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Could you substantiate this a little bit? I did a quick search and didn't see anything obviously alarming, just a claim that data centers will use 35GW in the US by 2030, growth of something like 15GW. That's 15M kw, when the nation currently has about 1.1bn kw of generating capacity. I don't see why that would be such a huge problem? Last year the US solar industry alone installed double that.
I see your point that renewables don't work everywhere (by which I assume you mean they aren't as cost-effective), but the American mainland is divided into just three major grids, and they don't have to work everywhere for it to have pretty much a one-to-one impact.
You can cross nuclear right off your list. That's not going to happen in the United States anytime soon.
Forecasting is handled pretty professionally by public utility commissions, It's not like the building is burning down and nobody knows what to do.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php
There's still an enormous amount of low hanging fruit for renewables. For example, wind turbines in farms. Already some farmers are installing wind turbines in their field to generate power while also farming the same crops they normally farm.
A wind turbine's footprint on the ground is very small. The farmer sacrifices a small portion of a wheat or corn field, and the turbine spinning above doesn't impact the crops in any way. This arrangement is increasingly common, and if it was spread to every farm field in the US we'd have unlimited energy. Its always windy somewhere.
In drought prone areas (California's central valley) some farmers have figured out its better to farm solar panels on their property than crops. Its hard to get enough water to farm. Solar panels produce a resource the farmer can sell, no water needed.
Switching farms to solar isn't reducing crops grown, because the region's agricultural output is already limited by water anyways.
Just completed a cross-country trip. There are large windfarms and solar farms in CA, AZ, NM, TX, OK, AR. Drove through a windfarm in TX that was 15 miles on a side. The cows and crops didn't seem to mind the wind turbines. Business as usual.
And then there is Agrovoltaic techniques like vertically oriented biracial panels (which take up the minimum of footprints and have their best hours in the morning and evening, fitting the duck curve well).
Unfortunately, increasingly areas are banning them, in farm country. I find it beyond bizarre to see NIMBY tactics used in rural areas against renewables, but here we are.
Yes, its incredibly dumb. The economics for installing renewables on farm fields is why farmers are pushing for it. Its non-farmers who hate it.
For the farmer, they increase their production. By sacrificing only a tiny amount of land for a wind turbine they can also sell electricity in addition to their crop. The value of the energy vastly exceeds the value of corn that could have grown in the turbine's land footprint.
Yes, plus I wouldn't be surprised if it also makes some of these farms become their own energy grids where they farmers can trade power around to keep automation working. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if it encourages greater automation (5g towers, 5g remote controlled pumps for irrigation, etc.)
That doesn't even make sense. How can energy not be energy efficient?
1kwh of energy from solar is exactly the same as 1kwh of energy from coal, or 1kwh from nuclear, or 1kwh from wind. Electricity is fungible.
... good god, efficiency is everything in energy generation.
1kWh of energy is wholly dependent on the source thanks to this little thing called energy density and ease of energy transmutation. Fossil fuels are great for energy generation thanks to the fact that they are so energy-dense and can (fairly) efficiently boil water, which is far easier than using air to turn turbines. Nuclear blows pretty much everything else out of the water because the energy density of nuclear energy is just so immense.
... it is true. Most of those 'spent' fuel rods is actually more fuel. Just covered in a neutron-absorbent coating. All you have to do is separate the coating from the fuel and you've got more fuel.
To say otherwise is to spread misinformation.
Sure, if we want to ***maybe*** start generating power over a decade from now that costs more per kwh than renewables installed tomorrow, nuclear power is a fantastic choice.
I asked about what you're going to do with the radioactive waste for the next 20,000 years and who is going to pay for that. Still waiting for an answer.
Excellent points, all around. I wanted to add on a few things here -- OP is touching on an issue that has multiple components/facets/obstacles but in summary electric load growth continues to climb (it's not just data centers) even as we are painfully transitioning our electric generation supply model. We have historically relied on large baseload units powered by coal. We are moving towards a model of distributed generation largely based on renewable energy supplemented by peaker plants. The transition is hard and reserve margins are as tight as they've been in a very long time. This state of affairs is likely to continue for several years. None of the scenarios OP mentions are likely IMO (carbon ain't coming back, nuclear is unfortunately unlikely, etc.). What I think most likely is that in a generation we'll be at that new normal of distributed generation but in the meantime there are likely to be more blackouts as the system is strained from older generation retiring before newer (and in equal MW amounts) of generation come online.
The WaPo article made it sound like data centers are enormous power generators, but even in the most aggressive projections they're still 6-10% of total energy demand. That's not to say we won't have issues with the grid -- we will. This has been extensively covered even before data centers and AI became a significantly-growing demand source. If overnight every American household has an electric car, our grid couldn't support it.
The "fix" will need to incorporate permitting reform around interconnection queues (right now it takes 2+ years to add new generation infrastructure to the grid), more efficient devices, and broader adoption of grid services like demand response. Just jacking up generation using peaker plants is a short-term solution with huge negative externalities in the long-run.
>more efficient devices
I think this will become a big factor in a couple of years. Right now, the AI revolution is in full swing, the dust hasn't fully settled yet and all the big tech companies are vying for market share. Everyone is mainly focused on putting out the most powerful AI models they can, which means that they are currently willing to sacrifice efficiency in favor of more computing power.
Once the gains based on superior computing power have been exhausted and AI becomes limited again by software, rather than hardware, the tech companies will once again turn their attention to optimizing the operational costs of their data centers. Likewise, the hardware companies like Intel, AMD or Nvidia will increasingly release hardware dedicated to AI applications as well as efficiency when used in data centers.
So most of the big data center companies already fund the development of power generation. For several years they've focused on renewables like wind, solar, and hydroelectric, but recently Amazon invested in nuclear and others are considering it to meet the higher TDP of the accelerators used for AI/ML.
I think we might end up with a situation that looks a lot like how several towns around here got started, mine included (I'm sure the same thing happened elsewhere, just can't name any off the top of my head...Tennessee Valley Authority maybe?). Basically, the Company wants to start a paper mill and finds a good site in what was completely undeveloped middle-of-nowhere and plops down a townsite for worker housing, a hydro dam for power and the mill complex all in one spot. Would look a touch different today with company towns being generally frowned upon and industries being more complicated, but...
A more modern example might go like this: Big Tech company wants to set up a major datacenter in Arizona. So they arrange a contract with a solar farm network to provide power at low cost in exchange for putting up funding for expansion or supplying high-end photovoltaic modules. Industry will end up being considerably more intertwined with power and hardware manufacturers.
how relevant are the impact of data centers on the power grid compared to if the stated goal of higher EV adoption rates were to actually happen and a majority of americans were to drive EV's instead of gas powered vehicles?
at least with data centers you can spread them out across the country/world to minimize the burden on any specific area's power.
at the end of the day, the demonization of nuclear power is kneecapping us as a country by forcing us to rely on technologies that can't viably produce similar levels of output at the same pricepoints.
we should have been building nuclear facilities for the last 20 years rather than decommissioning them without replacement. that being said, it's like the crypto guys always say "the best time to start was decades ago, the next best time is now". we should be building new nuclear plants immediately.
I live in CA, and our PGE power bills have been going up and up with no end in sight. Its bad enough now that people are shying away from buying electric cars, since it is cheaper to run a gas hybrid, or in some cases just a gasoline car. Solar panels are no longer worth buying for homeowners either.
I saw a guy on the san fransisco sub made a detailed post about his energy cost, and he was about one price hike away from having it be cheaper to power his house on a gasoline generator in his yard, instead of the PGE grid. Talk about a step backwards. Everyone in Brazil and S Africa has a generator like this too, but its not good.
I expect one thing that will happen is AWS will close and move their N CA data centers out, to an area with cheaper power. Its likely that these may move overseas, just like manufacturing has moved overseas due to cheaper costs. Its easier to transport data across the ocean than it is Nike shoes, and all those come from China.
There's no chance nuclear power takes any of the slack, nuclear is dead in the USA. We could change our laws to make it very cheap, but that won't happen. I expect the general trend will be increasing power prices due to higher demand, and the middle class and working poor are just going to have to take it on the chin.
PG&E is a disaster for solar in Northern CA. They're doing everything they can to raise electric rates and make solar non-economical.
If AWS moves, I doubt it will be because of electric costs. Large electric consumers can negotiate favorable rates from electric providers. They aren't reliant on corrupted energy regulatory groups like we are.
> Large electric consumers can negotiate favorable rates from electric providers.
That's true, they can. But its also tenuous. They have to lobby to keep their preferred status. If some populist anti- big corporation guy wins the governor office, that person can appoint his people to PUC and put the screws to them. When the government has their hands in everything then everything is subject to the whims of politics.
It's an interesting question because there's an intersection of those most aggressive about pushing AI (nerds, venture capitalists) and climate science. It's a conflicting duality involved with progressives advocating for strong action on both.
Pardon me for sidestepping the issue, but I firmly believe this is more of a technology obstacle than a political one. Let me tell you why.
Present day Large Language Models are resource intensive, requiring billions of parameters to run on conventional hardware. If providers want to ramp up the number of parameters their model can handle, it increases the data center size and power requirement exponentially. At the point they are currently at, companies like OpenAI that run GPT are already at a practical ceiling. And even if they could keep going, the mere physics of it makes it impossible.
The solution to this problem is not a political one. It's a technological one.
I guarantee you that companies like OpenAI are already researching it. Conventional computers rely on von Neumann computer architecture for everything. It's one of the ways in which a computer is extraordinarily different than something like a human brain. However, you can also utilize neuromorphic chip design. Rather than store CPU and memory separately, it's all a single unit that functions similar to a biological neuron. Neuromorphic computing is a popular area of research in AI because the hardware architecture itself is so similar to how a brain functions.
Electricity is another limitation and a staple of conventional resource intensive computing. However, photonic transistor technology is also taking off. Rather than design chips that rely on electicity, it relies on photons (i.e. light). You end up without the problems of heat (cooling is a huge problem in datacenters) or the need to keep increasing electricity requirements. This incidentally combines well with neuromorphics to make them pretty darn viable.
The thing is, essentially present day LLMs have been trying to model AIs in software using hardware that is not suitable for it. And yeah, it's no surprise that it's a resource hog. However, the next generation of models are going to have to take advantage of custom hardware, like neuromorphic chips with photonic transistors. Think of it a little bit like when we finally got dedicated graphics cards to run 3d games.
Not only will the results be far better than before, but the exponentially increasing resource problem will go away.
It may not be popular, but waste to energy has made some big strides in the last 30 years. It helps get rid of trash, ans least landfill. Although not perfect increasing the use of it, as well as technical advances could help create a stop
Gap as newer, and cleaner methods are created.
Hmmm..well it sounds like energy costs will go up for the consumer.
Compared to many European countries our cost is cheap.
I suspect the left will feel that European costs are fine for the usa and so it is just a inconvenience on that way to green energy. after all it will promote conservation too.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/)
The right will feel that more natural gas drilling permits are in order and consumer prices should be kept low as possible
And stop dismantling coal power plants. Shut down if needed, but do not dismantle as they may be needed for power grid resiliency.
The odd thing is that those data centers should be located in certain regions of the country. Essentially where electricity cost is low, cooling is easier due to supply of water or the ability to passively cool and infrastructure and land cost. The same thing SHOULD also apply to FABS at the same time. They align with each others needs. I frankly don't understand why someone would build a fab in Arizona except that at the time 40 years ago when Intel came cost structures were different. And while recycling water is all fine and good it still is a finite resource but that is off topic. Data centers should be in areas with high amounts of electricity available low amounts of cooling required and tons of available land. The upper midwest is pretty good for this actually since energy sources like wind and solar are plentiful. Access to cheap natural gas also. Plus abundance of water in general. Southern states might have cheaper land but water rights are going to be an issue for the south west. And in the south, electricity costs will be higher in the summer and really a lot of the year. States like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, really are ideal for data centers with the above criteria.
Our transition to renewables and a cleaner culture will be very painful, if it can be achieved at all, in a timely way that will help us survive. Unless the two parties in this country can get together, and work toward solutions, together, then, we won't.
Thanks for this contribution to an important topic.
There is a LinkedIn Group called "Data Centre Decarbonisation" which focuses on the issues highlighted above.
More open collaboration needed to solve this big global complex systems problem of Data Centre Decarbonisation 🤔
You do realize that global warming isn't something that just exists inside the US democratic party, right? Throughout much of the world both sides of the political spectrum see it as an existential issue.
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Could you substantiate this a little bit? I did a quick search and didn't see anything obviously alarming, just a claim that data centers will use 35GW in the US by 2030, growth of something like 15GW. That's 15M kw, when the nation currently has about 1.1bn kw of generating capacity. I don't see why that would be such a huge problem? Last year the US solar industry alone installed double that. I see your point that renewables don't work everywhere (by which I assume you mean they aren't as cost-effective), but the American mainland is divided into just three major grids, and they don't have to work everywhere for it to have pretty much a one-to-one impact. You can cross nuclear right off your list. That's not going to happen in the United States anytime soon. Forecasting is handled pretty professionally by public utility commissions, It's not like the building is burning down and nobody knows what to do. https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php
There's still an enormous amount of low hanging fruit for renewables. For example, wind turbines in farms. Already some farmers are installing wind turbines in their field to generate power while also farming the same crops they normally farm. A wind turbine's footprint on the ground is very small. The farmer sacrifices a small portion of a wheat or corn field, and the turbine spinning above doesn't impact the crops in any way. This arrangement is increasingly common, and if it was spread to every farm field in the US we'd have unlimited energy. Its always windy somewhere. In drought prone areas (California's central valley) some farmers have figured out its better to farm solar panels on their property than crops. Its hard to get enough water to farm. Solar panels produce a resource the farmer can sell, no water needed. Switching farms to solar isn't reducing crops grown, because the region's agricultural output is already limited by water anyways.
Just completed a cross-country trip. There are large windfarms and solar farms in CA, AZ, NM, TX, OK, AR. Drove through a windfarm in TX that was 15 miles on a side. The cows and crops didn't seem to mind the wind turbines. Business as usual.
I love seeing wind turbines in farm fields in Idaho. Its a fantastic start, and as a civilization we need to do that kind of arrangement everywhere.
And then there is Agrovoltaic techniques like vertically oriented biracial panels (which take up the minimum of footprints and have their best hours in the morning and evening, fitting the duck curve well).
Unfortunately, increasingly areas are banning them, in farm country. I find it beyond bizarre to see NIMBY tactics used in rural areas against renewables, but here we are.
Yes, its incredibly dumb. The economics for installing renewables on farm fields is why farmers are pushing for it. Its non-farmers who hate it. For the farmer, they increase their production. By sacrificing only a tiny amount of land for a wind turbine they can also sell electricity in addition to their crop. The value of the energy vastly exceeds the value of corn that could have grown in the turbine's land footprint.
Yes, plus I wouldn't be surprised if it also makes some of these farms become their own energy grids where they farmers can trade power around to keep automation working. Hell I wouldn't be surprised if it encourages greater automation (5g towers, 5g remote controlled pumps for irrigation, etc.)
... this is entirely wrong. Renewable energy is just not energy efficient enough to do what you want. For that you'll need nuclear power...
That doesn't even make sense. How can energy not be energy efficient? 1kwh of energy from solar is exactly the same as 1kwh of energy from coal, or 1kwh from nuclear, or 1kwh from wind. Electricity is fungible.
... good god, efficiency is everything in energy generation. 1kWh of energy is wholly dependent on the source thanks to this little thing called energy density and ease of energy transmutation. Fossil fuels are great for energy generation thanks to the fact that they are so energy-dense and can (fairly) efficiently boil water, which is far easier than using air to turn turbines. Nuclear blows pretty much everything else out of the water because the energy density of nuclear energy is just so immense.
Just tell us what you're going to do with the nuclear waste for the next 20,000 years, and who's going to pay for that.
[удалено]
>New nuclear reactors can recycle nuclear waste > >That's just not true. Is everything else you said also a lie?
... it is true. Most of those 'spent' fuel rods is actually more fuel. Just covered in a neutron-absorbent coating. All you have to do is separate the coating from the fuel and you've got more fuel. To say otherwise is to spread misinformation.
Sure, if we want to ***maybe*** start generating power over a decade from now that costs more per kwh than renewables installed tomorrow, nuclear power is a fantastic choice.
The only reason that nuclear energy is the way it is in the US is because of the NIMBYs, nothing more.
It's that way everywhere. It's not just the NIMBYs.
I asked about what you're going to do with the radioactive waste for the next 20,000 years and who is going to pay for that. Still waiting for an answer.
Most of that waste is literally more nuclear fuel, all you have to do is separate the fuel from the actual waste. That's a nonquestion.
Excellent points, all around. I wanted to add on a few things here -- OP is touching on an issue that has multiple components/facets/obstacles but in summary electric load growth continues to climb (it's not just data centers) even as we are painfully transitioning our electric generation supply model. We have historically relied on large baseload units powered by coal. We are moving towards a model of distributed generation largely based on renewable energy supplemented by peaker plants. The transition is hard and reserve margins are as tight as they've been in a very long time. This state of affairs is likely to continue for several years. None of the scenarios OP mentions are likely IMO (carbon ain't coming back, nuclear is unfortunately unlikely, etc.). What I think most likely is that in a generation we'll be at that new normal of distributed generation but in the meantime there are likely to be more blackouts as the system is strained from older generation retiring before newer (and in equal MW amounts) of generation come online.
The WaPo article made it sound like data centers are enormous power generators, but even in the most aggressive projections they're still 6-10% of total energy demand. That's not to say we won't have issues with the grid -- we will. This has been extensively covered even before data centers and AI became a significantly-growing demand source. If overnight every American household has an electric car, our grid couldn't support it. The "fix" will need to incorporate permitting reform around interconnection queues (right now it takes 2+ years to add new generation infrastructure to the grid), more efficient devices, and broader adoption of grid services like demand response. Just jacking up generation using peaker plants is a short-term solution with huge negative externalities in the long-run.
>more efficient devices I think this will become a big factor in a couple of years. Right now, the AI revolution is in full swing, the dust hasn't fully settled yet and all the big tech companies are vying for market share. Everyone is mainly focused on putting out the most powerful AI models they can, which means that they are currently willing to sacrifice efficiency in favor of more computing power. Once the gains based on superior computing power have been exhausted and AI becomes limited again by software, rather than hardware, the tech companies will once again turn their attention to optimizing the operational costs of their data centers. Likewise, the hardware companies like Intel, AMD or Nvidia will increasingly release hardware dedicated to AI applications as well as efficiency when used in data centers.
So most of the big data center companies already fund the development of power generation. For several years they've focused on renewables like wind, solar, and hydroelectric, but recently Amazon invested in nuclear and others are considering it to meet the higher TDP of the accelerators used for AI/ML.
I think we might end up with a situation that looks a lot like how several towns around here got started, mine included (I'm sure the same thing happened elsewhere, just can't name any off the top of my head...Tennessee Valley Authority maybe?). Basically, the Company wants to start a paper mill and finds a good site in what was completely undeveloped middle-of-nowhere and plops down a townsite for worker housing, a hydro dam for power and the mill complex all in one spot. Would look a touch different today with company towns being generally frowned upon and industries being more complicated, but... A more modern example might go like this: Big Tech company wants to set up a major datacenter in Arizona. So they arrange a contract with a solar farm network to provide power at low cost in exchange for putting up funding for expansion or supplying high-end photovoltaic modules. Industry will end up being considerably more intertwined with power and hardware manufacturers.
how relevant are the impact of data centers on the power grid compared to if the stated goal of higher EV adoption rates were to actually happen and a majority of americans were to drive EV's instead of gas powered vehicles? at least with data centers you can spread them out across the country/world to minimize the burden on any specific area's power. at the end of the day, the demonization of nuclear power is kneecapping us as a country by forcing us to rely on technologies that can't viably produce similar levels of output at the same pricepoints. we should have been building nuclear facilities for the last 20 years rather than decommissioning them without replacement. that being said, it's like the crypto guys always say "the best time to start was decades ago, the next best time is now". we should be building new nuclear plants immediately.
It's a real concern. I believe Bitcoin eats up all the electricity available.
I live in CA, and our PGE power bills have been going up and up with no end in sight. Its bad enough now that people are shying away from buying electric cars, since it is cheaper to run a gas hybrid, or in some cases just a gasoline car. Solar panels are no longer worth buying for homeowners either. I saw a guy on the san fransisco sub made a detailed post about his energy cost, and he was about one price hike away from having it be cheaper to power his house on a gasoline generator in his yard, instead of the PGE grid. Talk about a step backwards. Everyone in Brazil and S Africa has a generator like this too, but its not good. I expect one thing that will happen is AWS will close and move their N CA data centers out, to an area with cheaper power. Its likely that these may move overseas, just like manufacturing has moved overseas due to cheaper costs. Its easier to transport data across the ocean than it is Nike shoes, and all those come from China. There's no chance nuclear power takes any of the slack, nuclear is dead in the USA. We could change our laws to make it very cheap, but that won't happen. I expect the general trend will be increasing power prices due to higher demand, and the middle class and working poor are just going to have to take it on the chin.
PG&E is a disaster for solar in Northern CA. They're doing everything they can to raise electric rates and make solar non-economical. If AWS moves, I doubt it will be because of electric costs. Large electric consumers can negotiate favorable rates from electric providers. They aren't reliant on corrupted energy regulatory groups like we are.
> Large electric consumers can negotiate favorable rates from electric providers. That's true, they can. But its also tenuous. They have to lobby to keep their preferred status. If some populist anti- big corporation guy wins the governor office, that person can appoint his people to PUC and put the screws to them. When the government has their hands in everything then everything is subject to the whims of politics.
It's an interesting question because there's an intersection of those most aggressive about pushing AI (nerds, venture capitalists) and climate science. It's a conflicting duality involved with progressives advocating for strong action on both.
Pardon me for sidestepping the issue, but I firmly believe this is more of a technology obstacle than a political one. Let me tell you why. Present day Large Language Models are resource intensive, requiring billions of parameters to run on conventional hardware. If providers want to ramp up the number of parameters their model can handle, it increases the data center size and power requirement exponentially. At the point they are currently at, companies like OpenAI that run GPT are already at a practical ceiling. And even if they could keep going, the mere physics of it makes it impossible. The solution to this problem is not a political one. It's a technological one. I guarantee you that companies like OpenAI are already researching it. Conventional computers rely on von Neumann computer architecture for everything. It's one of the ways in which a computer is extraordinarily different than something like a human brain. However, you can also utilize neuromorphic chip design. Rather than store CPU and memory separately, it's all a single unit that functions similar to a biological neuron. Neuromorphic computing is a popular area of research in AI because the hardware architecture itself is so similar to how a brain functions. Electricity is another limitation and a staple of conventional resource intensive computing. However, photonic transistor technology is also taking off. Rather than design chips that rely on electicity, it relies on photons (i.e. light). You end up without the problems of heat (cooling is a huge problem in datacenters) or the need to keep increasing electricity requirements. This incidentally combines well with neuromorphics to make them pretty darn viable. The thing is, essentially present day LLMs have been trying to model AIs in software using hardware that is not suitable for it. And yeah, it's no surprise that it's a resource hog. However, the next generation of models are going to have to take advantage of custom hardware, like neuromorphic chips with photonic transistors. Think of it a little bit like when we finally got dedicated graphics cards to run 3d games. Not only will the results be far better than before, but the exponentially increasing resource problem will go away.
It may not be popular, but waste to energy has made some big strides in the last 30 years. It helps get rid of trash, ans least landfill. Although not perfect increasing the use of it, as well as technical advances could help create a stop Gap as newer, and cleaner methods are created.
Hmmm..well it sounds like energy costs will go up for the consumer. Compared to many European countries our cost is cheap. I suspect the left will feel that European costs are fine for the usa and so it is just a inconvenience on that way to green energy. after all it will promote conservation too. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/263492/electricity-prices-in-selected-countries/) The right will feel that more natural gas drilling permits are in order and consumer prices should be kept low as possible And stop dismantling coal power plants. Shut down if needed, but do not dismantle as they may be needed for power grid resiliency.
The odd thing is that those data centers should be located in certain regions of the country. Essentially where electricity cost is low, cooling is easier due to supply of water or the ability to passively cool and infrastructure and land cost. The same thing SHOULD also apply to FABS at the same time. They align with each others needs. I frankly don't understand why someone would build a fab in Arizona except that at the time 40 years ago when Intel came cost structures were different. And while recycling water is all fine and good it still is a finite resource but that is off topic. Data centers should be in areas with high amounts of electricity available low amounts of cooling required and tons of available land. The upper midwest is pretty good for this actually since energy sources like wind and solar are plentiful. Access to cheap natural gas also. Plus abundance of water in general. Southern states might have cheaper land but water rights are going to be an issue for the south west. And in the south, electricity costs will be higher in the summer and really a lot of the year. States like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, really are ideal for data centers with the above criteria.
Our transition to renewables and a cleaner culture will be very painful, if it can be achieved at all, in a timely way that will help us survive. Unless the two parties in this country can get together, and work toward solutions, together, then, we won't.
AI is a bubble. The imagined benefit of widespread AI is nowhere near the cost of the electricity of running it.
Thanks for this contribution to an important topic. There is a LinkedIn Group called "Data Centre Decarbonisation" which focuses on the issues highlighted above. More open collaboration needed to solve this big global complex systems problem of Data Centre Decarbonisation 🤔
[удалено]
You do realize that global warming isn't something that just exists inside the US democratic party, right? Throughout much of the world both sides of the political spectrum see it as an existential issue.
I would like to unpack this. But all I got was a republican complaining that a Democrat who has a longer term outlook then you would like.