How Quantum Computing is good for the Environment

I was asked this question recently and I could not provide a good answer. I asked a few smart people and they came up with these points. I would love to hear your thoughts on the topic.

Energy usage in computation

Today’s computers, data centers, the use of internet, and digital currency mining use enormous amounts of energy. Quantum tunneling uses a completely different method for achieving similar computation results, with far less energy.

As an example, the fastest supercomputer today, IBM’s Summit, deliver 200 petaFLOPS at peak. It is also the world’s third most energy-efficient supercomputer, with a recorded power efficiency of 14.66 gigaFLOPS per watt. “Summit’s 4,600+ servers, which take up the size of two basketball courts, house more than 9,200 IBM Power9 processors and over 27,600 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. The system is connected by 185 miles of fiber optic cable, and it consumes enough power to run 8,100 homes.” That’s 13 MW.

In their 2016 paper Joni Ikonen, Juha Salmilehto, Mikko Möttönen argue that with quantum tunneling, quantum computers will reduce the power consumption by a factor of 100 or even up to 1000 or beyond. This means we could get a 200 petaFLOPS performance with as little as 13 KW. We’re going from 8000 homes to just 8 homes.

Route optimization

A popular mathematical unsolved dilemma called Traveling Salesperson problem asks the following question: "Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city?"

This dilemma is not relevant just to salespersons, delivery trucks, ships, cargo airplanes, but to telecommunications and energy networks for example.  

It’s widely agreed the traveling salesperson dilemma is the only problem that is only solvable by quantum computers. Not solved faster, not solved with less energy. Solved. Period.

Solar panels and batteries

Two problems why solar power is not used more widely are a) takes a wide area of panels to produce any usable amount of energy and b) when the sun does not shine we need energy storage, which is not yet efficient in large scale.

“NREL has shown that quantum-dot solar cells operating under concentrated sunlight can have maximum theoretical conversion efficiencies twice that achievable by conventional solar cells—up to 66%,compared to 31% for present-day first- and second-generation solar cells.” In other words, just today’s research shows we can double the efficiency, or half the land area needed, for solar panels. How much more efficiency we can get with more research.

In energy storage, quantum computing is already used for “improving battery simulation models that could help accelerate research into safer, more efficient energy storage along with new battery materials for electric vehicle and other consumer applications.” Quantum computing can also help create EV batteries that are faster to charge.

Nitrogen cycle

The nitrogen cycle is the biogeochemical cycle by which nitrogen is converted into multiple chemical forms as it circulates among atmosphere, terrestrial, and marine ecosystems. Because of this capability, nitrogen is a critical element in our ecosystem.

As humans have interfered with the nitrogen cycle we are facing serious negative consequences in the core functions of nature; primary production including photosynthesis of plants, and decomposition. Accumulated levels of nitrogen in air and drinking water are also direct health risks for humans.

“Today, we spend approximately 3 percent of the world’s total energy output on making fertilizer. This relies on a process developed in the early 1900s that is extremely energy intensive—the reaction gas required is taken from natural gas, which is in turn required in very large amounts. However, we know that a tiny anaerobic bacteria in the roots of plants performs this same process every day at very low energy cost using a specific molecule—nitrogenase.

This molecule is beyond the abilities of our largest supercomputers to analyze, but would be within the reach of a moderate scale quantum computer.”

EDIT December 5, 2021. Added content:

Predicting catalyst behavior

In chemistry, catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change. Predicting exactly how catalysts will behave in a chemical reaction is difficult with todays classical computers.

Chemical and Engineering news wrote in 2017 that Chemistry is quantum computing's killer app

"Quantum computers could aid development of catalysts for clean energy and renewable chemical manufacturing, enable deeper understanding of the enzymes that underlie photosynthesis and the nitrogen cycle, power the discovery of high-temperature superconductors and new materials for solar cells, and much more."

Sources:

[1] https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/1351/ornls-200-petaflops-summit-supercomputer-has-arrived-to-become-worlds-fastest/

[1] https://www.rankred.com/fastest-supercomputers-in-the-world/

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.02732

[1] https://www.rankred.com/interesting-facts-about-quantum-computers/

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/finally-a-problem-that-only-quantum-computers-will-ever-be-able-to-solve-20180621/

[1] https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/59015.pdf

[1] https://www.eetimes.com/modeling-battery-designs-via-quantum-computers/#

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_cycle

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/problems-will-solve-quantum-computer/

https://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i43/Chemistry-quantum-computings-killer-app.html