor.

“You could just build loads of data centers, which drives up the electrification rate. Is that a good thing? … It's not a good thing from replacing, displacing fossil fuel consumption in industry, buildings, transport, because it's just adding electricity demand that wasn't there before.”

Zero: The Climate Race · Climate & Energy · November 2026

“You could just build loads of data centers, which drives up the electrification rate. Is that a good thing? … It's not a good thing from replacing, displacing fossil fuel consumption in industry, buildings, transport, because it's just adding electricity demand that wasn't there before.” — Jan Rosenow, Zero: The Climate Race

Context

The host asked whether the COP31 goal of raising electricity's share of final energy to 35% by 2035 should require that the power be clean. Rosenow answers that the headline metric can be met in unhelpful ways, such as an AI data center boom that adds new demand without displacing any fossil fuel.

Transcript

Zero: The Climate Race Around 11:58 into the episode
Jan Rosenow

…this very clearly: that the expectation is that in most parts of the world, the cheapest way of generating electricity will be a combination of renewables, mainly solar and wind plus storage, even factoring in storage at the same time. It will be cheaper than building new gas-fired power stations.

Akshat Rathi

…electricity by 2035, from about 20-ish percentage. We'll come to the sort of final energy question later, but there is clearly an increase in electricity share of whatever energy is being consumed. Do you think that target should include that the electrification needs to come from clean sources?

Jan Rosenow

I mean, one of the problems with such targets is always that you could achieve them in a way that actually isn't particularly helpful. So, let's, you mentioned data centers before, right? You could just build loads of data centers, which drives up the electrification rate. Is that a good thing? Some people would say yes, because we want lots of data centers, but it's not a good thing from an emissions perspective. It's not a good thing from replacing, displacing fossil fuel consumption in industry buildings, transport, because it's just adding electricity demand that wasn't energy demand, that wasn't there before. So, yeah, it is the target as it stands is not particularly helpful when…

Akshat Rathi

I suppose you could say the same thing about the Paris Agreement, where there are clear targets about keeping global warming below two degrees Celsius and preferably below 1.5 degrees Celsius. It focuses the mind to actually act on it, even though there is a very real risk that we may even blow…

Jan Rosenow

I think a good way of maybe visualizing this in your mind is to think about the energy flow that we see in the world. And a lot of people have drawn Sankey diagrams. That's a sort of technical term. Captain Sankey, he was, I think, an Irish engineer who wanted to understand how efficient steam…

Akshat Rathi

And so one way to think about it is from the perspective of oil. Like drilling just crude oil is primary energy. Then having refined products in petrol, diesel, or jet fuel is final energy. And then if the fuel is used for motion most of the time, that motion itself, the outcome of that motion, how…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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