Google lays out ideas, funding for infrastructure growth

By EPN Staff

Google intends to support training for 100,000 electrical workers and 30,000 new apprentices using artificial intelligence tools to boost fields critical to a coming infrastructure expansion.

The effort, partnering with trade unions, builds on Google’s AI Opportunity Fund, which focuses on building computer skills.

The tech company also released a white paper laying out its thinking on how AI will grow and impact the U.S economy, and the federal and state policy changes needed to prepare.

Why it matters

The numbers vary, but experts agree: U.S. electricity demand will increase substantially over the next decade as AI is layered into our economy.

Google said this offers “a generational opportunity for extraordinary innovation and growth” and that the infrastructure needed to power this era requires “constructive public and private collaboration to advance.”

Google's $10 million investment in the electrical trades targets a key workforce gap by partnering with electrical training ALLIANCE, a training group created by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers and the National Electrical Contractors Association.

The goal is to increase the pipeline of electrical workers by 70% by the end of the decade.

The bigger picture

Google's workforce initiative is part of a broader strategy to modernize U.S. energy infrastructure, in part to feed Google's power needs.

The company’s new paper, "Powering a New Era of American Innovation," lays out 15 recommendations to boost investment in advanced energy generation, improve power grids build new infrastructure.

Key recommendations include:

• Expanded federal loans to help pay for expensive nuclear energy projects, combined with permitting reforms and the creation of a domestic nuclear fuel supply.
• Federal changes to expedite other permitting processes, too, including permit approvals for geothermal projects, carbon capture pipelines and transmission lines.
• Congressional and state legislative action to require consideration of Grid-Enhancing Technologies, which boost grid efficiency, during transmission planning.
• A push, at the state level, to require utility companies to take a long-term view on transmission planning, in part by implementing FERC Order 1920A.
• The establishment of regional electricity markets in the western United States

Additional details

Google isn’t just making an infrastructure push to support AI; it’s leveraging AI to improve energy infrastructure development.

The company is working with PJM Interconnection, the largest regional U.S. electrical grid operator, to deploy AI technologies aimed at expediting the connection of new power supplies, and its new trade apprentice program promises to "integrate AI tools into its curriculum."

Google is also funding emerging power sources to fuel a data boom, entering into agreements to buy energy from small modular nuclear reactors as well as from advanced geothermal energy sources.

"AI presents the United States with a generational opportunity for extraordinary innovation and growth,” Google said in its white paper. “Fully realizing these opportunities will take a focused, forceful, and expedited effort to increase the capacity of the existing, sometimes antiquated U.S. energy system.”