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How much land mass would need to be covered by solar panels to power this future AI infrastructure. Yes, I'm implying that solar would be impractical, but I'm a
by davidmurdoch 1y ago
How much land mass would need to be covered by solar panels to power this future AI infrastructure. Yes, I'm implying that solar would be impractical, but I'm also genuinely curious.
- dismalpedigree 1y ago3,000-4,000 acres per GW of production capacity in the US Southwest. According to AI :) Considering how little use there is for most of that land anyways, it seems like a good option to me. Also AI training seems like the perfect fit for solar. Run it when the sun is shining. Inference is significantly less power hungry, so it can run base load 24/7.
- creato 1y ago> Also AI training seems like the perfect fit for solar. Run it when the sun is shining. Inference is significantly less power hungry, so it can run base load 24/7. If you're talking about just not running your data center when the sun isn't out, that effectively triples the cost of the building+ hardware. It would require a hell of a carbon tax to make the economics of this make sense.
- rapsey 1y ago> Inference is significantly less power hungry, so it can run base load 24/7. All major AI providers need to throttle usage because their GPU clusters are at capacity. There is absolutely no way inference is less power hungry when you have many thousands of users hammering your servers at all times.
- blitzar 1y agoFurthermore NVIDIAs 80% profit margin makes idling your biggest capital expense a huge ROI problem. Google and Apple should have a big advantage in this regard. If the balance between capital outlay and running costs was more balanced - then optimising the running cost becomes a big line item on the accounts.
- sim7c00 1y agothe sun is always shining.
- discordance 1y agoIt's worth considering total lifecycle use of water (mining, production and operation) for nuclear and solar. Solar: ~300-800 L/MWh [0] Nuclear: ~3000 L/MWh [1] 0: https://iea-pvps.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Water_Footprint_of_European_Rooftop_Photovoltaic_Electricity_based_in_Re-giornalised_Life_Cycle_Inventories_by_Task_12.pdf https://iea-pvps.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Water_Footpr... 1: https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/P1569_web.pdf https://www-pub.iaea.org/MTCD/Publications/PDF/P1569_web.pdf
- bluefirebrand 1y agoWater we have plenty of. We can desalinate as much as we need to
- NewJazz 1y agoBuild subsurface wells and responsible brine dispersion infrastructure then come back and tell me we can desalinate as much as we need to.
- HPsquared 1y agoIf you put the brine back into the sea, and later put the waste water back into the same sea, doesn't it balance out? Also, the sea is pretty big.
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- Kon5ole 1y agoYour implication is misguided, solar is in fact the most practical way to add more electricity for most countries. The US generated an additional 64Twh of solar in 2024 compared to 2023. To get the same amount from nuclear you would need to build 5 large reactors in one year. As for land mass, we can re-use already spent land mass, like rooftops, parking lots, grazing farmland and such. Solar can also be placed on lakes. So for the foreseeable future there is no actual need for new land to be dedicated to solar.
- 542354234235 1y agoSince America is so in love with car infrastructure, just turning open parking lots into covered lots would be more than enough. Just converting all Walmart parking to covered solar would meet almost half of all US electrical demand. 4,070,000,000,000 kWh US electric use in 2022 Using 330W panels it would require 8,447,488 panels (4,070,000,000,000 kWh / (330W * 4 hours/day * 365 days/year)) which is 164,726,016 sq ft at 19.5 sq ft per panel. Walmart has 4,612 stores in the US, averaging 1,000 parking spaces per store, and 180 sq ft per parking space (does not include driving lanes, end caps, etc.) giving us 830,160,000 sq ft.
- ReptileMan 1y ago>How much land mass would need to be covered by solar panels to power this future AI infrastructure Probably zero agricultural if you mandate all rooftops to be solar. And all parking lots to be covered with solar roofs.
- glitchc 1y agoEven though I think solar is impractical as a primary source for various reasons, it doesn't take a lot. David MacKay in "Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air" did a calculation circa 2010. To fulfill the world's energy needs back then, a 10 km^2 area in the Sahara desert would be sufficient. Even if you scaled that to 100 km^2, it's absolutely tiny on a global scale, and panels have only become more efficient since then. The challenge of course is storage and distribution, but yeah, in terms of land area, it's not much.
- ancillary 1y agoI was curious about this number, so: 10 km^2 is 10mil square meters, Googling suggests that the theoretical maximum energy captured by a square meter of solar panel is well under 0.5 kW, so well under 12 kWh per day. Say 10 kWh for neatness. Then multiplying by 10mil gives 100mil kWh. More Googling suggests that 10 TWh is a comfortable lower bound for daily world energy usage, but 100mil kWh is 0.1 TWh. So maybe 1000 km^2 is more like right order of magnitude. That's still tiny, about Hong Kong-sized. Even 100000 km^2 is about South Korea.
- saalweachter 1y agoI'm guessing it was supposed to be (10 km)^2, not 10 km^2.