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I’m not sure AI is using “mostly renewables”. I’ve seen lots of stories like this: “AI Needs So Much Power That Old Coal Plants Are Sticking Around” https://w

I’m not sure AI is using “mostly renewables”. I’ve seen lots of stories like this: “AI Needs So Much Power That Old Coal Plants Are Sticking Around” https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-25/ai-needs-so-much-power-that-old-coal-plants-are-sticking-around https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-25/ai-needs-...

jillesvangurp 3y ago
AI usage is indeed increasing energy demand. Overall coal usage in places like the US is actually down. About 3% in the US last year. Coal peaked in 1997 and has been trending down ever since. Any large users of power would want cheap power (i.e. not coal). Tech savvy companies running these data centers doubly so. They all have announced net zero targets years ago and the new data centers they are building with all the fancy new GPU hardware are exactly where they are putting in a lot of money to make that happen. It's true that there are still some data centers powered by coal. The article mentions Virginia. Which is exactly where Amazon just bought the rights to a lot of nuclear power for the next few years. Because they don't want to have anything to do with coal going forward. So they are investing in alternatives. Even expensive stuff like nuclear is preferable to coal for them. At best you could say that power companies are keeping some coal plants open a bit longer than planned because all their renewable power is being gobbled up by big data centers and they still need to serve their other, less picky customers. They simply did not plan for this much growth. Big data centers buying lots of renewable power is also a thing in Europe that has actually lead to some places limiting the construction of new ones. Keeping coal plants open is of course a stop gap measure as it's at this point not really a profitable business to be in. They are trying to get more more lucrative renewables online ASAP. Virginia has a few offshore wind projects coming online, for example.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

AI usage is indeed increasing energy demand. Overall coal usage in places like the US is actually down. About 3% in the US last year. Coal peaked in 1997 and has been trending down ever since. Any large users of power would want cheap power (i.e. not coal). Tech savvy companies running these data centers doubly so. They all have announced net zero targets years ago and the new data centers they are building with all the fancy new GPU hardware are exactly where they are putting in a lot of money to make that happen. It's true that there are still some data centers powered by coal. The article mentions Virginia. Which is exactly where Amazon just bought the rights to a lot of nuclear power for the next few years. Because they don't want to have anything to do with coal going forward. So they are investing in alternatives. Even expensive stuff like nuclear is preferable to coal for them. At best you could say that power companies are keeping some coal plants open a bit longer than planned because all their renewable power is being gobbled up by big data centers and they still need to serve their other, less picky customers. They simply did not plan for this much growth. Big data centers buying lots of renewable power is also a thing in Europe that has actually lead to some places limiting the construction of new ones. Keeping coal plants open is of course a stop gap measure as it's at this point not really a profitable business to be in. They are trying to get more more lucrative renewables online ASAP. Virginia has a few offshore wind projects coming online, for example.