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Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
- grafmax 1y agoNot just bills. These data centers, a major driver of new energy use, are contributing to climate change. Sadly it seems to be another way for large companies to offload externalities onto the public.
- kolinko 1y agoAre they? IIRC MS & Google were running on carbon neutral sources.
- rambojohnson 1y agoCarbon neutrality doesn’t refill a drained reservoir used to cool off these machines. Running your servers on wind power doesn’t make the millions of gallons they’re dumping into cooling systems any less gone.
- arghwhat 1y agoThe water cycle refills drained reservoirs - the "carbon cycle" is not one we want to be part of. Also note that there's other cooling solutions than evaporative cooling, such as closed loop water cooling with chillers, cooling with sea water, using heat pumps to redirect the heat to district heating loops (making use of the heat!), just building in colder places requiring less cooling, etc.
- cma 1y agoGoogle stopped claiming "operational carbon neutrality" shortly after the release of chatgpt.
- aurareturn 1y agoAre they? IIRC MS & Google were running on carbon neutral sources. It's like saying "our crypto mining energy is carbon neutral" but ignoring the fact that if the carbon neutral energy is going into crypto mining, it's not going into something more useful. If crypto mining buys all the carbon neutral energy sources, then those sources aren't being used by other industries. We have limited carbon neutral energy production.
- croes 1y agoMS revised its climate goals thanks to AI https://technologymagazine.com/articles/how-ais-rise-changed-microsofts-sustainability-strategy https://technologymagazine.com/articles/how-ais-rise-changed...
- rambojohnson 1y agoTo say nothing of the exorbitant amount of water used to cool these machines, we’re on track to face a water shortage crisis long before any other climate change impact.
- arghwhat 1y agoWater availability is a regional climate change impact, which does not apply everywhere due to differences in water sourcing and weather patterns and how climate change affects these. It's very stupid to evaporate potable water on purpose in dry regions, but note that many numbers in this area are highly sensationalized by taking e.g. the maximum design capacity of the cooling system instead of the actual load, and that there are several other cooling solutions. Most proper facts die tragic deaths before they make it to mainstream news media. :/
- croes 1y agoWater vapor is a greenhouse gas
- arghwhat 1y agoAnd sunlight causes skin cancer, but we don't want to boycott neither water vapor nor sunlight lest we will have no precipitation and no... life. Water evaporates constantly in from soil, plants, and water bodies - most notably from the ocean itself, which is how ~babby~ precipitation is formed. Evaporation from a datacenter is unlikely to make any notable impact through water vapor. What it could impact is highly localized potable water availability and humidity in places with e.g. low precipitation and limited reservoir capacity. And, again, note that other cooling methods are also in use, and that other things also use evaporative cooling. Heck, even when evaporative cooling is used, it doesn't necessarily mean that the water escapes into the atmosphere! Both heat pipes and refrigeration cycles are forms of evaporative cooling where the gas is allowed to condense, cool and evaporate again.
- croes 1y ago
- meta_ai_x 1y ago[flagged]
- sonofhans 1y ago> “… grandmother knows about AI energy demand.” Uh huh. Tell us more about how gramma should have planned for the AI future.
- watwut 1y agoTech companies are trying to lock the market and create monopolies to abuse later. And have pretty much established track record or genuinely not caring who or how they harm ... or even brag about it. Tech companies literally brag about disruption, about making groups of people obsolete and dont even pretend their compliance with rules is anything but bad faith. Like common here. We as a tech lost the goodwill because of the culture of people we celebrate.
- yapyap 1y agoyes let’s listen to the well thought out and impartial criticisms of “meta_ai_x” obviously the big AI companies are using lots and lots of energy, making big claims like you are about “brainwashing” and such without anything to back it up is cancerous to real discussion. as are the bad faith arguments.
- lelandbatey 1y agohttps://archive.is/YOo1H https://archive.is/YOo1H
- brotchie 1y agoBut the vast majority of my $500+ a month PG&E bill is for transmission, not generation.
- prasadjoglekar 1y agoAnd according TFA, those poles and wires for transmission are a large part of the increase in costs that are forecasted. Ideally, the folks who request the new plants and transmission lines pay for them, but it appears tech cos are attempting to pass the transmission cost burden onto residential consumers.
- taeric 1y ago500 a month sounds steep. I'm assuming you live somewhere that requires AC every day? The article referred to driving prices up from 2020 due to making the infrastructure stronger by as much as 30%. Which, yeah, about 150ish of your bill. It is less clear on how much it will need to go up because of increased demand? The prediction is 8%. Which, again, not nothing. But it is telling that there is more increase from infrastructure than there is generation? I don't know that that will change?
- hellisothers 1y agoMy bill last month was $450 and I don’t own an AC, it was around $350 before I got a plug in hybrid but every year it goes up double digit percentages.
- taeric 1y ago
- buckle8017 1y agothis is nonsense and the author even admits it > In the coming years, artificial intelligence could turbocharge those increases the cost of residential power is going up because of the shift away from natural gas towards solar failing to admit this or worse lying about it is not going to actually help long term
- kolinko 1y agowhat? solar is cheaper than natural gas.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoSolar+battery is the proper comparison.
- buckle8017 1y agoIt's absolutely not. Solar with batteries that provide power year long are so expensive they do not exist. At most you get one day of battery.
- specialist 1y agoYou need to distinguish between generation and transmission.
- southernplaces7 1y agoOh hey, not even crypto pulled this kind of thing off, but here we now see crickets from certain parts of the tech community (on this site especially) about this particular gargantuan use of electricity. I guess it's no longer a problem when the people who employee you are doing it, despite the vast amount of slop, spam and other garbage being generated among the occassionally (only apparently so far) productive uses of LLM technology. As far as that goes, i'd love to see a well researched breakdown of just what percentage of LLM technology is actually being used for anything productive, and what percentage is just being pissed into industrialized spam. LLMs even have the whole crime angle neatly covered, considering all the innovative uses they're being put to by the same people who brought us ransoms paid in crypto. Would be interesting to see the numbers on how that breaks down too.
- waltercool 1y agoIt's usually the opposite. When a company requires lot more energy, power plants are expected to produce lot more. When a power plant produce a lot, the low consumption rates tend to get cheaper. It's gets cheaper to produce energy as the demand increases. This is, of course, considering the input material is not scarce, like hydro power plants or wind power. Everything else (coal, oil, nuclear, gas, solar) should be easy to increase supply/demand.
- thedudeabides5 1y agobullish silver