Datacenter energy use to more than double by 2030 thanks to AI's insatiable thirst AI's thirst for electricity will see datacenter energy use more than double by the end of the decade – just five years from now – according to the latest forecast from investment banker Goldman Sachs. The stark warning from Goldman Sachs Research observes that worldwide interest in generative AI has resulted in an arms race to …
At the rate we're going, a wad of £5 notes will cost less than a lump of wood or coal for the fire.. Unfortunately they are plastic, so they don't burn as well as they used to.
But, blackouts are a serious possibility now, never mind with Ed Milliwatt's barmy plan for 95% renewables.
I only recently discovered Kathryn Porter (linked above) and she talks a lot of sense. It helps having degrees in BOTH Physics and Economics, she is the sort of person who _should_ be energy minister.
Building datacentres at this pace is worrying, because they are a constant load day and night, wind or calm. And things like "demand control by voltage reduction" (one of the tools in NESO's toolbox to avoid future blackouts, so they say) doesn't work on them, because their electronic power supplies would simply draw more Amps if you gave them less Volts.
At the same time, we have crackpot NIMBYs objecting to "pylons", believing that everything can be underground or offshore. Unfortunately they miss a few key points: 1. Just because London has some short (and exceedingly expensive) 400kV AC cables in tunnels (see: London Power Tunnels, cost: £2bn), doesn't mean that it can be done over long distances. Even if we could afford the tunnels and the cables, the capacitance of a HV AC cable fundamentally limits its length. It becomes inefficient, and you need very expensive shunt reactors to correct the power factor, even for short distances. 2. HVDC is great for cross-channel links between two separate grids, but it is a terrible idea internally. It can't work without stable AC commutation at both ends, and doesn't contribute to grid stability. If the 50Hz goes out of tolerance by 1Hz, HVDC links along with most Wind and Solar will trip offline. 3. They say "Just uprate existing pylons" - that is being done, with High Temperature (HTLS) conductors that can withstand operation up to 250°C at double the normal load for their weight, but this is inefficient, expensive, and doesn't improve system reliability - anyone on these forums knows that two lines of pylons have more resilience than one.
Perhaps anyone wishing to build a datacentre should have to pay their share of the next nuke plant, and the transmission infrastructure to go with it
I'm a bit more concerned with the climate-impact of the coal and gas that will be used to generate the electricity required under "emergency waivers" to current green-energy goals. After just enduring a week in February with temperatures running 25 degrees F above average, and watching winter not start until December and end in January in Texas -- we don't have the luxury of any more "committed warming" lag-time to waste.
Requiring to electricity hungry speculators to pay for and provide their own clean energy seems like a perfectly fair proposition. However, expecting these jokers to do the right-thing and think about anything other than the money they can put in their pockets is nothing but wishful thinking.
Population growth and improving quality of life throughout developing countries and continued reliance on fossil-fuels in the developed world have already blown past the critical 1.5 deg C warming target. The resounding short-sightedness of allowing a few profiteers to gamble for greater wealth while burning our children's world to a crisp seems akin to passing out marshmallows while your house burns down around you. Not the proper course of action...
I don't know about Texas, but in the UK, we have a lot of small "reserve" power stations which are essentially farms of containerised Diesel gensets. They get around the rules on carbon accounting, because the individual generators are below 2MWt - (but they have a few dozen of them at a time colocated on the same site..). These "Diesel farms" got a lot of press in 2015 but for some reason they have been forgotten about now. But whenever the grid is struggling, they make a massive profit on the UK's Balancing Mechanism, selling at up to 50 times wholesale price to the grid.
I have also heard of datacentres overprovisioning their "backup" generators by just over double, so that they can not only be paid to disconnect from the grid, but they can function as one of these Diesel farms at the same time.
However bad coal or gas is, diesel-powered electricity is worse - there are no electrostatic exhaust scrubbers, and their thermal efficiency is worse than an open-cycle gas plant.
What we needed was nuclear - but the industry has been regulated to death. Apparently a lot of that crippling regulation and anti-nuclear propaganda of the day came from the Rockefeller foundation, who had a vested interest in Oil.
-6 F and single digit and teen F temps in the last 3 weeks makes it feel like you might welcome a 2 degree C warmup. haven't had to run air conditioning in more than a year though do burn through oil in the winter. Think it's been 10 years since we had much snow. 100 inches in 2015. Good thing there are people who keep actual records of daily highs and lows. might start doubting global warming if you relied on bad memory and hearsay.
Every Joule used is a Joule stolen from the future or another drop in the catastrophic global boiling bucket that will destroy the future. If the greater good is not served by a given calculation, what right does that individual have to burn the energy needed to do it?
We can start by taxing the energy used for useless or harmful work and keep raising that tax until it's unprofitable.
"If the greater good is not served by a given calculation, what right does that individual have to burn the energy needed to do it?"
Define "greater good" for me, and list some of the consequences for a typical family of what won't be allowed under your People's Soviet.
As far as I'm concerned the greater good isn't being served by you wiping your arse on soft toilet paper, so I'll swap your Andrex for a single sheet of 180 grit silicon carbide sanding mesh. Wipe, wipe, rinse, wipe, wipe rinse. Should see you OK for a good five years.
The greater good is anything that enhances public wellbeing so, for example, AI that is used to identify cancer treatments that will be freely available would be permitted. AI that is used to replace workers would not.
In the home, I think efficiency standards for GPUs would be very sensible, no one needs to play their games at 4K on Ultra to experience the same improvement in their mental health. Social scientists could rate games based on the point at which they start to become detrimental and you could be allotted a certain number of hours each week on a sliding scale based on a factor for each game. There could also be additional allowances for neurodiverse and disadvantaged individuals, who might need more play time, which would be worth the cost to the environment.
If you don't consent to these measures, that is overruled by me and everyone else not consenting to breathe in the pollution you generate.
Sorry to burst your bubble... You are 10000000% wrong.
There is a planning app in the process of being approved for a massive AI DC near the M25/A1 junction.
I hope it never gets built. IT if is and goes live then we, the mere mortals who live here will suffer brown outs on a regular basis. Widespread blackouts are a possibility.
Yeah. If there's not enough to go round, I don't see the plebs getting any sort of priority, just higher prices and an ever more unreliable supply. People hark back to the power cuts of the '70s as "the bad old days" (as a kid, a couple of evenings lit only by candle-light was kinda cool) but this will probably end up worse and it'll potentially be forever.
Scotland is well placed to cash in then. We have around twice as much renewable energy as we need including storage options and stacks of water for cooling (that we aren’t using for the whisky and gin of course). After Independence when we’re uncoupled from the unfair UK energy market we should be paying a lot less for electrickery than we do now.
This will of course be for sale to rUK, at a price.
"After Independence when we’re uncoupled from the unfair UK energy market we should be paying a lot less for electrickery than we do now"
Well, no, not really. If Scotland became independent tomorrow, and the cross border lines were cut, then you'd be screwed every time there's a nice big anti-cyclone hanging over Scotland, with several days of zero wind. Who would supply that power at zero notice? Scotland needs to be linked to the English grid to sell surplus wind power and to buy power back when it's needed, so you'd be on the same system and wholesale prices wouldn't change much.
But don't let me stop any wishful thinking, maybe WJK can return to politics, and magic up a cut in electricity prices using the same wires and generation as now? I hear she's good with money.
In NL, where I live, in 2021 datacenters took 3.3% of the electricity supplied. If that would double, it will be close to 7%. Which does not include the gap 2021-2024, which is probably >3.3%.
Houses cannot be build because they cannot get a power connection - and AI will make this situation even worse.
Time for politics to really set priorities. And stick to them.
In the US, at least, we're not shy about using prison labor for various things, such as processing credit card payments and fighting fires. Why not harness all that free labor, put the prisoners on exercise bikes, and have them generate power for the AI datacenters? If we start to run low on criminals (dying from exhaustion, being released, etc.), just make more things illegal!
Problem solved!
Just kidding!
I think!
"There are three reasons for becoming a writer AI: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings." - updated from Quentin Crisp (icon) in the days before AI was created.
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