Comment by kulahan 10 hours ago
With AI on the horizon and each server farm using as much energy as a medium-sized city, I have no idea how they hope to meet demand otherwise, unless the plan is just some equivalent to "drill baby drill".
Could you expand more on your car point? I thought BMW and Benz were doing great at the moment. I dunno much about Audi or VW, but Mini also seems to be doing well (which I thought was British, but one of their models has literally the same engine as my last bimmer, so I guess they were sold at some point?).
It would take a long time to build new reactors, so not sure that would help.
Germany could also do more wind, solar, tidal, geothermal (fossil fuels aside).
I'm not sure how tidal and geothermal fare in Germany
It seems that some geothermal works have caused mini-earthquakes and soil shifts in Germany and the Netherlands
My baseline expectation is some opposition to any new energy infrastructure.
It is going to take a long time and a lot of resources no matter what so maybe we should be building effective longterm solutions like nuclear instead of stopgap solar and batteries
Not even “instead”. We need all of the above: nuclear for base loads, solar for peak loads, batteries for surplus capture.
Base load is a concept of the past, grids around the world are being redesigned to be flexible to reap zero-production-costs renewable energy. Nuclear (which is impossible to run economically as a flexible asset) simply does not fit into that new world anymore.
This right here. It's not one or the other, its a diverse combination of all of them that makes for the best results.
Why would, e.g., solar and chemical or physical storage be a stopgap? Why spend 20 years of building a fission reactor these days (other than for research, medical, or defense purposes) which also make awful targets in a conflict? Maybe just wait till fusion reactors are there.
Because the reactor will still run 20 years after that while the solar and storage will need to be replaced by then
You limit data center power demand until the AI bubble pops.
Peak Bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45218790 - September 2025
US Data center projects blocked or delayed amid local opposition - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44097350 - May 2025
Other countries can shoulder the cost of the hand waving grift. If it turns out they succeed, lift their models and weights. Eat some potential IP liability for not incurring economic damage ("inefficient capital allocation") chasing magic. Be first, be smarter, or cheat ("you can just do things"). DeepSeek showed a bit of this (model training efficiency), as Apple does slow walking their gen AI. Why incur material economic risk to be first? There will be no moat.
Given how fast compute needs replacing, it's not much of a fall behind.
Citizens will indeed use them anyway, but there's already free models that are OK and which only need 8x current normal device RAM. Bubble bursts tomorrow? Currently-SOTA models on budget phones by the end of the decade.
They can’t even use the products as a result of their obsession with government regulation. For example, Apple released a universal translator, literally right out of Star Trek, but the EU won’t be getting it either.
A country is not forced to have AI farms running in it. Building giant powerplant for the AI tech (possible) bubble not seems wise.
The plant will take 5 - 10 years to build, who knows what demands AI will have at that point.
SO let some countries that want to spent enormous amounts of their energy on AI do so, adn the rest can connect to those.
This is shortsighted. China routinely experiences large overcapacity in their electricity grid just to deal with the unknown unknowns of outages and other new demands. Suppose that the AI bubble burst and AI energy use is negligible, the extra capacity could be used for something else: retire your traditional coal fired furnaces for steel making and replacing them with electric arc furnaces; produce more aluminum; build more EV chargers.
Yeah, advanced geothermal is very interesting. They're taking fracking techniques and using them to get to hot rocks, which opens up geothermal to a much, much wider set of locations. Interested parties say it could provide everything we need beyond wind/solar, and seems much simpler than building out nuclear plants.
Check out:
https://www.volts.wtf/p/catching-up-with-enhanced-geothermal
> baseload generation, like when demand massively spikes
That is unlike any definition of baseload generation I have ever heard.
It’s simple, Germany isn’t going to be participating in the next industrial revolution. It will be the US vs. China. You can already see it happening with their car industry as they struggle to keep up with new technology.