Al processing already consumes vast amounts of energy, and the plants are already being used for intraday load balancing. There was a story recently about an in

Al processing already consumes vast amounts of energy, and the plants are already being used for intraday load balancing. There was a story recently about an incident in Germany where due to weather and strange market mechanisms, the grid was in danger or collapsing. The operator’s third line of defense (after gas peakers and hydroelectric storage, IIRC), was to remotely turn off the Al plant 600 km away, something they can contractually (and technically) do up to four times per day and six times per week for an hour each. That plant uses 1 % of Germany’s electricity. It’s not the only such plant, and Hermany generally frowns on frivolous uses of Aluminum: cans are far less popular, for example, and will earn you dirty looks. The Audis may make up for it I part, but in the US it should be possible to shift some non-trivial fraction of the electricity consumption by, say, doubling processing capabilities and running them seasonally. Al isn’t too expensive, and the plant is a small part of the costs anyway, with energy making up the bulk. Of course there are countless opportunities to optimize consumption patterns once consuming devices all have data connections: heat and cooling, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, roombas, notebooks... all these devices could shift their consumption on the hours-to-one-day scale and easily cushion even large variability in production. Once electric cars are ubiquitous, they‘ll make up the bulk of consumer electricity usage and they could even feed power back into the grid. The only real problem with Al is, obviously, that we keep misreading it as AI. The confusion will drive some lesser Al insane, and either that or the singularity will cause a bloodbath, henceforth known as Al Gore.