Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources

It is praiseworthy Microsoft straightforwardly reported the increase.

I haven't paid attention to these kinds of optional disclosures. Never thought about it but were I asked I would have said these are advertisements. I don't dislike sustainability, but I thought those function as advertisements because you can expect to get more sustainability "for free" over time, because of many things (Moore's Law, ephemeralization, societal investment). So of course savvy corporations publish sustainability reports that say, "We're doin' great : )."

Therefore I'd argue their commitment to sustainability is shown by their disclosure of the increase.

I would be very interested in the breakdown of how they conclude it's 0.01kWh (10Wh) per request, and what that does and doesn't include.

I expect that if you were to calculate "incremental energy per request" - how much "extra CPU compute" each request adds, you could probably get to that sort of value.

But odds are good that figure ignored all the training data collection, all the processing on that, storage of that digested information, retrieval of it, etc, and that sort of number tends to also skip things like "storage systems running to have the information available."

If I've got an entire datacenter running to provide services, and the request consumes, say, 3 GPU-minutes of time across all the nodes, sure. This is a sane value. It just ignores a lot of the other resources dedicated to the task at various points.

Microsoft isn't using 30% more energy than their current footprint on 10Wh/request AI answers.

Math like this is very much a "Tell me what answer you'd like, and I'll make it work out!" sort of scenario. An increase in data center use by 30% is harder to fudge.

Does Microsoft have a history of buying fake carbon credits? And by that I mean, do they buy carbon credits from disreputable sources more often than reputable ones on average in recent years? Or do you simply believe that all carbon credit systems are fake?

The energy consumption would not be a problem if it was renewable energy. Ironically, we already have plenty of renewable energy in the US, it’s just there, sitting, waiting to be hooked up to the grid and not being used productively.

The US currently has 947 GW of renewable generation capacity that is not hooked up to the grid [1]. To put that number into perspective, the US currently has 1160 GW of generation capacity in total [2]. We could almost double our countries generation capacity if we could just hook up the power to the grid.

Unfortunately it takes 10 years to build new transmission lines in the US [3]. Changes are going to need to be made to the permitting process, which may include giving more responsibility and agency to FERC to oversee the review process.

Congress needs to act on this. If you care about this, you can educate your self and get involved. https://community.citizensclimate.org/topics/clean-energy-pe...

[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/utility-scale-solar

[2] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-...

[3] https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/10/permitting-americ...

So to be clear, this is just a bureaucracy issue?