Comment by arghwhat

Comment by arghwhat 3 hours ago

It's not the power demand that is the problem.

It's that the majority of AI deployments are happening in a country which has a has had very poor renewable adoption and is now actively sabotaging renewable projects with an active opposition to climate goals because a particular group wants to protect their existing revenue.

Renewables are cheap and highly profitable, and money talks - even in the US, as can be seen in Texas. But it's hard to fight against your government when they want to force you to buy their rich friends' fossil fuels instead...

cmiles8 2 hours ago

This is a pretty gross mis characterization of what’s happening. There’s been a lot written about the fluff that is a lot of these AI company “purchases” of “green” energy. In practice there’s no way to get that power from (insert middle of nowhere location with green energy plant) to (insert location of AI datacenter) so to actually power the data center the utility is forced to power on some clunky old coal plant to keep the chips powered.

The AI company is issuing press releases saying how they bought all this clean power but in practice they just forced some old clunky power plants back online to meet their demand.

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arghwhat an hour ago

What your are describing is purchasing certificates from renewable energy vendors, which while technically a small investment (more money to the renewable energy vendor → renewable business growth → more renewable energy projects) has very little to do with renewable energy projects like those I was talking about.
It is technically possible for the AI companies to decide to become self-sufficient or enter into the energy production market if things tilt far enough in favor of that, but it is somewhat unlikely and unexpected.
Big renewable projects are run by electricity producers, not consumers, and they are the ones being actively sabotaged in all sorts of ways.

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dangus 2 hours ago

Exactly this. Powering all AI data centers with renewable energy is actually trivially easy.

You could even legislate it and make big tech companies responsible for providing the power themselves. One stroke of the pen resolves the issue.

If OpenAI can afford to “spend $1 trillion” on AI they can afford to build some wind/solar/battery power plants.

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schiffern an hour ago
>You could even legislate it
Spoiler alert:
"At BigGridCo we're proud to switch AI to 100% renewable power. On paper we just send all the dirty power to (scoffs) pesky houses and industry, leaving the clean power for AI."
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exabrial 2 hours ago

That’s power that could have been used to shut off coal plants. Instead now you’ve extended their lives.

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nradov 2 hours ago

In what sense is it trivially easy? The battery supply chain is still backlogged and will be for years to come.

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- dangus 2 hours ago
  
  Nuclear power works too, it’s clean and low carbon impact.
  Can Microsoft and Google not afford to build a battery factory or nuclear power plant? Are they broke or something?
  Why is the solution to scarcity of supply to bend over backwards and roll back regulations? The scarcity of supply itself should be a hint to society to stop supporting unfettered growth. Or maybe these mega-corporations need to get over it and pay fair market value for the projects they want to build.
  Why do we have to breathe coal power emissions so that we can have one more ChatGPT wrapper nobody asked for?
  
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  hvb2 an hour ago
  
  > Nuclear power works too, it’s clean and low carbon impact.
  You want an AI company to invest in a project that takes decades to complete? What are the chances they're around when it completes and what powers their datacenters while that takes place
  
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  arghwhat an hour ago
  
  Just to be pedantic: The median construction time is 7 years. With very slow planning, it is a decade, not decades. It can be done faster though.
  Our power consumption won't be going down, and it generally wouldn't be the AI company itself running the project but the electricity companies that earn money supplying power that see dollar signs in all that extra electricity consumption.
  Even if the AI companies all die, our global electricity consumption will keep going up margins will be better than the retired plants, so it's a good investment regardless.
  
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badgersnake 2 hours ago

Not if your government refuses to let you build any renewable capacity.

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- dangus 2 hours ago
  
  Hence the stroke of the pen. That’s all a policy choice.
  
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