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AI is exhausting the power grid
- spacecadet 2y agoTime to build some nuclear plants. We let Westinghouse die and now all boo hoo no power.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bayindirh 2y agoWhen you have production at a power station, your problems only start. You need to carry that power somewhere, and it takes time. Also, you have to upgrade every path between the power station and your data center. It's not like flicking a switch. Your standard power budgeting doesn't take a multi-megawatt data center into account when it's first made. And power budgeting is not on paper only. It affects from power generation schedules, demand curves, infra planning, etc. It changes literally everything.
- spacecadet 2y agoSounds like a solvable problem. Are you complaining or working on a solution?
- bayindirh 2y agoI'm a sysadmin at a multi-megawatt datacenter. We work with authorities for finding solutions, plus we also provide computational support for calculating generation schedules across the country. Plus we aid people to do their research. So, I'm not complaining, at least.
- spacecadet 2y agopreaching to the choir.
- bayindirh 2y agoIf working on a scientific supercomputer, helping researchers and doing my own research at the side is preaching to the choir, I'm a happy camper.
- melling 2y ago…or reopen a few. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-may-revive-some-shut-nuclear-plants-help-meet-emissions-goal-energy-chief-2024-06-05/ https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-may-revive-some-s...
- zacksiri 2y agohttps://archive.is/YCLBp https://archive.is/YCLBp
- toenail 2y agoI guess power grids have never grown when demand increased.
- bayindirh 2y agoIt's not easy to scale power grids like computing racks. We have moved our data center recently, and it's a multi-megawatt one. Finding a location where power is available or made available was a major challenge and reduced our choices dramatically. At the end, multiple transformers, a couple distribution points and tons of power cables had to be changed/relaid or upgraded. The power budget planning for the region we're in have changed and this took close to a year, alone.
- Jensson 2y agoHuman power use has remained pretty constant in the past 60 years, at least if you just count the west. It was exponentially growing before then, which is why people had so crazy ideas about the future since they were used to exponential power growth and assume that would just continue. So point is that no power grid hasn't grown as demand increased, rather we tempered demand to match that the grid didn't grow. You even see it today with power shut downs etc rather than increasing grids.
- bayindirh 2y agoEven if our demand increased in terms of output, we curbed the demand in terms of input by increasing efficiency. My whole house's lighting requires less power when compared to two rooms' lighting power requirement 20 years ago.
- Jensson 2y agoThat happened since we couldn't make more power so only way left was to increase efficiency. Power used to be like how we see compute today, exponentially increasing so everyone wasted with it since you soon had more than enough. But once that stopped power efficiency suddenly became very important.
- 2y ago
- margorczynski 2y agoUsable energy (work) is the lifeblood of any country. Do the sane thing and start building nuclear again.
- silverquiet 2y agoHere we are on a technology startup site; you'd think that if anyone had the vision for new nuclear power, it would be here, but it always seems like the comments are calling for someone else to do it.
- pretendscholar 2y agoLet me just spin up a nuclear powerplant on my laptop here
- tomalaci 2y agoI suggest using kind or minikube to simplify the setup but make sure you supply --nuclear option to create Nukernetes cluster. Also setup scheduled batch of jobs to dump nuclear waste, we wouldn't want to have that overflowing in our laptops, do we?
- cjk2 2y agoIt's old and hard. Which is the exact opposite of tech innovation.
- djaouen 2y agoGood. Now we can shut it down lol
- bayindirh 2y agoAI is not made solely of LLMs. We're a member of some projects which uses AI models to monitor health of the marine life for example. AI is useful, stochastic parrots are not. Knowing the difference is crucial.
- badcppdev 2y agoAre the AI models monitoring the health of the marine life? Or are they modelling the marine life?
- bayindirh 2y agoThey are monitoring the marine life for trends, abnormalities and such. Plus these models are used for better prediction of future events/cycles with greater accuracy with simpler measurements.
- jasfi 2y agoMore aggressive layout of solar is the best thing to do. I don't agree with all the pro-nuclear sentiment after Fukushima. It's like nuclear is always safe "now", don't consider any previous disasters.
- infecto 2y agoWhile this will help, it still does not answer the baseloads. Batteries are not there yet.
- fundatus 2y agoBatteries are very much there and are being rolled out on a large scale globally since the price per kwh has been plummeting for years.
- infecto 2y agoThey most definitely are not there to take up overnight baseloads. I don't think the economics has been fully baked out yet. They are certainly rolling out but often times to replace the function of a peaker plant not a baseload plant.
- Herz 2y agoThis is not to say that prices will continue to decrease indefinitely; in fact, they appear to be reaching a plateau. https://assets.bbhub.io/professional/sites/24/fig1battery.png https://assets.bbhub.io/professional/sites/24/fig1battery.pn... Moreover, it is prudent to avoid relying solely on a single technology. Currently, lithium is the only type of storage that is commercially viable, and hydropower capacity in Europe is nearly maxed out. Additionally, a significant portion of lithium supply is controlled by China, which poses its own set of challenges: https://carboncredits.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/lithium-prices-april-2024.png https://carboncredits.b-cdn.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/l... I am optimistic about the future of storage technologies. If prices continue to fall and production increases, we could potentially use these technologies to better manage daily energy peaks by 2050. However, achieving affordable and efficient seasonal storage remains a distant and costly goal. It's also important to acknowledge that while storage technologies exist, they have yet to meet the ambitious targets we are discussing anywhere in the world, the data are promising, but they say nothing about what might happen in the future.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago[flagged]
- Seb-C 2y agoVery few places banned crypto mining from wasting energy when it was the "bubble of the moment", so I doubt that anything will happen for AIs (that are — at least — not as worthless).
- vouaobrasil 2y agoAI is more than worthless -- it is actively destructive.
- kstenerud 2y agoHeh, if you think that's bad, we're going to hit peak oil extraction ability next year. After that, it will get gradually more and more expensive every year to extract a gallon of oil. The implications of this are huge, and the most likely result (unless we can all cooperate) is energy cannibalization. AI couldn't happen at a worse time in history.
- bayindirh 2y ago> AI couldn't happen at a worse time in history. Shh... Murphy might hear.
- infecto 2y agoHow long have we been saying that?
- melling 2y agoWe don’t use much oil to generate electricity. Natural gas and coal are the main sources. Of course coal produces the most greenhouse emissions.
- kstenerud 2y agoWe use oil for every modern thing we make, and to power our machinery. As AI begins to express its true hunger, we'll start feeding it from any source we can, including oil and its byproducts. This will exacerbate the oil problem, and accelerate the point where it takes more energy to extract oil than we get from it. From there, things get bad. Real bad.
- carrja99 2y agoShut down the stupid blockchain miners that are taxing the grid for no good reason beyond transferring wealth upward.
- nope1000 2y agoWe literally have a huge fusion reactor in the solar system that we can use right now for clean energy. Don't get me wrong, I support research and development into nuclear fusion and it would be amazing if it worked but baking the future of the planet on technology that may or may not work seems crazy to me.
- mtreis86 2y agoAt what point will it make sense to Microsoft to build their own nuclear plant?
- scioto 2y agoMove to Texas, specifically the ERCOT grid. Texans love power suckers like bitcoin miners, so AI should fit right in.
- infecto 2y agoI know it will go over your head but the scheme in Texas that bitcoin miners take advantage is not isolated to bitcoin and is used in other industries there as well. From a electric market perspective it makes sense, ignoring the functionality of bitcoin mining. Having industrials that can dynamically adjust their use is very helpful for electric generation.
- ohmyiv 2y ago>I know it will go over your head but the scheme in Texas that bitcoin miners take advantage is not isolated to bitcoin and is used in other industries there as well. Where did OP say that? They said _power suckers_, as in plural and used bitcoin mining as one example. It’s strange you started your comment with an unnecessary personal attack and assumption OP is an idiot when you didn't seem to understand their comment. I dont understand why you had to take it so personal. Unless you're part of ERCOT or a energy supplier, I guess, but even that's not a good reason.
- infecto 2y agoSorry my comment got you upset. My point is that power suckers serve as part of a healthy energy grid because they are able to somewhat time their use which helps for overall grid health. I am not sure how well that would play into a data center, so I think the original comparison to AI is weak but nonetheless from the OP bitcoin perspective it is.
- ohmyiv 2y agoYour comment didn't upset me. But it seems my comment upset you? Please don't project anything. It's just strange to take a random comment so personal. And I understand your point, but I dont care about that part.
- cryptica 2y agoIt would be interesting to see a chart showing the % share of electricity being used for real world activities versus abstract computations. The current AI wave reminds me of Bitcoin. You have to wonder if humans actually need all that processing. It would seem we have more intelligence than we need; every aspect of our lives is already over-schematized. We don't need more control and more advanced abstractions to keep our minds busy, we need the opposite; less control and more time. I hope things will shift more towards using AI to solve physical problems.
- gjm11 2y agoThis article claiming "AI is exhausting the power grid" seems awfully light on actual evidence that AI is exhausting the power grid.
- gjm11 2y agoI see that this got at least one downvote, which I guess indicates that someone thinks it's an unfair (or at least insufficiently-justified) complaint, so let me try to justify it a bit. So, to me, "AI is exhausting the power grid" means something like this: The datacentres running AI models are consuming so much power that existing power generation capacity is no longer sufficient, producing (at least the danger of) power cuts, brownouts, etc. Here, by contrast, is what the article says (in order of appearance). Everything is paraphrased. Some quotations are lightly massaged for brevity and clarity. 1. The Columbia River has long provided hydroelectric power, "but the AI revolution will demand much more". (This is about what AI allegedly will do, not what it is doing.) 2. Microsoft and other big tech companies are investing in experimental energy generation: nuclear fusion, small-scale fission, geothermal, etc. (Fine, and it connects to the second half of the title that isn't in the HN title: "Tech firms are seeking a miracle solution". But no evidence of what AI is alleged to be doing.) 3. Someone called Tamara Kneese claims "Coal plants are being reinvigorated because of the AI boom". (This is about what AI is alleged to be doing, but it's just reproducing someone else's claim and provides no evidence that it's right, no numbers, etc.) 4. Lots of datacentres are being built. (Link to an earlier WP article, which in no way links this to AI and in fact says it's been going on continuously for many years.) "Some worry" that there won't be enough electricity for them. (Again, about the future. No indication of who worries. No evidence, no numbers.) 5. "The amount of electricity they need now is soaring because of AI". (Again, no citations, no evidence, no numbers.) A ChatGPT query is more expensive than a Google search. (True.) Meta has a datacentre complex that consumes a lot of power. (Surely true, but again doesn't really connect with the title's claim. They don't even offer any evidence that this datacentre runs any AI tasks at all.) 6. Big tech companies like to talk about sustainability and low emissions, even though their datacentres consume electricity some of which is produced from fossil fuels. (True, but nothing to do with claim in title.) 7. Some people associated with AI, such as Sam Altman and Bill Gates, also think there will be breakthroughs in clean energy production. (True, but, y'know.) 8. Many paragraphs saying that tech companies talk about renewable/sustainable/clean energy production but consume energy from the national power grid, some of which comes from e.g. coal-fired power plants. (True, but again no connection with title claim and, really, what is actually supposed to be wrong here?) 9. Some fossil-fuel power plants in Utah were going to be closed but are now going to stay operating for longer. (No connection to title claim. In fact, no evidence of any connection with tech at all.) Meta is building datacentres in the area. (OK.) Etc., etc., etc. The article gives plenty of evidence that tech companies have datacentres that use electricity, and that some electricity comes from fossil fuels. It suggests (and quotes a few people claiming but not providing evidence) that a lot of that electricity is for AI these days. It offers absolutely no evidence that anything is "exhausting the power grid", nor that if the power grid is being exhausted it's because of AI. It talks about some connections between tech companies and novel clean energy projects that may or may not ever work out, and apparently we're supposed to think that that's a bad thing somehow?
- MELEKE 2y ago[dead]
- zetgest 2y agoThere is no free lunch . Humanity has to pay a price for everything esply if we want to go against or want to outdo Nature which has taken billons of years to provide us with whatever we need for our happy survival. But humanity is invested with insatiable curiosity and want to know what's on the other side of the mountain, even at the cost of our survival and land ourselves and mother nature into trouble . But that's OK . We are what we are !
- bokohut 2y agoI'm always late to the comments as I am busy elsewhere, apologies. For those creating energy solutions I encourage all to listen. Start @ 02:41:25 www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4Skit8Jwhw Mr Pfluger of Texas "Are renewables baseload capable?" Dr Lott "Renewables are not 24/7/365 capable in an economic way, technically as an engineer I can design you a system but then we have to pay for it. So what we find is you want a mix of renewables because they are cheap when they are there, you want to compliment them with storage and you want compliment them with firm dispatchable power that can be there 24/7/365 and design the markets to that everyone can get paid effectively to keep their systems well maintained and online." ... Hon. Clark "With regard to the RTOs, taking off from where Dr Lotts was, I agree with everything that was said, there be mix of efficiency, demand response, solar, batteries, renewables and dispatchable capacity designing a market around that is extraordinarily difficult because the markets are designed to run what's cheapest to run right now and that has been a 20 year process trying to get those market signals correct." In the end someone has to take the risk and do it as our world is only the way it is today because of entrepreneurs that took the risks. This forum has more than a few serial risk takers I deduce, including myself. Go build something they tell me, Ok.