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Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

arstechnica.com

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Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#41

Post by crowcroft »

api wrote: post #18
crowcroft wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are environmental externalities accounted for? How do we accurately measure the 'benefit' of something when it's still largely speculative (ie. AI is not providing as much value RIGHT NOW, but we think it will in the future). Economic problems are rarely just economic problems, and saying that it will resolve itself in the long term is dismissive and offers no value to the discussion.

That's why high-carbon sources like coal and oil should be subject to carbon taxes: to price in externalities.

I 100% agree. A carbon tax is a purely capitalist thing to do, and by not having one you incentivize bad outcomes.

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#42

Post by GaggiX »

IMTDb wrote: post #20
Veedrac wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The environmental externality of new energy in the US is likely ~0, potentially even net positive, because approximately all new energy in the US is renewable, and displacement effects are likely to dominate the small-single-digit percentage of nonrenewables and the marginal environmental cost of the renewables themselves.

Lithium extraction to build millions of solar panels, batteries etc is not a 0 impact operation.

Well good news you don't need lithium to build solar panels.

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#43

Post by crowcroft »

Veedrac wrote: post #40
crowcroft wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if that's true, why would we only price in the externalities of new energy? If we have a coal plant and add one wind farm we still have one coal plant.

Because the article is in context of new demand.

I'm just not sure if that's a helpful way to look at it though because we don't know the counterfactual. If we didn't generate new demand would we still have created more renewable energy and shut down non-renewable energy sources.

I suppose it's fair to say energy demand will always go up, and if all new energy creation is renewable then when you extrapolate to a limit the amount of energy from non-renewable sources is an infinitely small percentage of all energy production? I don't know if that is a fair way to model the future though.

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#44

Post by Veedrac »

crowcroft wrote: post #43
Veedrac wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the article is in context of new demand.

I'm just not sure if that's a helpful way to look at it though because we don't know the counterfactual. If we didn't generate new demand would we still have created more renewable energy and shut down non-renewable energy sources. I suppose it's fair to say energy demand will always go up, and if all new energy creation is renewable then when you extrapolate to a limit the amount of energy from non-renewable sources…

The price of renewables scale down as demand rises, and the capacity we have building them is growing at an exponential rate at least somewhat capped by demand. It follows that if you want to displace existing power sources, you're probably better off driving demand up, because that lowers their price and makes replacement more economically attractive.

As long as you're not driving demand up faster than the industry is able to increase its rate of scaling (which doesn't yet seem the case with AI, though that's not to say it couldn't be at some point), this should help a renewable transition.

Another effect is that you push issues that arise in transition earlier. For example, the sooner you have a lot of solar on the grid, the sooner grid-scale batteries are incentivized, and the sooner battery production scales. This feeds back into the feasibility and profitability of replacing existing nonrenewable sources.

A simple example where this effect is very clear is synthetic fuels. Synthetics don't compete on a dollar-for-dollar basis yet, but from an energy basis they're getting close. There's an obvious demand phase change once you hit that price point, and the sooner you hit it the better. If you believe the scaling trends, and I think you broadly should, more solar brings that point forward and so is clearly environmentally beneficial.

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#45

Post by crowcroft »

Veedrac wrote: post #44
crowcroft wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just not sure if that's a helpful way to look at it though because we don't know the counterfactual. If we didn't generate new demand would we still have created more renewable energy and shut down non-renewable energy sources. I suppose it's fair to say energy demand will always go up, and if all new energy creation is renewable then when you extrapolate to a limit the amount of energy from non-renewable sources…

The price of renewables scale down as demand rises, and the capacity we have building them is growing at an exponential rate at least somewhat capped by demand. It follows that if you want to displace existing power sources, you're probably better off driving demand up, because that lowers their price and makes replacement more economically attractive. As long as you're not driving demand up faster than the industry…

Appreciate the insight here. It's not an obvious way to think about this to me, but it does make a lot of sense, especially as you think about the trend over time.

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#46

Post by jononor »

teitoklien wrote: post #9
jononor wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone else has to pay the price that data centers are willing to as well. And they can afford quite high prices before having margin troubles - likely much higher than what we as residents want to pay for energy.

This is on the assumption that supply will continue to remain constrained, excess energy usage, might as well be the investments necessary to shift to more Solar Panels and renewable energy storage, high compute intensive workloads can be executed anywhere, higher energy usage, might as well incentivise optimising AI, Research and Other Compute-intensive training workloads to shift to day time, when solar power peaks…

Yes, you are right in that. However we are not yet seeing much uptake in very flexible compute that works only during high energy production. And while I would love to see it, I am not sure we will anytime soon. One reason is capital costs of the compute equipment - if one only runs 25% of the time (daily solar peaks) - then it takes 4x as long to pay back the equipment. And we are still improving energy efficiency of compute a lot over time, so upgrading the equipment often is very beneficial in terms of TCO. Longer payback times is in conflict with that.

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#47

Post by samatman »

TheDudeMan wrote: post #24
samatman wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution to all of these problems is an aggressive buildout of nuclear fission plants to provide baseline power and accelerate the closure of all remaining plants which burn fossil fuel. Subsidized if necessary, as essential infrastructure.

Which is better -- subsidize what you perceive to be the solution or tax what is known to be the problem (carbon emissions)?

Infrastructure is routinely subsidized because of the benefits it brings. Taxing the problem can help pay for that subsidy, that has some hazards because now government revenue depends on carbon emissions, but it can be part of the solution, sure. Tax revenue all goes in the same bucket no matter what the government claims.

It helps that the actual electrical generators don't care where the steam is coming from, so we could be leveraging the gensets from decommissioned coal plants in fission reactors. All that's missing is the political will.

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#48

Post by wkat4242 »

cjk2 wrote: post #37

It's not about an energy apocalypse at all. It's about the cost versus benefit when the principal cost on large scale deployments is energy. AI stuff takes a lot of energy to run therefore costs a lot of money to run therefore requires revenue that matches the energy used. Now the problem is that if someone puts a $10/month price on the AI functionality, they will stop paying for it because it doesn't really have a $…

The energy equation can be improved dramatically with tailor-made hardware. Bitcoin has showed how much was possible, these days using even the fastest gpu is totally unviable. Of course llm inference is much more complex but there's still much optimization to be had.

And 10$ isn't an awful lot of money to justify. It's like half an hour a month (and like a smoke break's worth of salary in silicon valley lol)

I think AI has its uses. I just think they are overblown and applied too widely. There's a few things it's really good at. And in those cases it will shine. The rest is hype.

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#49

Post by wkat4242 »

IMTDb wrote: post #20
Veedrac wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The environmental externality of new energy in the US is likely ~0, potentially even net positive, because approximately all new energy in the US is renewable, and displacement effects are likely to dominate the small-single-digit percentage of nonrenewables and the marginal environmental cost of the renewables themselves.

Lithium extraction to build millions of solar panels, batteries etc is not a 0 impact operation.

Solar panel production doesn't use lithium. They're made from sand and a lot of energy. A bit like silicon wafers.

You might mean the storage to keep those data centers running throughout the night though and yeah. But this problem is not very big in the scope of other battery challenges like transportation. Because for data centers you don't need the best energy per weight or volume which you do need in a car.

And there's other sources of renewable energy too.

Re: Taking a closer look at AI's supposed energy apocalypse

#50

Post by wkat4242 »

antisthenes wrote: post #22

Wasn't crypto supposed to cause this same energy apocalypse? Does AI even use more energy than crypto ever did? Doubtful. Besides, we're projected to ingest all of humanity's written knowledge by 2026, and after that there will be a cliff in power consumption, we will mostly switch to inference on purpose built hardware, which is vastly more efficient.

Well AI is only just getting started of course. Many people don't even know what it is.

All the products and services based on it like Microsoft's many copilots are totally beta quality and not really ready for the mainstream. In a couple years they probably will be and I'm sure the usage will have increased tenfold.

On the other hand I'm sure many optimisations in hardware have been accomplished. But I don't think it can be compared to bitcoin which is a more mature technology (as much as one can call a disorganised macro-economic experiment mature)

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