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North Norwegians will finally experience higher electricity prices like us in the south experience since a few years.

scotty79 1y ago
Increasing demand is the only reason anyone every developed more supply. And the future will obviously need more energy production. Development costs money so consumers will pay for it with higher prices but Norway just got new, large consumer to help foot the bill.
- antupis 1y ago
  I would not hold my breath, Norway is kinda holding back new supply (wind + solar + nuclear) if you compare it to Finland or Sweden.
lelanthran 1y ago
On the plus side, a ton of electricity generation capacity is being built for AI datacenters. If this is a bubble and it pops, electricity prices are going to fall faster than you've ever seen before.
- marcyb5st 1y ago
  Even if it pops, I think the cat is already out of the bag. About LLMs: Maybe there won't be much training going around as model we might starting to hit diminishing returns with the current model architectures/approaches, but I believe inference is here to stay. Scaffolding code, trivial functions, ... are things that LLMs excel at doing and once you get used to offload those to the LLM it is really hard to get back to doing it manually. About Image/Video generations: Here I believe there is even more to explore and I consider this separate from LLMs in the context of AI winters/bubbles. Especially regarding the video generation part. I am not in the field, but I believe the appeal of being able to create movies without needing xM$ for actors' salaries is huge. And if you can even replace the VFX also with Video Generation then it is a 3 birds with one stone scenario (You pay for AI compute and you replace actors, VFX specialists, and compute costs for render farms). So, I believe that there is not a scenario in which electricity prices plummet as you describe. Maybe locally around datacenters that were primarily built for LLMs training, but not globally.
  - littlestymaar 1y ago
    > scaffolding code, trivial functions, ... are things that LLMs excel at doing and once you get used to offload those to the LLM it is really hard to get back to doing it manually. True, but local models cover that use-case very well already and consume little power doing so.
    - marcyb5st 1y ago
      That is a fair point. Honestly, for programmers/technical people I believe you are right and it is trivial already to get started. However for non technical people I believe it is just easier to open claude/gemini/openai web interfaces and chat away. Especially if they have already great integrations (say Google Drive) out of the box.
- adrianN 1y ago
  Electricity prices have a pretty hard bottom that additional supply can't lower. At least where I live distribution is more often the bottle neck than supply.
  - piva00 1y ago
    Same for me, I pay more for distribution fees per month than the kWh generated.
- littlestymaar 1y ago
  No, the infrastructure cost would have been paid already and will be recouped on the remaining consumers.
- jononor 1y ago
  Norway is currently building very little new power generation at all, unfortunately. NIMBYism is blocking onshore wind, ecological concerns blocking hydro. This has already started hurting, and is projected to get worse. Before taking any AI datacenters into account.

Increasing demand is the only reason anyone every developed more supply. And the future will obviously need more energy production. Development costs money so consumers will pay for it with higher prices but Norway just got new, large consumer to help foot the bill.

antupis 1y ago
I would not hold my breath, Norway is kinda holding back new supply (wind + solar + nuclear) if you compare it to Finland or Sweden.

lelanthran 1y ago

On the plus side, a ton of electricity generation capacity is being built for AI datacenters. If this is a bubble and it pops, electricity prices are going to fall faster than you've ever seen before.

marcyb5st 1y ago
Even if it pops, I think the cat is already out of the bag. About LLMs: Maybe there won't be much training going around as model we might starting to hit diminishing returns with the current model architectures/approaches, but I believe inference is here to stay. Scaffolding code, trivial functions, ... are things that LLMs excel at doing and once you get used to offload those to the LLM it is really hard to get back to doing it manually. About Image/Video generations: Here I believe there is even more to explore and I consider this separate from LLMs in the context of AI winters/bubbles. Especially regarding the video generation part. I am not in the field, but I believe the appeal of being able to create movies without needing xM$ for actors' salaries is huge. And if you can even replace the VFX also with Video Generation then it is a 3 birds with one stone scenario (You pay for AI compute and you replace actors, VFX specialists, and compute costs for render farms). So, I believe that there is not a scenario in which electricity prices plummet as you describe. Maybe locally around datacenters that were primarily built for LLMs training, but not globally.
- littlestymaar 1y ago
  > scaffolding code, trivial functions, ... are things that LLMs excel at doing and once you get used to offload those to the LLM it is really hard to get back to doing it manually. True, but local models cover that use-case very well already and consume little power doing so.
  - marcyb5st 1y ago
    That is a fair point. Honestly, for programmers/technical people I believe you are right and it is trivial already to get started. However for non technical people I believe it is just easier to open claude/gemini/openai web interfaces and chat away. Especially if they have already great integrations (say Google Drive) out of the box.
adrianN 1y ago
Electricity prices have a pretty hard bottom that additional supply can't lower. At least where I live distribution is more often the bottle neck than supply.
- piva00 1y ago
  Same for me, I pay more for distribution fees per month than the kWh generated.
littlestymaar 1y ago
No, the infrastructure cost would have been paid already and will be recouped on the remaining consumers.
jononor 1y ago
Norway is currently building very little new power generation at all, unfortunately. NIMBYism is blocking onshore wind, ecological concerns blocking hydro. This has already started hurting, and is projected to get worse. Before taking any AI datacenters into account.