AI datacenters putting zero emissions promises out of reach The datacenter industry looks set for a turbulent 2025 as AI growth threatens to trump sustainability commitments and authorities are likely to see growing public hostility to new projects. In addition, an overhaul of the way power is supplied and distributed to server farms seems increasingly necessary. These findings come …
Thirty seconds on Google, and I found a IEA report that states that data centers account for roughly 1% of global energy usage.
Don't get me wrong. 1% is a very large amount, especially considering that a lot of that power is consumed for purposes of dubious benefit.
However, I really don't think that data centers can be honestly said to be the thing that puts net zero out of reach.
By all means, make them more efficient, and/or stop running them for useless "AI" that benefits nobody and doesn't even have a positive ROI, but hyperbole is not helping the cause.
We should not be aiming to reduce energy consumption, we should be aiming to reduce the CO2 produced during energy production. Building nuclear power plants is the clear solution.
It is far easier to replace the 50 ~0.5MW gas power stations in the UK with 8 3.2MW nuclear power stations that it is to insulate, install heat recovery ventilation, damp proof and install new heating in ~20 millions houses.
To hard questions. The UK has been building ONE power nuke for the best part of a decade, with consumers are already paying for the 0KWh currently being produced. I haven't seen queues of developers waiting for permission to build the other 7 or the other 700 SMRs.
You will be horrified!
This-
https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/01/16/moss-landing-power-plant-fire-evacuations-road-closures/
The facility, owned by Vistra Energy, a Texas company, is one of the largest battery storage plants in the world. It holds tens of thousands of lithium batteries, which are used to store electricity from solar power and other sources generated during the day for use at night. Such battery storage plants are a key part of California’s efforts to shift most of its electricity generation to renewable sources.
“There’s no way to sugarcoat it. This is a disaster, is what it is,” Monterey County Supervisor Glen Church told KSBW-TV. “This is extremely disconcerting.”
Should also horrify you, given the number of battery storage systems being built in the UK as well. Toxic contamination of a population centre and nature reserve. How very Green.
Solar panel fires are actually far worse, toxic-contamination-wise.
Censorship note: 2nd quoted paragraph has been deleted (as at 7hrs later). For future reference, any time you see something likely to be deleted or censored (i.e., factual), whack it into archive.today. Doesn't comply with deletion demands like Internet Archive. (But snapshot only, no auto-recheck.) Installable extension on front page for one-click preservation. Extremely useful where facts are awkward for the anti-pleb brigade -- they tend to get disappeared. Carpe diem.
Solar panel fires are actually far worse, toxic-contamination-wise.
Yep, although much the same risk, ie the problem of spreading toxic and very persistent heavy metals. Which is also a bit like the nuclear waste disposal problem. The UK's FIT-induced first wave of solar panels will be nearing the end of their service life and need replacing. Newer solar panels might be more efficient, but also more toxic and degrade faster. Strange the way lead was banned for useful things like solder, but gets a pass for solar. Plus there's also the challenge of dealing with old windmills. Some of it can be recycled, but a lot can't, so huge windmill blades are just chopped up and buried. They won't be radioactive for thousands of years, but will just sit there being generally useless.
Which pretty much sums up the whole 'renewables' industry. Mostly useless, expensive, and produces a collosal amount of waste.
"Which pretty much sums up the whole 'renewables' industry. Mostly useless, expensive, and produces a collosal amount of waste."
It is fine however to have loads of coal slag heaps and pump greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere willy nilly and polute our cities with nitrous oxide and fine particulate mater.
Lets all double down down and go for the status quo. Its served us so well in the past and we dont have to bother about improving our environment for our children.
quote: They won't be radioactive for thousands of years, but will just sit there being generally useless.
Surely the lack of thousands of years of radioactivity is a very good reason to run with turbines and not nukes. I'm sure the good folk of Fukushima would have been happy with a few buried turbine blades. At present they have no means of dealing with their molten, radioactive problem as the readings are off the scale. Long term containment will only be possible if they can work out how to move stuff that radioactive before the place gets ripped apart in another quake.
The UK doesn't have the money or the workers to build multiple nukes, and the cost of nuclear power is so high that the energy bills would topple the government. There are serious issues with one under-construction UK nuke that may see construction halted. That will make HS2 look cheap.
Net Zero is a fallacy, supported politically for convenience. We will only be able to shave a bit off. But don't wait too long before switching to resilience measures. Australia, who are in the front line, have already waited too long.
Building nuclear power stations is a terrible option. They are expensive, take a long time to build, we don't know how to dispose of the waste material, and in terms of cost/kw are a long way behind solar which gets cheaper every year. The way to make renewables work as a viable and resilient energy option are:
1) Over supply on the generation side - the sun doesn't always shine, but the wind is always blowing somewhere even if it isn't blowing in a particular locality.
2) A much better grid so that power can be shifted from where it's being generated to where it's needed.
3) More storage capacity to smooth out peaks in generation vs peaks in demand. A smart grid and electric cars could actually help here as each car plugged in is a mobile power storage unit.
And the other thing to do, is to stop wasting energy on useless shit like crypto currencies and building ever larger LLMs with dubious benefits.
"Building nuclear power stations is a terrible option. They are expensive, take a long time to build, we don't know how to dispose of the waste material"
Its cheaper to build oil, gas or coal. But if you want reliable generation without the pollution complaints especially from the co2 cult it is about the only real solution (UK). As for waste material we can reprocess it, extremely little is actually left over and we can store it.
"1) Over supply on the generation side - the sun doesn't always shine, but the wind is always blowing somewhere even if it isn't blowing in a particular locality."
Dunkelflaute. The theory may work but reality is not even close. And for solar it may be viable in places with actual sun exposure most of the time but not much use to the UK. Australia is having problems with too much solar making the grid unstable and short of power.
"2) A much better grid so that power can be shifted from where it's being generated to where it's needed."
The problem with the unreliables is the lack of it working on the grid successfully. It always requires that bit more investment before it will work. To make use of the incredibly expensive wind already deployed by the UK we need even more expensive upgrading of the grid to transport energy from where it is generated to where it is needed AND still need a mythical technology we still dont have (batteries) to store that energy of sufficient quantity to make it usable when it is needed.
"3) More storage capacity to smooth out peaks in generation vs peaks in demand. A smart grid and electric cars could actually help here as each car plugged in is a mobile power storage unit."
That smart grid would be turning people off when the sun isnt shining enough, the wind isnt blowing enough, the grid isnt upgraded enough and the batteries are out. The solution used at the moment is fossil fuels because they work where and when they are needed.
Your choice of language is quite revealing of your prejudices. We get it. You don't believe that CO2 is a problem or that renewable energy is viable. Because god forbid that we should use energy sources that don't pollute or make us dependent on importing most of it from elsewhere. What a relief it must have been to you that war in Ukraine didn't cause everyone's energy bills to shoot up overnight.... oh wait...
@Paul 195
"Your choice of language is quite revealing of your prejudices."
Good I dont try to hide it.
"You don't believe that CO2 is a problem"
I dont think we know enough which gets proven every time the climate does something the 'experts' have no clue is going on. Or that everything is climate change just to keep hope alive that the theory can still be peddled. Maybe it doesnt or maybe it does but we have no idea of proportion or if its good or bad. As for the doom cult they are just another group preaching the end is coming.
"or that renewable energy is viable"
That isnt quite right for my opinion. Unreliables are not viable on the grid currently which is a fact. It relies on weather events which are unreliable to produce a very variable and unstable supply of power where and when it can generate but not necessarily where we want it. To make it 'viable' we need to upgrade the grid considerably and need a magic technology that doesnt exist to make it work. We can of course use reliable renewables for example hydro if we are willing to sink some of the environment but that upsets the greenies so thats not gonna happen. My problem isnt the renewable bit, its the unicorns and magic bit that I have no trust in.
"What a relief it must have been to you that war in Ukraine didn't cause everyone's energy bills to shoot up overnight.... oh wait..."
It didnt. Government policy did. You may or not agree with government policy on this but they cut off Russian gas (we could probably get a hell of a discount currently) and ban fracking. That is 2 government policies making gas expensive. I cant imagine shutting down and not replacing our coal plants helped either but what really screwed our bills before the war was unreliables. And to make unreliables work on the grid we need energy generation that can quickly ramp up and down which is.... dun dun duuuunnn- gas.
To make your chosen monuments to a sky god work on the grid requires gas power plants to back them up. You dont like gas we should stop hooking up wind and solar to the grid and move away from gas. Previously you said nuclear is a bad option so what do you propose? Coal? Oil?
@The Central Scrutinizer
Did you miss /sarc from your comment? I am gonna assume not but I hope you are joking.
"Seriously? FYI the wind blows 24/7"
Nope. There are still periods over a very large area which means no wind power. Look up Dunkelflaute. Also there is the additional problem of too much wind shutting them down too.
"And surprise! Batteries store power"
Very true. What we dont have is the magic technology of batteries that store enough power, cheaply and safely. Without the magic technology wind and solar need gas power to fall back on.
>> What we dont have is the magic technology of batteries that store enough power, cheaply and safely.
Missed the El Reg stories on sodium/salt batteries huh?
https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/15/boffins_bust_sodium_ion_battery/
https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/06/sodium_ion_batteries_china/
It will also help solve the issue of the highly saline slurry "waste" from desalination plants.
@MrDamage
"Missed the El Reg stories on sodium/salt batteries huh?"
Not at all. There is impressive work being done. And yet what we dont currently have is the magic technology battery to store days worth of power at a reasonable price to make unreliables viable on the grid.
And when I call it magic I dont mean it isnt possible, but we dont know if it will work nor if it will be economical to do it. Until there is a viable solution to make the unreliable sources viable, they wont be. And still the whole grid would need an expensive upgrade just to get power from where it generates to where its needed.
Just to add..
Waves never stop rolling.
You really should get out of your basement more, or just look up sea states, and what flat calms are. Waves frequently stop rolling because they're wind driven. Which means if there's no wind to blow windmills, there's not going to be much wave power either. And tidal generation is more predictable. But that would reimagine the old saying that 'Time and tide wait for no man' to 'Man waits for tide to boil their kettle, have a shower, cook, do some work'.
Ah, 'renewables' fast forward back to the Dark Ages!
Why would anyone want to live in the Dark Ages: Scavenging for resources to burn to keep warm and keep the lights on?
Some ecofreaks already do. So on the large scale, Drax already burns entire forests. On the small scale, some decided to buy wood burning stoves, then wrote articles about the joys of scavenging for 'found wood'. Which was sometimes found to belong to someone else (especially when 'finding' it with the help of a chainsaw) or found to be pressure treated timber and just a tad toxic. And then finding that the price of firewood rocketed, and councils started cracking down on smoke pollution.
Better to rely on limitless hydrocarbons.
Indeed. With cheap electricity, we can make hydrocarbons out of water and CO2.
I think you've solved our energy problems!We use cheap Russian gas to generate cheap electricity and then create hydrocarbons using Fischer-Tropsch.(?) This is genius!
Not.. entirely. But see also-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
The Sabatier reaction or Sabatier process produces methane and water from a reaction of hydrogen with carbon dioxide at elevated temperatures (optimally 300–400 °C) and pressures (perhaps 3 MPa) in the presence of a nickel catalyst.
which is already used, including this neat bit-
NASA is using the Sabatier reaction to recover water from exhaled carbon dioxide and the hydrogen previously discarded from electrolysis on the International Space Station and possibly for future missions
although it dumps the methane. But for future lunar or martian projects, it's a good start. If you have water and CO2, you can bootstrap an off-world hydrocarbon industry. It's something I've been following because things like making bricks or construction materials off-world could also be used as a gas generator which could then be used to synthesise other chemicals, and reduce the need to import them.
Meanwhile, back on Earth, the ecofreaks want to go in the opposite direction and decompose water or methane to create a 'hydrogen economy' that nobody really wants. And because hydrogen and oxygen really like each other, breaking those bonds requires a lot of energy that we don't have.. Although it's something we could do, if we had surplus nuclear energy or ever get fusion working on a commercial scale.
But banning fossil fuels also means banning the production of all the products produced by the petrochemical industry. So no more bitumen to make asphalt for roads. We could mine the La Brea tar pits, but that might prove unpopular, or recover more interesting remains from the past. So no more asphalt for road surfacing or repairs, so we could switch to concrete, but that produces deadly CO2 so is heavily taxed making road building, resurfacing and repairs even more expensive. And then there's all the other stuff produced as byproducts from pharmaceuticals to plastics. The petrochemical industry isn't 'evil', it's essential for modern living. But the neo-luddite ecofreaks seem determined, once again to get us back to a lifestyle from the Dark Ages.
This could be a fitting punishment for the neo-luddites that glue themselves to the roads. Forbid them from using or owning any petrochemical derived products for say, a year. Then see if they really want the lifestyle they want to impose on others.
What a relief it must have been to you that war in Ukraine didn't cause everyone's energy bills to shoot up overnight.... oh wait...
The sanctions we imposed on ourselves are what caused everyone's energy bills to shoot up overnight.
Some of the rest is cognitive dissonance. If 'renewables' are so cheap, why is it that the more we're forced to 'invest' in them, the more our electricity costs go up? Surely with all the windmills and solar, our electricity should be almost too cheap to meter?
Oh, and in other news of the absurd. Seems like we narrowly avoided blackouts last week thanks to a thing called 'STOR', or Short Term Operating Reserve. Which the article mentions. Sort of-
Microsoft, for example, has deployed "grid-interactive UPS technology" at its Dublin campus which allows the energy storage systems installed for backup power to feed energy back to the grid if required. This is intended to help smooth out any variability in the power supply due to the variable nature of renewable energy sources.
Which is another way of saying STOR. So when the wind isn't blowing and the sun isn't shining, and the lights are about to go out, grid operators can hit the panic button and call owners of banks of diesel generators to fire them up & keep the lights on. For which the STOR participants get paid a LOT of money, which gets added to our electricity bills. Of course there may be a few snags, like the ability to keep those diesel generators running in the event of any prolonged outage.
I still think that Ofgem should require anybody on a 'Green' energy tariff that promises to deliver only the finest, free range organic electrons to their customers should disconnect those customers when demand exceeds 'renewables' supply. Then more of the public may educate themselves about how useless and expensive 'renewables' really are.
>Seems like we narrowly avoided blackouts last week
Just to add to that:
~500 MW in hand, per the hands-on real-world industry boys. Substantially below "minimum". 300 MW of STOR was already illegally operating in the market. NESO has come out with a startlingly fraudulent "reply" (eg, claiming that the nominal capacity of wind turbines not turning because no wind, constitutes reserve power (I wish I was making this up)), and has been challenged to provide the data it's suddenly hiding. NESO so far refusing; industry is going to OFGEN etc to try to force the issue.
Separate but related: the long-warned-of Frequency problems caused by nonspinners wind+solar (wolar) are mounting up. 100s of near-breaches of limits each month now. And by drift, not event. !!!
Be aware: breach means sub-second shutdown. And with so little reserve left in the system, sub-second chain reaction across entire grid is exponentially increasingly possible. Meaning blackstart. Never done before in UK. Because previously, it's never happened since electricity was rolled out in UK, because previously the grid was managed on real-world principles related to facts.
"Building nuclear power stations is a terrible option."
Why yes, it is. However, contrary to your assumptions, It's probably the least bad of the available options. Hydro is or soon will be pretty much maxed out. Geothermal and tidal have very few appropriate sites. That's really true of wind as well. Solar is possibly OK in the tropics. But, when properly assessed, it's far more expensive than its advocates believe. It needs a huge amount of back up storage. And, at scale, it's ugly and really shouldn't displace farmland and/or forests except in exceptional situations.
When you do the arithmetic, nuclear (fission or fusion) seems to be the only long term option for supporting 8 or 10 billion people at a reasonable standard of living. See UCSD astrophysicist Tom Murphy's DoTheMath.ucsd,edu archived posts for the supporting arguments ... and the math.
Other than that, most of your ideas are fine. Really. They simply don't look to be adequate to make up the gap between what is needed and what other technologies can provide.
>solar...And, at scale, it's
FRAGILE.
Hail, winds, bushfires (sometimes self-started) -- all have been demonstrated to wipe out large solar farms. Soil often irretrievably contaminated as a result.
The minerals requirements are also eyewatering; in scale, expect knock-on consequences blowing out cost of anything electronic. Eg, traffic lights, elevators, phones, ... computers...
(The latter is the béte noire of the faux-renewables. Look up Prof Herrington's (Oxford, Natural History Museum) run-through of just the minerals impact of just EVs alone. Something he wasn't aware of: copper's supply is tight as a drum: the PRICE impact of even 1% demand increase is large. And affects whole economy.)
?
Nuclear power stations can be armoured, unlike solar or wind, and they are. In all Western countries, they're actually required to be safe vs terrorist attack (portable missiles, fire-bombs (accelerants), high-speed trucks, etc etc). Are you unaware of this?
So in answer to your question: infinitely, since 0 relevant damage from a scrub fire.
but the wind is always blowing somewhere even if it isn't blowing in a particular locality
Try telling that when a winter high pressure zone is sat over the UK - dead calm for hundreds of miles in all directions
A much better grid so that power can be shifted from where it's being generated to where it's needed
Again in the UK they are trying to upgrade the grid but the NIMBYs are doing everything they can to block them
More storage capacity to smooth out peaks in generation vs peaks in demand
Time to get your calculator out and do some maths. As I am typing (midday Saturday) the UK power demand is 38GW. Gas is providing 20GW of that, Wind 7, solar 1.3 (!). During the week it can reach 45GW demand. The rest is Renewables/Carbon Neutral (whatever they are), Biomass (burning stuff) and inter connectors.
Now work out how many batteries it would take to cover those shortfalls for a foggy, low cloud blocking high pressure over the UK that can last for days. You would have to cover all the countryside with battery farms to do it.
Pumped storage like in Wales can only run for a few hours at most - how many mountains do you want to hollow out?
Actually the best option is the one that keeps being binned as inefficient,.
Hydrogen - if you have enough surplus renewables (mostly wind for the UK) who cares if it is inefficient.
Hydrogen can be used to mix with existing natural gas to burn in CCGT or heaven forbid, used directly in vehicles instead of all the highly toxic lithium batteries.
The environmental damage to get the lithium is incredible but it occurs in places that the consumer does not care about.
Agree with that the sentiment that its vanishingly unlikely that we will get our existing housing stock up to scratch in any sort of useful time frame. But the obstacle isn't just generating clean(er) electricity its replacing fossil combustion appliances with electrical ones in a way that people can actually afford to buy and operate them.
A high temperature HP might work as a drop in replacement to a gas boiler without having to worry about thermal improvements to the fabric of the building, but its going to be an expensive beast to procure and without a significant realignment of the relative cost of gas and electricity the running costs will be ruinous. Similarly EV's if you need to rely on public chargers, significantly more expensive per mile than petrol/diesel.
And its a moving target. The extra demand from displacing fossils needs to be met by the electricity network. So you are probably looking at more like another 20 nukes(*) and associated infrastructure. Too cheap to meter?
(*) I have absolutely no problem with nukes, I've even stood on the charge floor of one and touched a (new) fuel canister.
Sorry, mate, you've been egregiously misled.
He is quite correct. We were ~0.00008% away from being in serious trouble.
Look up any of the long-standing measurements of plant viability at various CO2 concentrations.
Note that humans derive the bulk of their plant nutrients (vs mere carbohydrates) from C3 photosynthesis, not C4.
I'm not your mummy, mate, and I am not interested in that sort of flouncing gamesmanship.
You have heard of google, ddg, etc? JFGI.
>Look up any of the long-standing measurements of plant viability at various CO2 concentrations.
Throw in C3 & C4 to ~eliminate false positives.
This is not remotely rocket science nor obscure nor arcane knowledge. It is extremely well known and for a very long time. For you to NOT know it suggests you've confined yourself to marketing documents. Time to try some data.
Throw in C3 & C4 to ~eliminate false positives.This is not remotely rocket science nor obscure nor arcane knowledge. It is extremely well known and for a very long time. For you to NOT know it suggests you've confined yourself to marketing documents. Time to try some data.
I think it's also strange when climate 'experts' tell us we're doomed by rising CO2, and that plants we rely on will die. Funny how those evolved during periods where it was both hotter and much higher CO2 than present. Plus ample evidence that elevated CO2 increases yields and can reduce water requirements. The 'Greening of the Earth' is well documented.
Yeah it's all toytown anti-data shrieking. For a real laugh, check out "ocean acidification". Priceless watching the panic on scweamers' faces when you ask if they've heard of freshwater crayfish, oysters, prawns, crabs, etc, ("of course!") then tell them what pH that is.
>ample evidence that elevated CO2 increases yields
Well...like: shops. Selling stuff grown by: farmers. Who for max.growth rate use sealed environments @ 1,500ppm CO2. For some crops/locations, cost-benefit trade-off will drop that, sometimes even as low as 1,000ppm. But virtually all are north of 1,200.
Most British vegans rely on more-than-tripled CO2 levels for much of their diet. (Just like a huge proportion of their diet is, physically, oil&gas.)
The global greening is also dropping our albedo.
"Awkward" for the apocalypse modellers.
"It's turtles all the way down!" | sed s/turtles/farce/g
Priceless watching the panic on scweamers' faces when you ask if they've heard of freshwater crayfish, oysters, prawns, crabs, etc, ("of course!") then tell them what pH that is.
Could mean softshell crabs get cheaper. Less crunchy, moar meat! Another fun one is to ask the chicken littles to try a simple experiment. Take say, a cubic metre of water. Drop a couple of kilos of chalk in it. Then keep breathing on it until the water turns acidic. This may take them some time, but would keep them off the streets. But it's indicative of our education and misinformation system that people can quote 'ocean acidification', yet can't comprehend how this can't happen given the amount of carbonates in and around our oceans.
"It's turtles all the way down!" | sed s/turtles/farce/g
Ah, well, and my favourite lil critter-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkenone
Alkenones are long-chain unsaturated methyl and ethyl n-ketones produced by a few phytoplankton species of the class Prymnesiophyceae
And alkenones are very stable molecules. So take sediment cores, measure the concentration of alkenones and E.huxleyi corpses, wave a magic wand and convert alkenone concentration to temperatures. If you can do this with wood density, you can make highly accurate thermometers from plankton. Maybe. Stop laughing. But this relies on understanding the conditions that allow plankton to thrive. Acidification dogma suggests that high CO2 means they can't, yet experments have shown that they can, and do. So if that basic assumption is false, then assumptions based on alkenone density from sediment cores are basically inverted reality. Just one of the many disputed areas of actual science.
> Plus ample evidence that elevated CO2 increases yields and can reduce water requirements
Sadly it also puts the temperatures up which a lot of plants don't like i.e they die, and a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapour (which also traps heat - look what happened to Venus from when it had liquid water on the surface) but most importantly it will also rain more which us poor soggy souls in the UK have been experiencing for the last 2 years.
Sadly it also puts the temperatures up which a lot of plants don't like i.e they die
No, it does not. Or at least by any actually harmful amount. If this were true then plants would have died millenia ago when CO2 levels were far higher. The IPCC assigns CO2 a Global Warming Potential (GWP) of 1 because it's a weak GHG. Climate sensationalists then use homeopathy to create scenarios where less CO2 causes more warming, and dangerous warming requires more CO2 than we have carbon. Plus most of the mythical 'feedbacks' that were supposed to amplify CO2's radiative effects remain just that. Mythical. They haven't been observed outside of AI climate models.
look what happened to Venus from when it had liquid water on the surface
But Venus is much closer to the Sun, so absorbs more energy, and has around 90x more dense atmosphere than we do. But blame James Hansen for spreading that myth, along with making himself millions from his 'science'. His climate model was also one of the first to be falsified by observations.
it will also rain more which us poor soggy souls in the UK have been experiencing for the last 2 years.
But this is good, no? More water for datacentre cooling, and helping keep solar panels clean. Even if that might help leach toxic chemicals from any damaged ones. Arts grads like the Bbc calls 'climate specialists' might think we've been having 'extreme weather', but the reality is it's nothing unsual for the periods we've been measuring rainfall.
Starmer and his Brain Trust have just decided to go all in on AI. I saw mention of starting with a 0.5GW class DC and ramping up from there. Total UK electrical demand is typically between 30 and 40 GW so that he's already committing to increase consumption by more than 1%. And remember that the UK rarely generates enough to satisfy demand, we generally import 10 to 20% of our consumption from the continent.
The only saving grace is that Ed and Co. will fuck it up as usual and it won't get built, or it'll be scaled back gradually by successive administrations until its little more than a drawer full of RPi's...
This post has been deleted by its author
Seems to me that it would be a good idea for Starmer & Brains Trust to add a section to their "AI everywhere" manifesto that requires a considerable AI energy saving: i.e. to develop and use much more power-efficient reasoning devices rather than simply grabbing a sackful of the cheapest chips they can lay their hands on and throwing them into the cabinet. Something like a mandatory limit for all future AI kit of no more than 20-50% of the power consumption of any AI kit available in Feb 2025 would seem like a reasonable starting point.
Total UK electrical demand is typically between 30 and 40 GW
My understanding is that gas is still the main source of residential heating in the UK.
But even if that's not true, if UK energy consumption is only electricity, and electricity is the only generator of CO2, that would mean that you aren't importing steel, concrete, or oil.
Thinking about this and then watching a new Android tablet update 15 apps for an hour makes me wonder just how much energy is used by Google etc to send updates to every phone virtually every day. And so many users accessing Social Media and other entertainments resulting to data traveling around the world all the time. Could climate change be technically related to the modern businesses internet environment?
First of all, "Net Zero" has NEVER been a realistic goal except for a few places with small populations and abundant hydroelectric/geothermal or other non-hydrocarbon power. Published national goals are consistently missed -- everywhere and always. Whereupon the IPCC laments (yet again) that humanity is doomed. That's quite possibly true. But not from climate change I think.
However, I think the fear here, may be somewhat realistic. A few AI machines are probably not much of a problem any more than a few hundred supercomputers are a problem today. A world where everyone is using AI might conceptually have many millions of AI machines. I don't think that will happen. But I guess it could. And THAT would be a problem at least unless/until improved algorithms and better hardware reduce power demands to something tractable -- which may take quite a few decades
One answer, which almost certainly will not happen, would be an international agreement to limit AI to research on a one facility per 50 million people basis. That's something less than 160 machines worldwide. Smaller countries could form consortiums to reach the 50 million threshold. Germany and France would each get one machine, Japan 2, the US 6 -- maybe 7 by joining their excess population over 300 million with Canada for a joint facility. Such an agreement should also forbid any commercial applications until they have been thoroughly vetted and everyone agrees they are harmless.
But that'll delay AI . Indeed. So what? It's not like AI is anything the world actually seems to need.
The UK, according to gridwatch is currently showing demand @ 30GW, so you can run a country of 60M people and it's economy or run 227K AI systems. I know which I would choose.
Nvidia is expected to ship upto 500K units of the GB200 in Q1 2025. Not sure how many units and their associated switching, power distribution etc in a dual rack cabinet.
I wish people would understand the implications of government support for huge power consumers.
Why do banks finance real estate development on low lying land, even on the edge of the sea?
Why do wealthy politicians buy beach front properties?
Why do the wealthy and powerful jet round the world constantly, buy yachts and private jets and lecture us on reducing our carbon footprint?
Have you any idea how much CO2 that wildfire in CA produced, or a Volcano errupting?
Do you know how high CO2 has been?
Do you know what the level of CO2 is currently?
Do you know what the biggest greenhouse gas is?
Do you know what sustains life on this planet?
Do you know that temp rises increase atmospheric CO2?
Do you realise the extent of natural climate change from orbital dynamics?
Please wake up you're being conned out of huge amounts of tax that doesn't come back to the tax payers in any shape or form.
The leader of the opposition here in Australia is touting nuclear power as some sort of panacea for energy supply. Fuck off.
We have no nuclear industry here and it would take at least 20 years to get one reactor up and running. Yeah, that'll really help us all out and cure global warming.
The Poms asked the French how to do it for them. They got Hinkley Point C.
Where's the water going to come from? You could build a reactor in the Yallourn Valley, provided you were prepared to sequester Melbourne's drinking water supply.
Where's the waste going to go? SA had better watch out. The only way Spud will be able to pay for his dream is if he offers to take France and China's high level waste in perpetuity. That'll teach them to make a viable renewable energy industry.
Where's the fuel going to come from? Australia's nuclear experience consists of digging uranium ore out of the ground and putting it on boats.
Doing a Hinkley Point 7 times over in Australia per Spud's dream would consume more than half of an annual GDP and not generate a single kWh of electricity until after 2040. And the UK is a country that already has a nuclear industry, and all of the supervisory government to go with it, something he has no plan to build.
Meanwhile the same policy would stop renewables installation because guess what...? If we keep building renewables at current rates, nuclear power will be uneconomic. As it is right now, a nuclear generator would literally have to pay to put energy into the grid during the day in summer, because that's normal whenever the sun is shining because of the scale of already installed renewables. Nuclear works efficiently at steady state, so you can't turn it down when electricity is not cheap but free.
And when you've finished doing all that, the nation's energy generation capacity will be smaller than it would have been if we had kept building renewables. Considering a modern economy is essentially the transformation of energy into goods and services, we're left with less economic strength to pay off the debt we went into to build it in the first place. But it's ok, the kids will be paying for it because Spud will be retired by then.
Spud has no intention of building nuclear reactors. His policy exists to placate the National Party so the Libs can continue to not have an energy policy and not have a climate change policy, while simultaneously placating the wealthy inner suburbs that have got wise to the Coalition's climate position and thrown them out on their arse for it.
Isn’t it great that the internet can provide evidence to support whatever belief one currently holds.
I have yet to see any solutions to medium/high level radioactive waste… it just keeps fizzing electromagnetic energy on time scales beyond our personal experience, and long term storage comes with no guarantees of safety (let alone containment). It’s all very concerning, we humans keep reproducing and consuming all the available resources. Energy is probably the least of our real world concerns once other more pressing matters like food and water become scarce — assuming the climate predictions are correct (and so far they seem to be somewhat under stated)
Still, Trump is crowned next week, what a great time to be alive.
I have yet to see any solutions to medium/high level radioactive waste… it just keeps fizzing electromagnetic energy on time scales beyond our personal experience, and long term storage comes with no guarantees of safety (let alone containment).
That's a problem of ignorance and apathy. The Cornish live in a highly radioactive environment thanks to radioactive granite, and are (mostly) quite normal. Same with people living in naturally radioactive places like Colorado. You could happily juggle pure plutonium and would be more at risk of death by GSW than radiation because it's a pretty weak alpha emitter. Skin happily blocks that, or if you're really concerned, just wear a pair of gloves. Pretty much any material would block the 'deadly' radiation.
But as for storage solutions, here's one that was prepared earlier-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
The Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository is a deep geological repository for the final disposal of spent nuclear fuel
Which is also interesting because Finland built the same reactors as we're building at Hinkley. But-
Even taking into account all OL3 construction delays the long-term target for operational production cost (not including investments and subsidies) for all three plants is 33 €/MWh. Production cost for the OL3 reactor alone is estimated at 49 €/MWh, as OL1-2 had a production cost of app. 18 €/MWh during 2016-2020, prior to OL3 entering service.
Despite all the problems and delays, Finland's Olkiluoto NPPs are generating far cheaper electricity than the contracts negotiated for the same reactors at Hinkley. China also built the same design, but for far less, and far faster.
And then there's sustainability. Currently we tend to use 'once through' nuclear fuel, but it can, and sometimes is recycled and reprocessed into new fuel rods. Recycling is good, right? But that needs sensible policy decisions and a fuel cycle designed to sustain a nuclear fleet. Which the UK was doing, until G.Brown Esq decided to close ours down and flog it off. We used to own Westinghouse, and now they've got a pretty full order book for reactor designs we once owned.
But such is politics. And probably the biggest producer of radioactive waste by volume is.. the NHS. Because nuclear medicine is vital for diagnosing and treating patients. We're fed radioactive materials, and excrete them, and because the poop exceeds radiation levels set by government, that 'nuclear waste' has to be stored. Or sometimes people just flush, and then neo-luddites find trace amounts of this-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technetium_(99mTc)_sestamibi
which they find on beaches and assume it must have come from Sellafield, not the NHS treating patients. Oh, and of course Technetium-99 is easily produced in nuclear reactors, along with a lot of other valuable radioisotopes that can't be produced by the 'renewables' industry. Just another way the Greens are trying to kill or cause harm to humans..
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