102. AI and Energy Use, the Real Story Therapists Aren’t Looking At

By /

AI and Energy Use, the Real Story Therapists Aren’t Looking At

The conversation around AI and energy use has gotten loud, and if you care about the planet, it can leave you feeling guilty every time you reach for a tool that would actually save you from burnout. Maybe your teenager has told you you’re ruining the planet. Maybe a colleague keeps forwarding you articles about data centers. Maybe the guilt is all coming from you.

In this episode of Run Your Private Practice with AI, I dig into the research I did to finally answer the question I keep getting from therapists. There are two very different conversations happening about AI and energy, and they keep getting tangled together. I separate them, walk through the actual numbers, and share what surprised me once I sat down and really looked.

AI Tips You Don’t Want to Miss:

  • The two AI energy conversations that keep getting mixed up, and why only one of them is worth worrying about.
  • A grounded way to put your whole year of AI notes into perspective against the everyday things you already do.
  • Why being a telehealth provider already puts you ahead on carbon emissions before AI even enters the picture.
  • How to build an interactive lead magnet in Claude using Artifacts.
  • Using Cowork and Netlify to get an interactive page hosted and clickable when your usual platform won’t cooperate.

Mentioned in this episode:
AI and Energy Use Freebie to download: https://kymtolson.kartra.com/page/opt-in-energy-use

Little Bird AI: http://Littlebird.ai for two months free use code F3Q6ESFA

Run Your Private Practice with an AI Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/aiprivatepractice

Berries https://www.heyberries.com/therapists

EPOCH AI STUDY (ChatGPT Energy)

Title: How much energy does ChatGPT use?
Link: https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-much-energy-does-chatgpt-use
Published: February 7, 2025

NPJ DIGITAL MEDICINE STUDY (Telehealth Carbon)
Title: Telemedicine and the environment: life cycle environmental emissions from in-person and virtual clinic visits
Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-023-00818-7
Published: May 9, 2023

Connect with me:

Sponsored by Alma: www.helloalma.com/kym
Sponsored by Berries:www.heyberries.com/therapists
Sponsored by Auralink Pro: Start your free trial and use code KYMTOLSON for 20% off www.auralink.com/pro

Transcript:

[00:00:00] Your teen daughter thinks you’re destroying the planet by using AI to write your treatment plans. Your skeptical colleague won’t stop sending you articles about data centers. Your own guilt is making you hesitate on tools that would actually save your sanity. Welcome back to another episode of Grow Your Private Practice with AI.

[00:00:18] Okay, so the headlines are terrifying. AI is destroying the planet. Data centers are environmental disasters. And if you’re a thoughtful therapist who cares about the planet, you read that and think, “Well, I can’t use AI then. I can’t be a part of that.” Here’s the thing, the headlines are actually wrong.

[00:00:34] There are two completely different conversations happening about AI and energy, and they’re getting mixed up like crazy. One is real, one is being wildly overstated in my opinion. I’m sure I’ll get emails about this episode. I always do anytime I talk about this topic. But once you separate the two, the panic stops, and it allows us to have some freedom to use AI to help us in our practices.

[00:00:58] The one that’s grossly overstated is that using ChatGPT in your daily life, you asking it to help you brainstorm a marketing call or help you figure out your pricing for a new group that you’re wanting to start in your private practice, that’s you using a model that’s already been trained, and the energy cost is tiny, like invisibly tiny.

[00:01:19] So I keep getting the same questions for therapists, and it’s essentially is, “Isn’t AI bad for the environment?” And I kinda keep giving them a shrug or a vague, like, reassurance around it, which usually isn’t good enough. I’ve done a ton of research on this. I thought today I’d talk a little more about it because specifically in the free Facebook group, Run Your Private Practice with AI, one of the members- Posted anonymously, and she said, “I’m making this flyer for my business, and I wanted to show it to my teenage daughter just to get her feedback to see what she thought about it,” that sort of thing.

[00:01:53] And her daughter totally refused to even look at the flyer. She was like, “You’re ruining the planet, Mom, by using AI. I refuse to look at it.” So I was already working on this guide, but it’s prompted me to speed it up a little bit, this free guide. I’ll put the link down under in the show notes on energy use.

[00:02:09] It’s an interactive guide, so it talks about a lot of the calculations I’ve done that I’m gonna dig into, but it’s something you can go in and play around with. So there’s slider bars, and these are called artifacts in Claude, and I’ll talk more about that at the end, like how I did that. But I want you to go download it.

[00:02:24] If you’ve ever been worried about, like, how much energy am I using? I shouldn’t be using AI. I feel guilty, that sort of thing, check out this guide that I created. I want you to actually see it and play with it, and then share it with other people that might be asking the same questions, ’cause I think it really helps put everything into perspective for us.

[00:02:42] So there is actual research on this. Epoch AI’s energy analysis. I’ll put the link down below so you can go read the study. It’s a peer-reviewed study on the telehealth carbon footprint. But in the study, it also talks about the footprint of lots of other things that we’re using, like watching Netflix or charging your cell phone, using the microwave, using a Keurig, a K-cup, and how many watts of energy it basically uses when we’re doing those things in our day-to-day life.

[00:03:11] What I found about AI use specifically when I started to analyze, like, how much energy is used for charging your phone or watching Netflix, something like that, I figured out that really this guilt is real, right, around, like, I can’t use I- AI. It’s… We’re shaming ourselves. We’re not using it. We’re, like, torturing ourselves over, you know, trying to manually do a bunch of stuff that AI really could be handling a lot faster for us and saving us from burnout.

[00:03:38] So the guilt’s real, but the math is not real when you sit down and you really look at, like, how much energy you’re using just in day-to-day things versus, for example, how much energy does it take to generate one AI progress note? The one ChatGPT query uses the same energy as charging your phone for a couple of seconds.

[00:03:57] Your entire year of AI notes uses less electricity than one Netflix binge. And it also showed if you’re already a telehealth provider versus, like, somebody in an office, you’re already preventing 20 kgs of carbon emissions per session compared to in-person work. So if you’re already telehealth, you’re already saving the planet, so to speak.

[00:04:18] So let me give you the actual numbers. According to Epoch AI’s research from February 2025, one ChatGPT query uses approximately .3 watt hours of energy. Now, charging your cell phone to full capacity, we all do this every day, right? Every night I plug my phone in before I go to bed. That’s roughly 17 watt hours.

[00:04:39] So one ChatGPT query uses the same energy as charging your phone for about two seconds. Now let’s talk about your actual practice. If you’re using AI to write progress notes through Berries, for example, you guys know I’m the clinical consultant for Berries. If you’re using Berries to write your progress notes Which is probably the biggest use case for therapists to end burnout.

[00:05:03] Let’s say you’re doing 10 notes a week. That’s about 50 a month, roughly 600 a year. Of course, some therapists do more, some do less. Group practices do more, that sort of thing. 600 notes times 0.3 watt hours equals 180 watt hours per year for your entire year of AI-assisted documentation. To put that in perspective, running your dishwasher once uses about 1.5 to two watt hours.

[00:05:28] So your entire year of AI notes uses the same energy as running your dishwasher roughly 90 to 120 times. Or if you’re the type of person who runs it twice a week, that’s like one month and a half of dishwasher use for a year of clinical work. And I want to give you a few other comparisons so this really lands.

[00:05:45] A 30-minute Netflix episode on regular TV, about 60 to 72 watt hours depending on your screen size. So your year of AI notes, 600 notes, uses less energy than one Netflix episode. A single cup of coffee from a single serve brewer like a K-cup, about 60 to 100 watt hours. So again, a year’s worth of notes is less than one cup of coffee.

[00:06:09] A 10-minute car commute, that’s roughly 1,500 to 1,700 watt hours depending on the car. So your year of AI notes is less energy than a 10-minute drive. Now, I’m not saying this to minimize energy use. Energy matters. The planet matters. But I’m saying it so you can actually see the scale. Your AI habit really isn’t the problem.

[00:06:29] It’s a rounding error. It’s one of those things you wouldn’t even measure or decide to cut out if you were trying to cut your household carbon footprint. The panic comes really from conflating two things that aren’t the same: the environmental cost of training AI and the environmental cost of using AI.

[00:06:45] Training does happen, and it’s expensive. Using it happens thousands of times a day, and it’s cheap. So in my opinion, the first thing for a therapist to let go of is that guilt about the planet. And here’s something else that was in that study. The study was really about telehealth and how much energy it saves, that kind of thing.

[00:07:02] If you’re a telehealth therapist, a single in-person therapy session produces about 20 kilograms of CO2. That’s the transportation, the office space, all of it, 20 kilograms. A telehealth session produces 0.04 kilograms of CO2. So that’s a big difference In person is 20, telehealth is .04. That’s a 500 times difference.

[00:07:29] So if you’re a telehealth therapist, you’re already one of the most environmentally friendly ways to deliver mental health care. You’re already winning at the saving the planet thing. Your clients are already not driving anywhere. You’re not driving anywhere. You’re not using office space energy. You’re already doing the right thing.

[00:07:45] Now let’s talk about your AI notes on top of that. Let’s put that into context. Let’s say you’re using AI to write 600 notes a year, which again, is about 180 watts. That’s roughly the carbon equivalent of 0.018 kilograms of CO2 for the year. So your in-person clients would have produced 12 kilograms of CO2 for the same 600 sessions.

[00:08:06] So here’s, like, the simple version. Every telehealth session you do is already preventing about 20 kilograms of CO2 compared to that of in-person practitioners that are driving to and from the office and their clients are driving to and from the office. So if you want to know if your AI habit is bad for the planet, in my opinion, it’s not even close.

[00:08:25] Your telehealth practice, if you’re a telehealth practitioner, is already a climate solution. AI documentation is a tiny undetectable addition to something you’re already doing right. Someone in your life, a client, a colleague, your daughter, your family members, is worried about the AI and the environment, here’s what you can tell them.

[00:08:42] “You’re right to care, but I’m already doing telehealth. I’m already preventing massive carbon emissions just by showing up virtually instead of going to an office. My AI notes are a fraction of a fraction of that win. The environmental concern is valid in theory, but in practice, my practice is already the climate solution.”

[00:09:01] So anyway, that’s my soapbox about AI and energy. When I started really looking at the numbers, I was pretty shocked that it equaled out that way, ’cause I, you know, I feel guilty about it, too. But I actually wanted to take the time to go research that stuff to give you, like, the real data about it. So I would say go research it yourself.

[00:09:18] Let me know what you find out. But download my guide ’cause it gives you a ton of comparisons, and it’s really cool. It’s interactive, so you could just, like, click, and there’s a slider, and it’s gonna show you like, oh, I did three AI notes. What’s the equivalent to that? Oh, okay, maybe I shouldn’t use the Keurig coffee maker today.

[00:09:34] Cut that out. You’re saving the same amount of energy. I do want to talk about these interactive guides. If you do download this guide I’m gonna put in the show notes, I want you to check out how it’s got all these interactive things going on in it. So with Claude now, Claude has this thing called Artifacts.

[00:09:49] I don’t know if you guys have seen it, but if you go into Claude, go under Artifacts, click it, and it’ll just ask you, like, “What do you wanna create today?” It’ll just ask you, “What do you wanna create today?” So you could say apps and websites, documents and templates, games, productivity tools, creative projects, a quiz or a survey, or just start from scratch with just, like, vibe coding an idea with Claude.

[00:10:12] So if you go in there, let’s say I wanted to do this lead magnet that I did for this energy use thing. I just went in and said, “I want to show a really interactive comparison of how this much energy equals this much energy.” I dropped the study, I dropped some, like, notes that I’d already taken about it, and I put it into Claude under the artifacts and I said, “Create this.”

[00:10:33] And it made this really cool landing page that you’ll see. It’s essentially a landing page, but you could call it a freebie lead magnet. It’s essentially a landing page that you go click on, you open up, and it’s got all these really cool things in it. Sliders, it can do calculations for you, it can have tiles on your website where you click on and the tile turns around and then it says the answers to, like, flash cards almost.

[00:10:56] There’s so many things. I’ve done a couple of them, but the possibilities are really endless and you could say, “I want it to do that. I want it to be interactive this way. I wanna embed a quiz that then gives them…” You know, what are those old books back in the day that, like, choose your own adventure?

[00:11:10] Like, you can make this all on a landing page, or it can be a website. I mean, however you wanna do it, it works, just as long as you get Claude to generate the HTML in the background that’ll make it interactive for you. Now, one problem I did run into is I use a delivery management system called Kartra.

[00:11:30] It’s where I keep my email list and build up my landing pages. It’s where my memberships are housed, so people can join my memberships, that kind of thing. So I developed a really special skill in Claude to, like, convert the HTML to Kartra, because Kartra’s got this weird they call it, like, a wrapper, an HTML wrapper that’s different than regular HTML.

[00:11:50] So it was kind of a pain to figure out, but I did figure it out. But what I haven’t been able to figure out is how to embed these interactive pages in Kartra like I have with all my other landing pages that Claude’s been helping me create. So I was talking to Claude, I was like, “This is not working. It’s not interactive for the user because it’s having to be routed through Claude essentially.”

[00:12:12] And Claude was like, “Why don’t you try Netlify?” Which I hadn’t thought of. If you guys don’t know what this is, Netlify is, like, a hosting platform that’s got a back end hosting component, so you can put databases there, you can put websites there, landing pages, that sort of thing. And they do have, like, paid tiers, but I’m on the free tier over there right now.

[00:12:31] And I was like, “Oh, that’s so smart.” So I went to Cowork and I said, “I wanna embed this on Netlify,” ’cause I don’t wanna spend the time really to deep dive into all of Netlify and how to set this thing up. So Cowork took over my computer, went to my Chrome browser, opened up my Netlify. It made me log in ’cause it can’t

[00:12:50] Like, the cap- CAPTCHAs where you have to solve a puzzle or whatever, Claude can’t do those for you. And it’s not supposed to log in for you unless you give it, like, explicit permission, so it couldn’t do it, so I had to log it in. After that, it went in, it found how to set it up. It did it all for me, like I could watch it doing it on my browser, set the whole thing up, put the URL in there, and then it was like, “It’s ready.

[00:13:12] It’s clickable.” So I click it, and I open it up into like a essentially web browser. It’ll work on people’s phones, too, and it’s totally interactive, and you can use it that way. So this lead magnet that is under these show notes about the energy use is one of those interactive lead magnets that I had to use Netlify for to set up.

[00:13:30] Normally, it would just all have gone through my Kartra Now organizing and keep track of where everything is, that’s a little more complicated. I actually just downloaded this thing called Little Bird, and I’m gonna put my referral link down below if you wanna check it out. But Little Bird lives in your desktop on your computer, and it basically takes snapshots all day long of everything that you’re doing, and it keeps track of where you’re doing things.

[00:13:55] So I’ve got Perplexity, Manus, Comet Browser, Claude, Claude Cowork, ChatGPT. I’ve got all these places that I go, and each place basically, you know, has got something that I like there that I wanna go use for the specific thing that I’m doing. And, you know, Little Bird keeps track of it. So you can go to Little Bird and say, like I did for this podcast episode, I was like, “I already had like a brief idea of like a podcast episode I wanna do around this energy use thing.

[00:14:24] Where is that?” ‘Cause I know I jotted it down somewhere, but I couldn’t remember. So Little Bird searched all of my history through all of my AIs , through my emails, everything, and said, “Here it is. I found it for you.” Game changer. If you’re anything like me, super ADD, where you’ve got like 50 tabs open on one browser window, and then another browser window has got more tabs open for some other purpose, this thing is keeping track of what I’m doing all over the place all day long on my computer.

[00:14:52] You can even set up routines with it, so at the end of the day it sends me an email, and it says, “This is what you did today.” It’s like a summary, and I’m like, “Wow, I did a lot of shit today.” And in the mornings, I’ve got it set up for a brief in the mornings, and it’s sending me like, “Here’s… I pulled your calendar.

[00:15:08] I pulled your Fathom recordings from yesterday.” It pulls like all of your workflows from everywhere, and it gives you a summary, and it’s like, “Here’s what you need to pay attention to today.” For example, I’ve got this free summit I agreed to do about AI and therapists and running your private practice and all that.

[00:15:25] The recording is due June 8th, and this thing basically today in my morning report, it was like, “You better focus on this today because it’s due, and Christina, your business manager, is still gonna need to be able to deliver it, package it up, and send it over to the summit leader.” So I mean, that’s pretty exciting.

[00:15:44] It basically told me, “Get on it, Kim. Don’t mess around on your computer all day doing something that’s totally irrelevant or not something that’s important,” because my team is depending on me to get this out. The leader of the summit needs it by that certain date. I need to create an accompanying tool for the VIP tier also.

[00:16:02] So all of that being said, Little Bird’s really cool, and I’m gonna put the referral link down below. And I’ll tell you guys more about the summit probably next episode because the affiliate links aren’t quite ready yet that give me like, if you sign up for the VIP tier, I get credit. I think I get like 50% of whatever the VIP tier is.

[00:16:21] And it’s good. I mean, there’s like probably 30 participants in this, and I think the VIP tier gives you access to all of them forever if you just pay, like, I think it’s like $97 or something like that. So anyway, I’ll give you more details next time. That’s all I’ve got for today. Let me know if you have any questions.

[00:16:38] If you hate me for talking about using AI and energy, email me. It’s fine. I get emails all the time every time I put a episode out about AI, somebody… Like, hate mail. You know, “I don’t use AI, take me off your list,” that sort of thing. So if you’re one of those people, feel free, reach out. If you love this episode, it’s super helpful, reach out to me too, ’cause I’d love to hear how these episodes are helping you guys in your business, and particularly this one.

[00:17:02] The naysayers, the ones that are giving you a hard time about it, like, just share this guide and show them how much energy they’re really using with actually using AI on a day-to-day basis. Okay, talk to you later. Bye bye.