This week in buildings, land and industry decarbonization news, the liquor conglomerate Diageo announced it was making some major upgrades to some of its most famous real estate: the Guinness Brewery at St. James’ Gate in Dublin. The investment will transform both the energy and water use at the 264-year-old brewery to make it among the most efficient in the world. No word on whether the changes will impact the apocryphal flavoring rats. 

In other news from across the pond, the BBC took a look at the issues around artificial intelligence and energy use. Generative AI makes up content from scratch, which means more computing and thus energy use required than machines running task-specific software. AI systems can use up to 33 times more energy than more traditional computing, BBC said. All of that is happening at centralized data centers, which used 460 TWh in 2022, and the International Energy Agency expects to more than double by 2026. By that year, data centers globally could use as much electricity as the entire nation of Japan. 

Canary Media looked into two Biden administration-funded projects to manufacture clean steel using green hydrogen. Ohio and Mississippi are hosting the two commercial demonstration facilities, which will require huge amounts of energy. The Ohio plant’s demand could be filled by doubling the amount of renewables in the state, while Mississippi would need to expand renewables by five times its current installed capacity. 

Tech Xplore wrote about using solar power for California’s huge agriculture industry to grow crops if they are short of water. The legislature rejected a bill that could have helped develop solar power on formerly agricultural land by easing a tax hit on such conversions caused by a law meant to preserve farmland. 

Solar and farming do not have to be exclusive for land use, with North American Clean Energy posting a brief on “agrivoltaics.” The concept involves putting up solar panels and then growing crops alongside them, which can benefit from the partial shade the solar panels provide. 

Read more stories in this week’s Intelligence Report: