cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/32465427
Datacentres consume just 1% of the world’s electricity but may soon demand much more. Their share of US electricity is projected to more than double to 8.6% by 2035, according to BloombergNEF, while the IEA projects datacentres will account for at least 20% of the rich world’s growth in electricity demand to the end of the decade.
“This idea that the lower cost of renewables alone will drive decarbonisation – it’s not enough,” said Daly. “Because if there’s a huge source of energy demand that wants to grow, it will land on these stranded fossil fuel assets.”
Tech companies have resisted pressure to provide detailed data on their AI energy footprints,
The IEA estimates that AI could boost technically recoverable oil and gas reserves by 5% and cut the cost of a deepwater offshore project by 10%. Big oil is even more bullish. “Artificial intelligence is, ultimately, within the industry, going to be the next fracking boom,” Mike Sommers, head of the American Petroleum Institute, told Axios.
At the same time, the oil and gas industry says AI can cut its carbon intensity, for instance by analysing satellite data to spot methane leaks. But even here, critics say there is a gap between digital insights and corporate actions.
AI is exacerbating the damage we are causing by staying on fossil fuels. I see the issue is mainly political as we have green energy and all
There’s also a huge issue around water use which isn’t mentioned in the article.
The water use issue is largely blown out of proportion or not compared to other sources of water use.
The US Corn industry alone uses 80x the water usage of the entire global AI industry.
Hank Green on YT goes over it in more details and with citations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
It’s also going to get more efficient, like Amazon’s data centers have been over time. By the way, where was this zeal over water usage from people back when AWS and other data centers started popping up all over the place?
The water issue will end up being more in how local water tables are affected, not overall consumption.
Yeah but when but gets 20% more efficient they build a second one. You still end up with a net increase.
Fair, but corn has a use. (Also not one I agree with but you get my meaning.)
Only 1% of the corn grown in the US is eaten by people. Most of it is used as animal feed (which is catastrophic on their systems as their stomachs aren’t designed to digest corn, so their corn diet slowly kills them) and a large portion is made into ethanol and added to gasoline. The corn subsidies are so dumb that they require a minimum amount of the corn being grown to be turned into ethanol, which is extremely inefficient.
The Hank Green video someone linked above goes over some of the stuff I mentioned.
Yeah, exactly.
Good news is there is increased investment in nuclear energy for data centers, which will go a long way to combat this.
not going to happen lol, nuclear takes at least a decade or more to build, and then approve by regulatory bodies, and people are not keen on having nuclear plants built near cities. plus once the bubble bursts, whos going to maintain those nuclear plants.
God no, it will not. Aside from the discussion whether nuclear is really a good way to generate electricity (and I think it’s not): The demand is so insanely huge that it’s actually stacked: green plus coal plus gas plus oil plus nuclear is currently getting “assigned” to genai.
What do you think will replace fossil fuels as our baseload source? Because (to my understanding) renewables don’t have the output and stability required to fill that void.
Watt for watt, nuclear is one of the safest methods of generation and generates tons of energy with minimal waste (which already has methods of storage and reprocessing).
random, barely related thought
It always amuses me to point out that fossil fuel plants like coal are more radioactive than nuclear power plants. Because nuclear plants have strict regulations they have to follow, but coal plants concentrate radioactive materials into the ash as part of their normal operation, which can make it to the outside.
Please see my other comment: whether nuclear power is good or bad is not my point, the monstrously power hungry genai shit is.
Your understanding would change if you actually looked into the facts and the numbers, and change even more if you’d been keeping track of what financial markets have put their money into for well over a decade.
So fossil fuels better? Nuclear works great for France.
All nice and well but it is not my point here. My point is that I disagree that adding nuclear is good as it doesn’t remove fossils from the mix in the first place. LLM/genai is a problem no matter how much power you throw at it.
What has worked great for France is keeping their nuclear mishaps very well hidden… as it did for the Saint-Laurent meltdown in 1980, and at the Centraco plant in 2011, for two examples.
I’d rather just not build them
Is Coal and Gas is your preferred energy source? Because that’s what nuclear would be replacing.
That expenditure would displace the 10x the power which renewables + storage have already proven to do all over the world… that’s what nuclear would replace. Nuclear is never good news.
There are no other alternatives for baseline power generation.
You can’t run a national grid on 100% renewables and batteries. If you’re not using nuclear then you’re using fossil and fossil fuels are not only polluting but the dependence on them creates a huge amount of political instability around the world.
Nuclear plants use less uranium than Coal plants burn into the atmosphere. Coal has trace amount of radioactive uranium and if you burn hundreds of thousands of tons of it every year then you’re putting pounds of radioactive uranium into the atmosphere.
Natural Gas is still fossil fuel.
Ok. You still have to push electrons and also not destroy the global climate.
As much as you think it is BS, datacenters exist and they are attached to the same grid as your house, so if you don’t want the power to your house to go away then the grid needs more generating capacity. Unless you want to live under the ocean or in a desert then that capacity can’t produce CO2. The only options which generate power are renewables and nuclear. Solar and Wind cannot provide baseline power generation and the renewables that can provide baseline power (hydroelectric, for example) are limited in where they can be deployed.
So what power generating source exists that can generate baseline power, doesn’t produce CO2 and can be used without specific geological formations?
Nuclear investments will probably just meet the increase in energy consumption due to new datacenters, not make an energy transition
The datacenters.
I’d rather it didn’t rain today, but it did and I still needed to bring an umbrella no matter how much I didn’t like the rain.
Nuclear energy is never good news.
Solar energy can boil water too. At much lower cost, 10x faster build times, and MUCH less waste … none that has to be guarded for centuries.
Never safe, never clean, never too cheap to meter. The exact opposite of the sales pitches. Rarely built without taxpayer dollars. Name the companies willing to insure one.
Crazy people still get downvoted in Lemmy for reminding everyone that Nuclear energy is the most expensive form of generating power while solar, wind, and water are the cheapest.
When you include storage in your cost calculations, this is far, far from the case. If you don’t include storage, you are pairing renewables with natural gas peaker plants, which defeat a good bit of the point of renewables being fossil-fuel-free.
People just eat the “nuclear waste isn’t a problem actually ignore that in some places we’re already seeing it wasn’t stored safely aftet all” propaganda from the nuclear lobby right up.
And forget that just because nuclear plants are pretty damn safe when everything is done properly, people are notoriously great at not doing things properly, hence why 2 of the things have melted down so far (though i should say the same applies to hydro, except I only know of 1 disaster instead of 2, and the financial damage is less because water doesnt contaminate the ground for forever. Killed a lot of people though).
I’ll take it over fossil fuels still because co2 is also a huge problem, and having nuclear waste at all is a bigger problem than adding slightly more while we transition to full renewables.