31–40 of 46 posts
But 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?
PG&E works with a capture PUC and cost plus accounting where the only way for the company to increase profits is to drive up expenses.
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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.
Water availability is a regional climate change impact, which does not apply everywhere due to differences in water sourcing and weather patterns and how climate change affects these. It's very stupid to evaporate potable water on purpose in dry regions, but note that many numbers in this area are highly sensationalized by taking e.g. the maximum design capacity of the cooling system instead of the actual load, and t…
Not 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.
https://technologymagazine.com/articles/how-ais-rise-changed...
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Water availability is a regional climate change impact, which does not apply everywhere due to differences in water sourcing and weather patterns and how climate change affects these. It's very stupid to evaporate potable water on purpose in dry regions, but note that many numbers in this area are highly sensationalized by taking e.g. the maximum design capacity of the cooling system instead of the actual load, and t…
Water vapor is a greenhouse gas
Water evaporates constantly in from soil, plants, and water bodies - most notably from the ocean itself, which is how ~babby~ precipitation is formed. Evaporation from a datacenter is unlikely to make any notable impact through water vapor. What it could impact is highly localized potable water availability and humidity in places with e.g. low precipitation and limited reservoir capacity.
And, again, note that other cooling methods are also in use, and that other things also use evaporative cooling.
Heck, even when evaporative cooling is used, it doesn't necessarily mean that the water escapes into the atmosphere! Both heat pipes and refrigeration cycles are forms of evaporative cooling where the gas is allowed to condense, cool and evaporate again.
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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.
Granted, my memory is largely from when we lived in a smaller house.
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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.
I'm curious what your major costs are, then? Without AC, pretty sure our costs were not even half that. Granted, my memory is largely from when we lived in a smaller house.
But the vast majority of my $500+ a month PG&E bill is for transmission, not generation.
And according TFA, those poles and wires for transmission are a large part of the increase in costs that are forecasted. Ideally, the folks who request the new plants and transmission lines pay for them, but it appears tech cos are attempting to pass the transmission cost burden onto residential consumers.
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Water vapor is a greenhouse gas
And sunlight causes skin cancer, but we don't want to boycott neither water vapor nor sunlight lest we will have no precipitation and no... life. Water evaporates constantly in from soil, plants, and water bodies - most notably from the ocean itself, which is how ~babby~ precipitation is formed. Evaporation from a datacenter is unlikely to make any notable impact through water vapor. What it could impact is highly lo…
> Water evaporates constantly in from soil, plants, and water bodies - most notably from the ocean itself, which is how ~babby~ precipitation is formed.
And CO2 is constantly released too. The point are the additional released greenhouse gases
BTW we kind of boycott sunlight, it’s called sunscreen
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I'm curious what your major costs are, then? Without AC, pretty sure our costs were not even half that. Granted, my memory is largely from when we lived in a smaller house.
PG&E charges about 50c per kWh. It's not very hard to have an electric bill that high when electricity costs ~5x the national average.
I'm not claiming that you don't. Or that you shouldn't. I'm genuinely curious on where the main use of electricity is.
To add numbers, an AC can use up to 5000 watts. That is literally 10x a refrigerator. Over 100x what a TV uses. The car, I'd guess is using a lot. But where are you using that much energy without AC?
That is, even compared to your 5x energy costs, I should have been paying more to keep a decent sized house running with AC in GA since I almost certainly had more than that multiplier on my usage?