But the vast majority of my $500+ a month PG&E bill is for transmission, not generation.
You can thank all the wildfires for that
Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
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Re: Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
#22Re: Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
#23this is nonsense and the author even admits it > In the coming years, artificial intelligence could turbocharge those increases the cost of residential power is going up because of the shift away from natural gas towards solar failing to admit this or worse lying about it is not going to actually help long term
You need to distinguish between generation and transmission.
Re: Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
#24Not just bills. These data centers, a major driver of new energy use, are contributing to climate change. Sadly it seems to be another way for large companies to offload externalities onto the public.
To say nothing of the exorbitant amount of water used to cool these machines, we’re on track to face a water shortage crisis long before any other climate change impact.
Re: Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
#25this is nonsense and the author even admits it > In the coming years, artificial intelligence could turbocharge those increases the cost of residential power is going up because of the shift away from natural gas towards solar failing to admit this or worse lying about it is not going to actually help long term
what? solar is cheaper than natural gas.
It's absolutely not.
Solar with batteries that provide power year long are so expensive they do not exist.
At most you get one day of battery.
Re: Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
#26But the vast majority of my $500+ a month PG&E bill is for transmission, not generation.
500 a month sounds steep. I'm assuming you live somewhere that requires AC every day? The article referred to driving prices up from 2020 due to making the infrastructure stronger by as much as 30%. Which, yeah, about 150ish of your bill. It is less clear on how much it will need to go up because of increased demand? The prediction is 8%. Which, again, not nothing. But it is telling that there is more increase from i…
My bill last month was $450 and I don’t own an AC, it was around $350 before I got a plug in hybrid but every year it goes up double digit percentages.
Re: Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
#27But the vast majority of my $500+ a month PG&E bill is for transmission, not generation.
That isn't unique to PG&E. Clear across the country, my utility bill is close to 60% transmission fees.
Also what are you doing? Running a flux capacitor?
Re: Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
#28Not just bills. These data centers, a major driver of new energy use, are contributing to climate change. Sadly it seems to be another way for large companies to offload externalities onto the public.
Are they? IIRC MS & Google were running on carbon neutral sources.
Are they? IIRC MS & Google were running on carbon neutral sources.
We have limited carbon neutral energy production.
Re: Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
#29Oh hey, not even crypto pulled this kind of thing off, but here we now see crickets from certain parts of the tech community (on this site especially) about this particular gargantuan use of electricity. I guess it's no longer a problem when the people who employee you are doing it, despite the vast amount of slop, spam and other garbage being generated among the occassionally (only apparently so far) productive uses of LLM technology.
As far as that goes, i'd love to see a well researched breakdown of just what percentage of LLM technology is actually being used for anything productive, and what percentage is just being pissed into industrialized spam.
LLMs even have the whole crime angle neatly covered, considering all the innovative uses they're being put to by the same people who brought us ransoms paid in crypto. Would be interesting to see the numbers on how that breaks down too.
Re: Big Tech's A.I. Data Centers Are Driving Up Electricity Bills for Everyone
#30It's usually the opposite.
When a company requires lot more energy, power plants are expected to produce lot more.
When a power plant produce a lot, the low consumption rates tend to get cheaper. It's gets cheaper to produce energy as the demand increases.
This is, of course, considering the input material is not scarce, like hydro power plants or wind power. Everything else (coal, oil, nuclear, gas, solar) should be easy to increase supply/demand.