Yury Dvorkin, a core researcher with the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute (ROSEI) and an associate professor with the Departments of Civil and Systems Engineering (CaSE) and Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), recently made an appearance on the Climate Conversations: Pathways to Action webinar, which is hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
Climate Conversations is a monthly webinar series that aims to convene high-level, cross-cutting, nonpartisan conversations about issues relevant to policy action on climate change. The episode that Dvorkin appeared on was titled “Powering AI” and in it, he discussed many aspects of the work that he is doing at ROSEI. His fellow panelists included Kristin Hayes, the senior director for research and policy engagement at Resources for the Future (RFF) and Cooper Elsworth, who leads Google’s AI and cloud emissions program.
Both Dvorkin and Elsworth emphasized the urgent need to improve how we measure and manage the carbon footprint of data centers. They noted that enhancing the temporal and spatial granularity of emissions accounting is essential to upgrading the 24/7 GHG Protocol and enabling smarter decision-making, which requires improvements in emissions data collection and processing. Elsworth highlighted the importance of tracking embodied emissions in data center hardware—pointing to recent Google’s study estimating such emissions can account for up to 15% of total lifecycle emissions. Dvorkin added that operational emissions, which can be as high as 80+% of the overall data center footprint, can be substantially reduced by better aligning data center loads with clean energy supply. This coordination, he noted, must account for grid transmission constraints, as analyzed in his recent paper with Resurety, and should leverage the flexibility of data center operations.
Recently, Dvorkin also hosted the panel title “Enabling an AI World” at the 2025 ARPA-E Innovation Summit, which included Levi Patterson, the Director of Energy, Science, and AI Infrastructure Policy with NVIDIA and Ben Wilson, the President for National Grid Ventures.
You can click here to watch the webinar, or scroll below.