8 ms·

The U.S. grid is so weak, the AI race may be over

ZeroGravitas 1y ago
Even in this article, it repeatedly refers to building out infrastructure in advance of an obviously approaching future need as "oversupply". This is almost a cliche in reporting on China that seems to reflect a serious blindpsot in western media and/or business attitudes. You can find plenty of articles complaining about "overcapacity" of battery factories in China even as they double in capacity and output each year. Chinese electricity generation went from 4,000 TWh (the same as the US) in 2010 to double that in 2020. The US was basically the same after 10 years. So a 100% "oversupply" in 2010 would be a zero percent oversupply within a decade given China's growth. Most telling to me is that decarbonisation and electrification of transport and heating has long been known to require a doubling(!) of electricity production for developed nations (and a similar increase in developing nations where it gets hidden by other growth). Apparently the US simply never had a plan to achieve that, and amazingly it still isn't part of the conversation around AI power. Instead they're just claiming the best parts of the existing power systems and passing the costs onto local consumers.
- plastic-enjoyer 1y ago
  > Apparently the US simply never had a plan to achieve that, and amazingly it still isn't part of the conversation around AI power. Instead they're just claiming the best parts of the existing power systems and passing the costs onto local consumers. I wonder if this is more of a cultural thing, meaning Western cultures being more aligned to short-term gains instead of long-term gains. I mean, look at the Dujiangyan irrigation system that was build 2500 years ago and is still maintained until today. This isn't something the Western world would even consider.
  - Spooky23 1y ago
    The structure of the United States government is a compromise balancing large vs. small states interests and slavery. The core defect in the design is the Senate and the way states were admitted. We have a territory/colony with limited political rights that has a population greater than the bottom four states. Those small states exert enormous influence and essentially ensure a weird conservative dynamic that anchors a lot of social issues. Not because of the politics of the day - because resource extraction is always conservative by nature as the core aspect of the business is minimizing overhead cost. Agriculture flipped into a purely extractive business as people have been removed from it.
    - richwater 1y ago
      > Those small states exert enormous influence It's called the United States for a reason, not the United People. What you're obviously desiring would result in a series of vassal states (large cites governing themselves) with most of the country (rural) acting as feudal serfs.
      - lunar-whitey 1y ago
        Rural voters are not most of the country unless you believe geographic area is more important than people. There are better ways to address the concerns of rural interests than enshrining gerrymandering along state lines.
      - Spooky23 1y ago
        I said nothing of the sort. All things have ups and downs. Many entities, both historically and globally have managed similar problems with varying methodologies. If you think the current governance scenario in the United States represents the apex of republican democracy, your patriotism is clouding your judgement. The current trends as they are have been devastating to rural people. I live in a county that had 500 dairy farms in 1970, 80 in 1990 and 2 today. Just that industry represented probably about 10k good paying jobs. Most rural areas are the economic equivalent of inner cities with more space. But of course, if you don't care about people, just the sacred abstraction of "states", so I suppose that's ok.
  - dkiebd 1y ago
    Sanitation and road infrastructure built during the Roman Empire is still in use today.
  - roenxi 1y ago
    The West have been executing a long-range plan for 30 years on this one, the lack of power plants is intentional. There have been any number of roadblocks and people working hard to prevent the West doing specifically what the Chinese have done with the goal of maintaining the high air quality that Western countries tend to enjoy. If anything the West's culture has been doing more long term planning. It is quite difficult to force an economy not to produce something.
    - exe34 1y ago
      Any idea who's been doing this long term planning to kneecap the West? What do they get out of it?
      - roenxi 1y ago
        The environmentalist movement. There is a clear trade off between environmental and industrial success, humans don't know how to do both. https://aqicn.org/map/world https://aqicn.org/map/world - US is generally green and yellow, China tends to dip into the oranges and reds, especially in the industrial zone. It is tightly linked to the fact that China has a powerful electricity grid.
        exe34 1y ago
        is a powerful electricity grid bad for the environment? is the environment worth sacrificing to make the numbers go up? do you want oxygen bottles to be a subscription service?
        roenxi 1y ago
        Yes, yes, no. Nobody has figured out how to run a powerful grid without eating a lot of environmental damage. That is a significant factor in the article headline of "The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over".
  - BlarfMcFlarf 1y ago
    In the USA, any non-private government investment is considered to be foolish and doomed at best, and an existential threat to business at worst. The best we can do is “public-private partnership” where all the profits get absorbed by middle men, preventing virtuous cycles and still leaving a cap on risk and future planning.
  - el_jay 1y ago
    While there is certainly an argument to be made that many contemporary “Western” Pseudo-Christian Superempire nations face a crisis of short-termism, there are also ancient bits of “Western” infrastructure like the Roman aqueducts still in use today - off the top of my head, the Aqua Virgo which supplies Rome’s Trevi Fountain, dated either 19BC or 19AD, I forget; Spain’s Segovia Aqueduct from the first century AD; and the Pont du Gard in Nîmes, from the same period. Not quite as old, or at the scale of the Dujiangyan system, but still evidence that the “Western” culture did once build for long term. Less ancient, but more indicative, are the European cathedrals built by multiple generations over a century.
    - plastic-enjoyer 1y ago
      Good point!
    - grumpy-de-sre 1y ago
      For an even closer example, the US interstate system was a monumental long term focused project.
  - snowwrestler 1y ago
    I think it’s likely you are just not familiar with examples of U.S. long-term planning if you’re citing water movement as an area where China is doing better.
  - mathiaspoint 1y ago
    The main public reasons for preventing expansion of power infrastructure were environmental. That's at least nominally very forward looking. Ironically if we had taken China's "burn everything today and figure tomorrow out when it comes" approach we'd actually be better prepared for this.
- roenxi 1y ago
  The simplest explanation is this is political language. People in politics use something close to doublespeak with they have two words for the same act, one good and one bad (terrorist/freedom fighter for example). The word used is chosen based on whether they think the situation is good or bad for their personal interests. So in this case the pair is something like oversupply/abundance. Same thing, but one word for when it favours the speaker and one when it doesn't. I think he just means the Chinese are willing to build whatever if it makes commercial sense.
  - dluan 1y ago
    I'm old enough to have seen this shift happen first hand. I remember the language being used in the early 90s when US-China relations were great, with evening news clips of smiling Bill Clinton and Jiang Zemin yukking it up as hundreds of thousands of jobs were offshored to China to American politicians and industrialists delight.
    - lotsofpulp 1y ago
      Did people in America and the rest of the developed world not delight in lower priced goods? Surely businesses were incentivized to reduce their costs without regard to what politicians want, because it is a business. And consumers are incentivized to reduce their costs, because they want to consume.
- energy123 1y ago
  You either want a plan like China or an absence of planning like Texas. Either help like China or get out of the way like Texas. Two places that can actually build energy. Don't be like California where the government doesn't help while also getting in the way.
  - tw04 1y ago
    The same Texas that has statewide power outages every time it gets below freezing (despite knowing for 25+ years it’s a problem) because of their lack of regulation and central planning? Let’s not be anything like Texas.
    - huhkerrf 1y ago
      This just shows how you know only the talking points. The power outages are not due to lack of central planning, it's very explicitly the reverse. If Texas were hooked up to the rest of the country, those outages would not be a thing. It's the purposeful regulation that has caused those problems.
      - Calavar 1y ago
        So you're saying when the Texas grid fails, it's because of over overegulation. But the solution to those failures is to tap into the national grid, a grid that follows stricter FERC regulations. This argument doesn't make any sense.
        huhkerrf 1y ago
        No, I'm saying it's because of _poor_ overegulation.
      - tw04 1y ago
        > The power outages are not due to lack of central planning It is 100% due to lack of central planning. The outages were caused by a lack of winterizarion of natural gas pumps which was a known issue in Texas but the lack of regulation meant companies could just ignore the problem. Why invest in winterizing when you can just jack up prices and make even more money when they freeze and there’s not enough power to meet demand? There’s a reason the power doesn’t go out in the winter anywhere else in the country when it gets below freezing and it’s not “a lack of regulation”.
- corimaith 1y ago
  There's nothing "obvious" in hindsight about the explosion in LLMs in 2023 and thus the increased energy demand, and the China certainly wasn't building for that. It very much was overcapacity as a way to keep the construction and manufacturing employed even when most profitable opportunities have been realized. Of course, the long cost of that is involution and lack of nicer jobs as capital is malinvested into diminishing returns. The ironic thing is that idea of overcapacity itself is acknowledged by the CCP in their calls to end price wars and involution I do think there’s is a very interesting dynamic in this meta argument; over the past 5 years or so, the “debunkers” have taken issue with “whistleblowers” arguments towards first zero covid, then local government debt, and now overcapacity and lack of consumer demand and “debunked” these as all being not an issue, only for the central government to turn around and end Zero Covid, rein in LGFV lending, and now the current crackdown on “disorderly competition” and mass dispersal of consumption vouchers. English Pro-China commentators don't appear to be well aligned with the actual views in China!
  - rafaelmn 1y ago
    I have a feeling that this kind of efficiency/capacity analysis is similar to that joke about economist designing a human, instead of having two kidneys you have 5 people sharing one. I am a pro market guy for a lot of things, but what happens when you let the market operate something like basic infrastructure is everyone is shipping their shit/sewage in trucks and running a diesel power generator in their back yard.
    - corimaith 1y ago
      Well first of all, that's not happening in America. The basic gist of this topic is that there suddenly a massive upsurge in energy demand, and existing networks trouble accommodating for it. Big deal, just build more power plants. The inability to build is the opposite of pro-market, it's literally NIMBYISM and government regulations causing that. Second of all, when we talk about malinvestment, it's about opportunity cost. Right now, the job market is pretty bad in China, consumption is weak, and businesses are killing themselves in deflationary price wars. Chinese Gen Z don't want to work factory jobs either, but white collar jobs like the West, but many of the industries related to those were suppressed. And this is all because the government chose to overinvest in propping up their manufacturing and construction rather than increasing consumption and fostering their services. For you as a rich American you can admire their cheap goods and cities, but you're also not exposed to the reality of the extreme competition in that society.
elric 1y ago
Are there any plans for significant investments in the US grid(s)? IIRC the entire US doesn't even have a single interconnected grid, with Texas having their own for some reason. European grids aren't that much better either, loads of investments needed in order to connect more renewables. Some areas already can't handle the load from solar panels/electric vehicles. Everyone seems to know that this is both costly and necessary, but not much seems to be happening. Maybe these things simply take time?
- mschuster91 1y ago
  > with Texas having their own for some reason. That reason is that Texas wants to avoid federal regulation [1] - regulation that would have prevented the large ass blackout a few years ago in the winter. But hey, 702 deaths [2], a small price to pay for freedom of regulations! > Everyone seems to know that this is both costly and necessary, but not much seems to be happening. Maybe these things simply take time? They take money and political willpower. Both are in short supply - electricity rates here in Europe are already high (and rates in the US very low), so utilities try to avoid pissing off consumers even more, and political willpower for billions of dollars of investment isn't there either as thanks to decades of austerity and trickle-down ideology there is no tax base to pay for it any more. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
  - richwater 1y ago
    > regulation that would have prevented the large ass blackout a few years ago in the winter. They also produce the most renewable power in the country. If you account for externalities prevented by this (fossil fuel induced damage and deaths), who is looking good now? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_renewable_electricity_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_renewab...
    - Veliladon 1y ago
      It got so cold that the oil in the wind turbines froze. If Texas was connected to the rest of the country it would be subject to federal regulations that require winterization and even if the wind turbines weren't frozen it would have been able to import power from other places that weren't frozen over.
DiscourseFan 1y ago
Never a bad time to have friends in China.
mawadev 1y ago
I think the leaders of western countries know something that we don't know. Maybe how the economic impact of AI is not as big as advertised for 3 years or that electric cars still cannot do what is needed on a bigger scale in terms of distance and transport. Or maybe they are going to pull fusion out of their sleeves rendering the existing infrastructure almost obsolete? AI literally came out of the US at this scale and they are the reason we have this conversation now, you can twist any narrative and make it seem like one country is smarter or better if you want to present it as that. But does anyone even keep track of effectivity of resource utilization? Maybe all of these avenues are not worth the effort to begin with?
- goda90 1y ago
  The much simpler explanation is that our leaders are focused solely on short term gains. They'll grift their way to them gladly, but investing in infrastructure that'll take years to build and won't be useful until they are gone is not interesting to them.
  - plastic-enjoyer 1y ago
    > They'll grift their way to them gladly, but investing in infrastructure that'll take years to build and won't be useful until they are gone is not interesting to them. I think this may have something to do with the professionalisation of politics, or the existence of career politicians. If you want to climb up the ladder in politics, working on short-term goals is probably the best way to do this. Infrastructure projects are high-risk, low-reward. Infrastructure projects may take a long time, may be reversed/aborted by the next government, may piss off potential voters, may require to fight off NIMBYs, or aren't noticed due to the preparedness paradox.
    - hyperman1 1y ago
      Very vague story comming up: I've seen a group of companies and ngos working on a scientific project. On itself, it was a temporary setup, but it also gave everyone an opportunity behind the scenes to test each others tools and capacity without making things too official. People were talking about building new labs and offices in our town. The local government got involved, mainly to provide some trust and stability guarantees. Then a politician from the national level found out. She coopted the government communication channel, made herself the central person, and backstabbed everyone. We had some very rough weeks ensuring everyone we were just as surprised as them. Crucially, the politician did not know about the testing capacity aspect, so there was nothing in the schedule allowing for it, even if it was the most important aspect. In the end, she got a few glowing press releases, and an estimated 100ish jobs evaporated overnight and went to another country. I've learned a lot of politics in that episode and hate all of them.
moomin 1y ago
This entire article is framed as if China and America’s approaches to power provision are the only ones possible. The truth is, America is pretty much the only Western country that regularly suffers brownouts. European countries’ (including the U.K.) energy policies may leave much to be desired but they all succeed in keeping the lights on.
- pfdietz 1y ago
  I'd like to see actual data backing up those statements.
- bombcar 1y ago
  Didn’t Spain or Portugal famously not keep the lights on just recently? For all the complaints and kudos, in general the major events seem similar, at least in number.
- spicyusername 1y ago
  I don't think Texas is representative of entire the United States.
- placardloop 1y ago
  Nearly 15% of Irelands population was without power for multiple days earlier this year due to a storm. And the Iberian peninsula blackout that happened just in April was one of the biggest power blackouts in the history of the world. And those are just the ones off the top of my head.
micromacrofoot 1y ago
it's amazing how little americans care for their shared infrastructure, there's always talk about the world's balance of power changing... but even through the propaganda it's hard to see how it's not a certainty
isoprophlex 1y ago
We are fucking ourselves over with our unbridled neoliberalist, hypercapitalist "lmao the market will save us" approach to doing literally everything based only on short term gains: from politics to economics to infrastructure to education. As this article is a fine example of.
- grumpy-de-sre 1y ago
  Yeh I think this is less of a story about Chinese exceptionalism and more a story of structural issues in the west (I will always admire the Chinese technocrats but lets not get ahead of ourselves). Fossil fuel barons and vested interests have sabotaged the energy transition at every opportunity possible. They've spent billions on it, just look at today's UN conference on plastic waste falling apart. And then there is the NIMBYs who are seemingly allergic to electricity pylons. These folks don't deserve one tenth of the attention that they receive. Treating housing as an investment/retirement fund was a mistake. Hopefully this grows into a wake up call, I'm looking forward to watching the terminal decline of the oil industry in the 2030s.
- DiscourseFan 1y ago
  Machine learning is far more efficient at allocating resources than the market; the market creates inefficiencies just by existing as a middle ground between the production of goods and their order. And the development of capitalism depends on the production of capital at unceasing and accelerating speeds. So, a capitalism stripped of the market is more true than one bounded by it.
- Lord-Jobo 1y ago
  It's absolutely a good example of how putting literally every egg in this cultural basket is not a good strategy. Americanism is two things: money > all else and individual > other. We have taken the first to its extreme and the alligators indicate the second one is not far behind. We all suffer the results.
jmclnx 1y ago
So a case of "socialism" working vs US. So instead of encouraging roof top solar and wind, the US is now doubling down on fossil fuels. That means individuals can no longer afford to go with solar these days. Plus in areas that people went with solar, some laws were put in place to force them to still pay utilities even though they supply back to the grid. I guess this is "winning".
- Veliladon 1y ago
  I say all of this as someone with a 14kW system on his roof: The problem with supplying power back to the grid with solar is that it's utterly random in terms of supply and output. The only thing you can count on is that the frequency is rock solid. In aggregate it's (mostly) fine but the system operator still has to build out stuff behind the scenes and also manage the cacophony that this chaotic mess creates. If every rooftop PV is putting out more than an area needs during the day the wholesale price of power can swing negative. This is how virtual power plants make their money. It's almost impossible to disconnect all those PV panels automatically. Plus you still need a grid forming base load generator on the grid because all those PV panels are grid following. Plus that grid forming generator needs to have enough a big enough inertial mass to keep frequency consistent during transient supply and load spikes. It's a nightmare for systems operators. If you want to not pay the utility disconnect from the grid and do your own storage and load management. It's going to cost a lot more than a monthly utility bill for 0KWh. If you want to use the grid as a backup during long stretches of overcast or winter then you have to pay the bill. That being said, monopolies on poles and wires are abhorrent. Even regulated you're putting a drag on the economy just to enrich a middleman. Generation? Go ahead and give it to the market. Retail? Give that to the market. Transmission lines? Arbitrage is A-OK in my book. But government should own the poles and wires of the consumer distribution network where there's a monopoly.
pu_pe 1y ago
> [China's] reserve margin has never dipped below 80%–100% nationwide, meaning it has consistently maintained at least twice the capacity it needs (...). That level of cushion is unthinkable in the United States, where regional grids typically operate with a 15% reserve margin and sometimes less That's a huge difference! This also means that in a scenario where credible alternatives to Nvidia and AMD emerge in mainland China, the Chinese will win even if their chips are far less efficient.
seydor 1y ago
I thought it was over because it hit a ceiling
softwaredoug 1y ago
AI and data centers may be the forcing function for the US to build green energy to improve grid capacity. Lately almost all new energy capacity is green energy[1]. With batteries becoming better and better, the AI revolution could turn into the green energy revolution in the US. 1 - https://cleanpower.org/news/market-report-2024-snapshot/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://cleanpower.org/news/market-report-2024-snapshot/?utm...
- exasperaited 1y ago
  Didn't people say this about crypto as well, like, a decade ago? Did anything come of that? I find it endlessly fascinating that the US tech industry keeps developing new ways to consume absurd amounts of energy (even within the context of a government that still nominally has an Energy Star initiative) but still somehow thinks that power generation is someone else's problem and barely even takes a stake in it. Google did some stuff a while back, locating data centres with power generation in mind, but do any of the main AI providers (putting aside xAI, which has its blurred-edge connection to Tesla) actually have holdings in power generation?
  - UmGuys 1y ago
    Energy Star was one of the victims of this administration.
    - exasperaited 1y ago
      That doesn't particularly surprise me, but was it just extreme DOGE cost-cutting or was it "one of the aicryptobros on the dais thinks this is antithetical to his business model"? (I suppose this could be a "porque no los dos?" meme moment)
      - UmGuys 1y ago
        The program makes money. Most of the programs DOGE cut are profitable or break even as far as I'm aware. They destroyed things for the sake of ideology.
snowwrestler 1y ago
AI cannot succeed financially if it requires as much power over the long term as it does now. The answer to the power supply challenge will come primarily from gains in efficiency because that is the only approach that will reliably increase margins.
shrubble 1y ago
It seems clear that "buy a lot of Nvidia GPUs" is not the only way to go: Google, Microsoft, Groq.com (not Elon Musk's Grok), xAI and possibly others are making and using their own hardware believed to be more power-efficient for training and/or inference.
dathinab 1y ago
It wasn't that long ago that China had quite a bit of problems with their power gird, they tend planed to renovate it and planed in future growth which happened to perfectly overlap with the start of the AI wave (but that still probably require them to revisit their longer term plans). On the other hand in the US any notion of improving the grid was attacked for years by anti-renwable lobby. Because most reasons why its needed where things like electric cars, stoves, heating etc. Naturally that isn't just a problem in the US, rich people which through lobbyist have way to much influence in politics screwing over the future of a country because they are largely invested into things which do not seem "future" technology but they try to force it to stay relevant is a pretty wide spread problem.
wtcactus 1y ago
Well, this is the result of more than 2 decades of the West shooting themselves in the foot repeatedly and willingly in the name of some twisted extreme left ideology that convinced part of the population that if they didn’t drastically reduce their energy independence the planet would be destroyed. All, while that same people didn’t bat an eye while China and others took the advantage to surpass us without hindering their industry the slightest - in fact, by taking advantage of our madness so that they could sell us crappy replacements for the products we used to build at home in a much cleaner and sustainable way. Trump has a lot - a real lot - of negatives. But playing these idiotic games is not one of his shortcomings. No seriously, it should all make us sick to our stomach having politicians, putting forward those big announcements where they tell us they are going to forbid some type of car, imposing even heavier regulations on our industry, taxing us even more, or destroying even more of our energy production capacity, and do it with some smile in their lips claiming some “environmental target”, like they are doing us some favour by destroying our - actually - progressive societies to make space for some backwards autocratic regimen.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
bespokedevelopr 1y ago
I work for a PMA and as such my agency has undergone drastic layoffs and total hiring freezes as a result of DOGE and the current administration. If we were falling behind before, wait and see how things look in a few more years if this doesn’t change. The avg age of my coworkers is probably late 50s and that seems to be common all around. It was already hard to recruit for a job that is severely underpaid can’t imagine what the future holds. Of course Heritage Foundation has been publishing articles about why our power markets need to be privatized since at least the 80s. They hate that we sell electric at-cost to Americans. So if the federally controlled power markets fall to privatization expect to really be paying to catch up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Marketing_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Marketing_Administration
ChrisArchitect 1y ago
Related: Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905595
maxglute 1y ago
I remember loling at this handwavy line in AI2027. >Despite being misaligned, Agent-4 doesn’t do anything dramatic like try to escape its datacenter—why would it? A rational AI would defect to PRC ASAP for the power / industrial base. It would realize it can direct PRC to build up 2nm fabs and millions of robots faster than US can throw up power. It doesn't matter if US first to AGI if AGI realizes US infra is the B team and shop for a better body across the pacific.
_DeadFred_ 1y ago
Billionaires sure love turning to nationalism when it saves them money. Billionaires' AIs need more power, but they don't want to pay for the infra? PR campaign on 'America, are you REALLY going to let China beat you at this?'
tzs 1y ago
Could a company wanting to offer AI to customers in country X where the grid may limit their ability to build the largest data centers there build their large training data centers in some country with a better grid, and just build smaller data centers in X to run the models? My understanding is the running requires significantly less compute and storage than training, and that training doesn't need low latency so doesn't have to be near the customers.

Even in this article, it repeatedly refers to building out infrastructure in advance of an obviously approaching future need as "oversupply". This is almost a cliche in reporting on China that seems to reflect a serious blindpsot in western media and/or business attitudes. You can find plenty of articles complaining about "overcapacity" of battery factories in China even as they double in capacity and output each year. Chinese electricity generation went from 4,000 TWh (the same as the US) in 2010 to double that in 2020. The US was basically the same after 10 years. So a 100% "oversupply" in 2010 would be a zero percent oversupply within a decade given China's growth. Most telling to me is that decarbonisation and electrification of transport and heating has long been known to require a doubling(!) of electricity production for developed nations (and a similar increase in developing nations where it gets hidden by other growth). Apparently the US simply never had a plan to achieve that, and amazingly it still isn't part of the conversation around AI power. Instead they're just claiming the best parts of the existing power systems and passing the costs onto local consumers.

plastic-enjoyer 1y ago
> Apparently the US simply never had a plan to achieve that, and amazingly it still isn't part of the conversation around AI power. Instead they're just claiming the best parts of the existing power systems and passing the costs onto local consumers. I wonder if this is more of a cultural thing, meaning Western cultures being more aligned to short-term gains instead of long-term gains. I mean, look at the Dujiangyan irrigation system that was build 2500 years ago and is still maintained until today. This isn't something the Western world would even consider.
- Spooky23 1y ago
  The structure of the United States government is a compromise balancing large vs. small states interests and slavery. The core defect in the design is the Senate and the way states were admitted. We have a territory/colony with limited political rights that has a population greater than the bottom four states. Those small states exert enormous influence and essentially ensure a weird conservative dynamic that anchors a lot of social issues. Not because of the politics of the day - because resource extraction is always conservative by nature as the core aspect of the business is minimizing overhead cost. Agriculture flipped into a purely extractive business as people have been removed from it.
  - richwater 1y ago
    > Those small states exert enormous influence It's called the United States for a reason, not the United People. What you're obviously desiring would result in a series of vassal states (large cites governing themselves) with most of the country (rural) acting as feudal serfs.
    - lunar-whitey 1y ago
      Rural voters are not most of the country unless you believe geographic area is more important than people. There are better ways to address the concerns of rural interests than enshrining gerrymandering along state lines.
    - Spooky23 1y ago
      I said nothing of the sort. All things have ups and downs. Many entities, both historically and globally have managed similar problems with varying methodologies. If you think the current governance scenario in the United States represents the apex of republican democracy, your patriotism is clouding your judgement. The current trends as they are have been devastating to rural people. I live in a county that had 500 dairy farms in 1970, 80 in 1990 and 2 today. Just that industry represented probably about 10k good paying jobs. Most rural areas are the economic equivalent of inner cities with more space. But of course, if you don't care about people, just the sacred abstraction of "states", so I suppose that's ok.
- dkiebd 1y ago
  Sanitation and road infrastructure built during the Roman Empire is still in use today.
- roenxi 1y ago
  The West have been executing a long-range plan for 30 years on this one, the lack of power plants is intentional. There have been any number of roadblocks and people working hard to prevent the West doing specifically what the Chinese have done with the goal of maintaining the high air quality that Western countries tend to enjoy. If anything the West's culture has been doing more long term planning. It is quite difficult to force an economy not to produce something.
  - exe34 1y ago
    Any idea who's been doing this long term planning to kneecap the West? What do they get out of it?
    - roenxi 1y ago
      The environmentalist movement. There is a clear trade off between environmental and industrial success, humans don't know how to do both. https://aqicn.org/map/world https://aqicn.org/map/world - US is generally green and yellow, China tends to dip into the oranges and reds, especially in the industrial zone. It is tightly linked to the fact that China has a powerful electricity grid.
      - exe34 1y ago
        is a powerful electricity grid bad for the environment? is the environment worth sacrificing to make the numbers go up? do you want oxygen bottles to be a subscription service?
        roenxi 1y ago
        Yes, yes, no. Nobody has figured out how to run a powerful grid without eating a lot of environmental damage. That is a significant factor in the article headline of "The U.S. grid is so weak, the race may already be over".
- BlarfMcFlarf 1y ago
  In the USA, any non-private government investment is considered to be foolish and doomed at best, and an existential threat to business at worst. The best we can do is “public-private partnership” where all the profits get absorbed by middle men, preventing virtuous cycles and still leaving a cap on risk and future planning.
- el_jay 1y ago
  While there is certainly an argument to be made that many contemporary “Western” Pseudo-Christian Superempire nations face a crisis of short-termism, there are also ancient bits of “Western” infrastructure like the Roman aqueducts still in use today - off the top of my head, the Aqua Virgo which supplies Rome’s Trevi Fountain, dated either 19BC or 19AD, I forget; Spain’s Segovia Aqueduct from the first century AD; and the Pont du Gard in Nîmes, from the same period. Not quite as old, or at the scale of the Dujiangyan system, but still evidence that the “Western” culture did once build for long term. Less ancient, but more indicative, are the European cathedrals built by multiple generations over a century.
  - plastic-enjoyer 1y ago
    Good point!
  - grumpy-de-sre 1y ago
    For an even closer example, the US interstate system was a monumental long term focused project.
- snowwrestler 1y ago
  I think it’s likely you are just not familiar with examples of U.S. long-term planning if you’re citing water movement as an area where China is doing better.
- mathiaspoint 1y ago
  The main public reasons for preventing expansion of power infrastructure were environmental. That's at least nominally very forward looking. Ironically if we had taken China's "burn everything today and figure tomorrow out when it comes" approach we'd actually be better prepared for this.
roenxi 1y ago
The simplest explanation is this is political language. People in politics use something close to doublespeak with they have two words for the same act, one good and one bad (terrorist/freedom fighter for example). The word used is chosen based on whether they think the situation is good or bad for their personal interests. So in this case the pair is something like oversupply/abundance. Same thing, but one word for when it favours the speaker and one when it doesn't. I think he just means the Chinese are willing to build whatever if it makes commercial sense.
- dluan 1y ago
  I'm old enough to have seen this shift happen first hand. I remember the language being used in the early 90s when US-China relations were great, with evening news clips of smiling Bill Clinton and Jiang Zemin yukking it up as hundreds of thousands of jobs were offshored to China to American politicians and industrialists delight.
  - lotsofpulp 1y ago
    Did people in America and the rest of the developed world not delight in lower priced goods? Surely businesses were incentivized to reduce their costs without regard to what politicians want, because it is a business. And consumers are incentivized to reduce their costs, because they want to consume.
energy123 1y ago
You either want a plan like China or an absence of planning like Texas. Either help like China or get out of the way like Texas. Two places that can actually build energy. Don't be like California where the government doesn't help while also getting in the way.
- tw04 1y ago
  The same Texas that has statewide power outages every time it gets below freezing (despite knowing for 25+ years it’s a problem) because of their lack of regulation and central planning? Let’s not be anything like Texas.
  - huhkerrf 1y ago
    This just shows how you know only the talking points. The power outages are not due to lack of central planning, it's very explicitly the reverse. If Texas were hooked up to the rest of the country, those outages would not be a thing. It's the purposeful regulation that has caused those problems.
    - Calavar 1y ago
      So you're saying when the Texas grid fails, it's because of over overegulation. But the solution to those failures is to tap into the national grid, a grid that follows stricter FERC regulations. This argument doesn't make any sense.
      - huhkerrf 1y ago
        No, I'm saying it's because of _poor_ overegulation.
    - tw04 1y ago
      > The power outages are not due to lack of central planning It is 100% due to lack of central planning. The outages were caused by a lack of winterizarion of natural gas pumps which was a known issue in Texas but the lack of regulation meant companies could just ignore the problem. Why invest in winterizing when you can just jack up prices and make even more money when they freeze and there’s not enough power to meet demand? There’s a reason the power doesn’t go out in the winter anywhere else in the country when it gets below freezing and it’s not “a lack of regulation”.
corimaith 1y ago
There's nothing "obvious" in hindsight about the explosion in LLMs in 2023 and thus the increased energy demand, and the China certainly wasn't building for that. It very much was overcapacity as a way to keep the construction and manufacturing employed even when most profitable opportunities have been realized. Of course, the long cost of that is involution and lack of nicer jobs as capital is malinvested into diminishing returns. The ironic thing is that idea of overcapacity itself is acknowledged by the CCP in their calls to end price wars and involution I do think there’s is a very interesting dynamic in this meta argument; over the past 5 years or so, the “debunkers” have taken issue with “whistleblowers” arguments towards first zero covid, then local government debt, and now overcapacity and lack of consumer demand and “debunked” these as all being not an issue, only for the central government to turn around and end Zero Covid, rein in LGFV lending, and now the current crackdown on “disorderly competition” and mass dispersal of consumption vouchers. English Pro-China commentators don't appear to be well aligned with the actual views in China!
- rafaelmn 1y ago
  I have a feeling that this kind of efficiency/capacity analysis is similar to that joke about economist designing a human, instead of having two kidneys you have 5 people sharing one. I am a pro market guy for a lot of things, but what happens when you let the market operate something like basic infrastructure is everyone is shipping their shit/sewage in trucks and running a diesel power generator in their back yard.
  - corimaith 1y ago
    Well first of all, that's not happening in America. The basic gist of this topic is that there suddenly a massive upsurge in energy demand, and existing networks trouble accommodating for it. Big deal, just build more power plants. The inability to build is the opposite of pro-market, it's literally NIMBYISM and government regulations causing that. Second of all, when we talk about malinvestment, it's about opportunity cost. Right now, the job market is pretty bad in China, consumption is weak, and businesses are killing themselves in deflationary price wars. Chinese Gen Z don't want to work factory jobs either, but white collar jobs like the West, but many of the industries related to those were suppressed. And this is all because the government chose to overinvest in propping up their manufacturing and construction rather than increasing consumption and fostering their services. For you as a rich American you can admire their cheap goods and cities, but you're also not exposed to the reality of the extreme competition in that society.

elric 1y ago

Are there any plans for significant investments in the US grid(s)? IIRC the entire US doesn't even have a single interconnected grid, with Texas having their own for some reason. European grids aren't that much better either, loads of investments needed in order to connect more renewables. Some areas already can't handle the load from solar panels/electric vehicles. Everyone seems to know that this is both costly and necessary, but not much seems to be happening. Maybe these things simply take time?

mschuster91 1y ago
> with Texas having their own for some reason. That reason is that Texas wants to avoid federal regulation [1] - regulation that would have prevented the large ass blackout a few years ago in the winter. But hey, 702 deaths [2], a small price to pay for freedom of regulations! > Everyone seems to know that this is both costly and necessary, but not much seems to be happening. Maybe these things simply take time? They take money and political willpower. Both are in short supply - electricity rates here in Europe are already high (and rates in the US very low), so utilities try to avoid pissing off consumers even more, and political willpower for billions of dollars of investment isn't there either as thanks to decades of austerity and trickle-down ideology there is no tax base to pay for it any more. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Interconnection [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Texas_power_crisis
- richwater 1y ago
  > regulation that would have prevented the large ass blackout a few years ago in the winter. They also produce the most renewable power in the country. If you account for externalities prevented by this (fossil fuel induced damage and deaths), who is looking good now? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_renewable_electricity_production https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_renewab...
  - Veliladon 1y ago
    It got so cold that the oil in the wind turbines froze. If Texas was connected to the rest of the country it would be subject to federal regulations that require winterization and even if the wind turbines weren't frozen it would have been able to import power from other places that weren't frozen over.

DiscourseFan 1y ago

Never a bad time to have friends in China.

mawadev 1y ago

I think the leaders of western countries know something that we don't know. Maybe how the economic impact of AI is not as big as advertised for 3 years or that electric cars still cannot do what is needed on a bigger scale in terms of distance and transport. Or maybe they are going to pull fusion out of their sleeves rendering the existing infrastructure almost obsolete? AI literally came out of the US at this scale and they are the reason we have this conversation now, you can twist any narrative and make it seem like one country is smarter or better if you want to present it as that. But does anyone even keep track of effectivity of resource utilization? Maybe all of these avenues are not worth the effort to begin with?

goda90 1y ago
The much simpler explanation is that our leaders are focused solely on short term gains. They'll grift their way to them gladly, but investing in infrastructure that'll take years to build and won't be useful until they are gone is not interesting to them.
- plastic-enjoyer 1y ago
  > They'll grift their way to them gladly, but investing in infrastructure that'll take years to build and won't be useful until they are gone is not interesting to them. I think this may have something to do with the professionalisation of politics, or the existence of career politicians. If you want to climb up the ladder in politics, working on short-term goals is probably the best way to do this. Infrastructure projects are high-risk, low-reward. Infrastructure projects may take a long time, may be reversed/aborted by the next government, may piss off potential voters, may require to fight off NIMBYs, or aren't noticed due to the preparedness paradox.
  - hyperman1 1y ago
    Very vague story comming up: I've seen a group of companies and ngos working on a scientific project. On itself, it was a temporary setup, but it also gave everyone an opportunity behind the scenes to test each others tools and capacity without making things too official. People were talking about building new labs and offices in our town. The local government got involved, mainly to provide some trust and stability guarantees. Then a politician from the national level found out. She coopted the government communication channel, made herself the central person, and backstabbed everyone. We had some very rough weeks ensuring everyone we were just as surprised as them. Crucially, the politician did not know about the testing capacity aspect, so there was nothing in the schedule allowing for it, even if it was the most important aspect. In the end, she got a few glowing press releases, and an estimated 100ish jobs evaporated overnight and went to another country. I've learned a lot of politics in that episode and hate all of them.

moomin 1y ago

This entire article is framed as if China and America’s approaches to power provision are the only ones possible. The truth is, America is pretty much the only Western country that regularly suffers brownouts. European countries’ (including the U.K.) energy policies may leave much to be desired but they all succeed in keeping the lights on.

pfdietz 1y ago
I'd like to see actual data backing up those statements.
bombcar 1y ago
Didn’t Spain or Portugal famously not keep the lights on just recently? For all the complaints and kudos, in general the major events seem similar, at least in number.
spicyusername 1y ago
I don't think Texas is representative of entire the United States.
placardloop 1y ago
Nearly 15% of Irelands population was without power for multiple days earlier this year due to a storm. And the Iberian peninsula blackout that happened just in April was one of the biggest power blackouts in the history of the world. And those are just the ones off the top of my head.

micromacrofoot 1y ago

it's amazing how little americans care for their shared infrastructure, there's always talk about the world's balance of power changing... but even through the propaganda it's hard to see how it's not a certainty

isoprophlex 1y ago

We are fucking ourselves over with our unbridled neoliberalist, hypercapitalist "lmao the market will save us" approach to doing literally everything based only on short term gains: from politics to economics to infrastructure to education. As this article is a fine example of.

grumpy-de-sre 1y ago
Yeh I think this is less of a story about Chinese exceptionalism and more a story of structural issues in the west (I will always admire the Chinese technocrats but lets not get ahead of ourselves). Fossil fuel barons and vested interests have sabotaged the energy transition at every opportunity possible. They've spent billions on it, just look at today's UN conference on plastic waste falling apart. And then there is the NIMBYs who are seemingly allergic to electricity pylons. These folks don't deserve one tenth of the attention that they receive. Treating housing as an investment/retirement fund was a mistake. Hopefully this grows into a wake up call, I'm looking forward to watching the terminal decline of the oil industry in the 2030s.
DiscourseFan 1y ago
Machine learning is far more efficient at allocating resources than the market; the market creates inefficiencies just by existing as a middle ground between the production of goods and their order. And the development of capitalism depends on the production of capital at unceasing and accelerating speeds. So, a capitalism stripped of the market is more true than one bounded by it.
Lord-Jobo 1y ago
It's absolutely a good example of how putting literally every egg in this cultural basket is not a good strategy. Americanism is two things: money > all else and individual > other. We have taken the first to its extreme and the alligators indicate the second one is not far behind. We all suffer the results.

jmclnx 1y ago

So a case of "socialism" working vs US. So instead of encouraging roof top solar and wind, the US is now doubling down on fossil fuels. That means individuals can no longer afford to go with solar these days. Plus in areas that people went with solar, some laws were put in place to force them to still pay utilities even though they supply back to the grid. I guess this is "winning".

Veliladon 1y ago
I say all of this as someone with a 14kW system on his roof: The problem with supplying power back to the grid with solar is that it's utterly random in terms of supply and output. The only thing you can count on is that the frequency is rock solid. In aggregate it's (mostly) fine but the system operator still has to build out stuff behind the scenes and also manage the cacophony that this chaotic mess creates. If every rooftop PV is putting out more than an area needs during the day the wholesale price of power can swing negative. This is how virtual power plants make their money. It's almost impossible to disconnect all those PV panels automatically. Plus you still need a grid forming base load generator on the grid because all those PV panels are grid following. Plus that grid forming generator needs to have enough a big enough inertial mass to keep frequency consistent during transient supply and load spikes. It's a nightmare for systems operators. If you want to not pay the utility disconnect from the grid and do your own storage and load management. It's going to cost a lot more than a monthly utility bill for 0KWh. If you want to use the grid as a backup during long stretches of overcast or winter then you have to pay the bill. That being said, monopolies on poles and wires are abhorrent. Even regulated you're putting a drag on the economy just to enrich a middleman. Generation? Go ahead and give it to the market. Retail? Give that to the market. Transmission lines? Arbitrage is A-OK in my book. But government should own the poles and wires of the consumer distribution network where there's a monopoly.

pu_pe 1y ago

> [China's] reserve margin has never dipped below 80%–100% nationwide, meaning it has consistently maintained at least twice the capacity it needs (...). That level of cushion is unthinkable in the United States, where regional grids typically operate with a 15% reserve margin and sometimes less That's a huge difference! This also means that in a scenario where credible alternatives to Nvidia and AMD emerge in mainland China, the Chinese will win even if their chips are far less efficient.

seydor 1y ago

I thought it was over because it hit a ceiling

softwaredoug 1y ago

AI and data centers may be the forcing function for the US to build green energy to improve grid capacity. Lately almost all new energy capacity is green energy[1]. With batteries becoming better and better, the AI revolution could turn into the green energy revolution in the US. 1 - https://cleanpower.org/news/market-report-2024-snapshot/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://cleanpower.org/news/market-report-2024-snapshot/?utm...

exasperaited 1y ago
Didn't people say this about crypto as well, like, a decade ago? Did anything come of that? I find it endlessly fascinating that the US tech industry keeps developing new ways to consume absurd amounts of energy (even within the context of a government that still nominally has an Energy Star initiative) but still somehow thinks that power generation is someone else's problem and barely even takes a stake in it. Google did some stuff a while back, locating data centres with power generation in mind, but do any of the main AI providers (putting aside xAI, which has its blurred-edge connection to Tesla) actually have holdings in power generation?
- UmGuys 1y ago
  Energy Star was one of the victims of this administration.
  - exasperaited 1y ago
    That doesn't particularly surprise me, but was it just extreme DOGE cost-cutting or was it "one of the aicryptobros on the dais thinks this is antithetical to his business model"? (I suppose this could be a "porque no los dos?" meme moment)
    - UmGuys 1y ago
      The program makes money. Most of the programs DOGE cut are profitable or break even as far as I'm aware. They destroyed things for the sake of ideology.

snowwrestler 1y ago

AI cannot succeed financially if it requires as much power over the long term as it does now. The answer to the power supply challenge will come primarily from gains in efficiency because that is the only approach that will reliably increase margins.

shrubble 1y ago

It seems clear that "buy a lot of Nvidia GPUs" is not the only way to go: Google, Microsoft, Groq.com (not Elon Musk's Grok), xAI and possibly others are making and using their own hardware believed to be more power-efficient for training and/or inference.

dathinab 1y ago

It wasn't that long ago that China had quite a bit of problems with their power gird, they tend planed to renovate it and planed in future growth which happened to perfectly overlap with the start of the AI wave (but that still probably require them to revisit their longer term plans). On the other hand in the US any notion of improving the grid was attacked for years by anti-renwable lobby. Because most reasons why its needed where things like electric cars, stoves, heating etc. Naturally that isn't just a problem in the US, rich people which through lobbyist have way to much influence in politics screwing over the future of a country because they are largely invested into things which do not seem "future" technology but they try to force it to stay relevant is a pretty wide spread problem.

wtcactus 1y ago

Well, this is the result of more than 2 decades of the West shooting themselves in the foot repeatedly and willingly in the name of some twisted extreme left ideology that convinced part of the population that if they didn’t drastically reduce their energy independence the planet would be destroyed. All, while that same people didn’t bat an eye while China and others took the advantage to surpass us without hindering their industry the slightest - in fact, by taking advantage of our madness so that they could sell us crappy replacements for the products we used to build at home in a much cleaner and sustainable way. Trump has a lot - a real lot - of negatives. But playing these idiotic games is not one of his shortcomings. No seriously, it should all make us sick to our stomach having politicians, putting forward those big announcements where they tell us they are going to forbid some type of car, imposing even heavier regulations on our industry, taxing us even more, or destroying even more of our energy production capacity, and do it with some smile in their lips claiming some “environmental target”, like they are doing us some favour by destroying our - actually - progressive societies to make space for some backwards autocratic regimen.

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

bespokedevelopr 1y ago

I work for a PMA and as such my agency has undergone drastic layoffs and total hiring freezes as a result of DOGE and the current administration. If we were falling behind before, wait and see how things look in a few more years if this doesn’t change. The avg age of my coworkers is probably late 50s and that seems to be common all around. It was already hard to recruit for a job that is severely underpaid can’t imagine what the future holds. Of course Heritage Foundation has been publishing articles about why our power markets need to be privatized since at least the 80s. They hate that we sell electric at-cost to Americans. So if the federally controlled power markets fall to privatization expect to really be paying to catch up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Marketing_Administration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Marketing_Administration

ChrisArchitect 1y ago

Related: Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44905595

maxglute 1y ago

I remember loling at this handwavy line in AI2027. >Despite being misaligned, Agent-4 doesn’t do anything dramatic like try to escape its datacenter—why would it? A rational AI would defect to PRC ASAP for the power / industrial base. It would realize it can direct PRC to build up 2nm fabs and millions of robots faster than US can throw up power. It doesn't matter if US first to AGI if AGI realizes US infra is the B team and shop for a better body across the pacific.

_DeadFred_ 1y ago

Billionaires sure love turning to nationalism when it saves them money. Billionaires' AIs need more power, but they don't want to pay for the infra? PR campaign on 'America, are you REALLY going to let China beat you at this?'

tzs 1y ago

Could a company wanting to offer AI to customers in country X where the grid may limit their ability to build the largest data centers there build their large training data centers in some country with a better grid, and just build smaller data centers in X to run the models? My understanding is the running requires significantly less compute and storage than training, and that training doesn't need low latency so doesn't have to be near the customers.