121–130 of 308 posts
1. Humans use AI 2. AI requires power^ 3. AI companies purchase/produce power 4. Humans complain that AI uses power (but continue to use AI) ^Same for water This is a silly 'news cycle' witch hunt that no economist takes even mildly seriously.
Not all humans
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't forget that they buy countless things from China, who is by a very large margin the largest polluter in the world.
Do you know how South Australia solved a problem of the Whyalla Steelworks when transitioning to 100% renewable electricity? They excluded on-site generation of the plant from the statistics. "Solarization" of the plant hadn't worked out economically. Continuous manufacturing processes have big problems with intermittent energy sources. China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.
Intermittent energy sources are predictable in aggregate. A fairly modest amount of storage to smooth things out and you can pretty reasonably get above 50% solar and wind. Make up a large chunk of the balance with nuclear and hydro and you're pretty close to 100%.
The last 10% is obviously the hardest, but what's the excuse for countries still doing majority fossil fuels?
> China is building tens of nuclear power plants though.
Trouble being they're still operating ~1200 coal power plants.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a good thing that green energy isn't a fixed quantity and more can be built if there's demand, which is exactly what Google is doing. It's great for marketing and, you're right, that's why they are doing it but the reason it's good for marketing is that their customers care about the environment. This is the exact invisible hand mechanism in action. It's their preferences changing the behavior of one of the bigg…
Nuclear power plants have a huge lead time and require government approval, something the Finnish government declined to approve (Fortum had requested to build a third reactor). Solar and wind are fine but they’re not usable as a replacement for nuclear without huge battery installations which make the cost worse than nuclear. Also large installations still take time - from regulatory approvals to actually building t…
Before the American tinfoil-hat data center nuts comes out in force: - This is a plant that was going to be decommissioned without investment - Finland is a rational country due to their small size and unfortunate proximity to Russia. They tend to do rational things like invest in good energy infrastructure. Nobody will be losing power due to this deal - Finland is one of the cleanest/greenest energy markets on earth…
This is a gross misrepresentation of the concern. Clean fresh water is locally very important and a finite resource. The vast majority of people know it does not destroy H2O molecules, but moves them to a less useful space.
Shouldn't we stop pushing the cost of things onto the public, in both CO2 and nuclear contamination? Surely a nuclear reactor is only economical if you don't have to pay for the cost of a Chernobyl type event. Did they assess the costs? Surely they played the costs down as the public is going to pay for the consequences. Shrug. It's so easy to do business this way. The fins also expose themselves to blackmail by an a…
1. Chernobyl disaster was not related in any way with nuclear plant normal functioning. It was "experiment of how low output reactor can go" proposed and exercised by people without knowledge or experience. It's monument of why government officials should not touch anything related to science 2. Chernobyl nuclear plant was very poor copy of safe by design nuclear plant. It had critical flaw in carbon based proton cat…
We don't have greedy, uneducated people who want better positions now?
I am not against AI data centers. But it's a good thing that the electricity infrastructure expenditures for AI data centers' consumption are paid by the companies making money from AI training and inference, rather than being paid by all taxpayers collectively. Not sure if this particular project is also sponsored by taxpayers' money or not, though.
Power prices will go up, since any growth will exceed the available power generation capacity. Power will become dirtier, since diesel generators will fill in when there is high demand. Then the community will spend a huge amount of money building out more capacity.
I think we will all soon see, communities sharing power infrastructure with massive-demand corporate customers will end badly for the communities.
Hopefully, such deals will also convince countries to build more nuclear power plants or expand existing ones. Europe urgently needs more electricity.
The technology, compression, etc, for models are getting better and better requiring less and less H/W and power to run the same inference power.
Perhaps our hunger for ever more powerful models will be enough to offset this, but I am not sure.
Before the American tinfoil-hat data center nuts comes out in force: - This is a plant that was going to be decommissioned without investment - Finland is a rational country due to their small size and unfortunate proximity to Russia. They tend to do rational things like invest in good energy infrastructure. Nobody will be losing power due to this deal - Finland is one of the cleanest/greenest energy markets on earth…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Chernobyl disaster was not related in any way with nuclear plant normal functioning. It was "experiment of how low output reactor can go" proposed and exercised by people without knowledge or experience. It's monument of why government officials should not touch anything related to science 2. Chernobyl nuclear plant was very poor copy of safe by design nuclear plant. It had critical flaw in carbon based proton cat…
> some greedy, uneducated people from the past wanted better position We don't have greedy, uneducated people who want better positions now?
His skin was falling from body while he was still breathing