I see white roofs that can be dark themed to reduce the load on the grid.
Wasn’t there a country with too much solar, causing electricity prices to fall too low?
Do they not have any space left for data-centres?That’s probably true but you only get ⅓ of a day on average of power. Demands are still rising so the other ⅔ of the day prices are higher and likely still averages higher on average for an entire day even if ⅓ of it is so cheap.
You could store surplus energy with batteries, pumped storage hydro power stations, gravity batteries and so on to bridge the gap at night. It’s just a matter of subsidies in the right direction and political will to get there. But currently in impending pre-war times it’s more like in a diesel-punk dystopy.
Yeah but all that costs money too, subsidies or not it comes from somewhere. Maybe your electric bill is lower but you’re paying higher on taxes or on something else that could have been subsidized.
The only good subsidies do is lower risk and advance technology. No one wants to take a chance on first generation products at high cost and high risk. So once the technology is developed, scalable, and sustainable someone begins to profit off of a subsidy. What good is a subsidy if it’s taken as profit somewhere on the chain of companies building it and not saving rate payers?
Regardless, there is going to be a bottleneck somewhere when demands are spiking and it takes years for this stuff to come online to support it. Data centers are gobbling up existing capacity that was built for long term projected growth. So how are utilities going to pay for future infrastructure to replace that capacity…. rate increases for everyone! The bottle neck of generation is caused by them and huge demands quickly, not because of subsidies, technology, or political will (related energy supply). You allow the generation to go to data centers then you are bottlenecking the materials or labor to replace the capacity later.
I’d say you won’t really require batteries for something like this, that will mostly be generating less energy than it is expending at any point of time.
Note that I am only suggesting filling the roofs and not the rest of the area around it.Besides, they most probably have a Double-conversion UPS, so they just need to make a controller that supports a side input channel for charging from the PV output.
I live in NJ, USA. I thought I had missed a payment when my last electric bill came. Nope, just a huge rate hike. about the same amount of electricity as the prior year, double the bill.
Were you recently told your bill is gonna go up again when they put in that massive data center in a year or so? We were told. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ no option to say “fuck you, make them pay their bills.” Nope. PSE&g was like “brace for it bitch.” And that was it.
I probably was. But I also just delete all their emails. They’re the only energy distributer in my area. Even if I contracted with someone else I’d have to pay their increased distribution rates.
Yeah same here. Just bullshit that they’re like “this is happening. Pay us more”
PSE&G told some coworkers of mine their bill would go up by “as much as 20%” shortly before they went up by 150%. One of them got a bill for $800 for their two bedroom apartment
These taxes collected from tariffs have to go somewhere
Europeans: “first time?”
My electricity costs must have tripled since the Ukraine war, not like they were low before…
As a “European” my electricity bill has never been as low as it is this year. I think it really depends where you live
Where are you located? In Germany it spiked but now I’m paying less than before the war (25 vs 27 cents).
Italy.
This is going to feel like the recycle scam isn’t it. Corpos sucking down every last drop of energy while residential will be asked to turn up the thermostat in the summer and down in the winter so we “do our part”.
Always has been
Residents in big cities have been experiencing it for decades at this point.
ConEd saying “We’re preparing for the heat wave in your area this week. Please, limit your energy usage to prevent power outages.”
Yeah, and times square is still lit up full brightness. The skyscraper offices aren’t doing their part. Most of them, you can feel the cold on the street from their lobbies.
Charge higher rates for crypto and AI. No one should be hot or cold so some asshole can make more money.
That’s how prices work, yes.
This has been the case for decades, why would it change now?
It will be even worse than before. Texas hasn’t added any power generating capacity outside of the devil that is solar and wind. Solar and wind are the only reasons we haven’t seen the rolling blackouts for a few years now. Texas is even trying to make it harder to add more solar and wind, so it will strain even more.
literally passing the bucks to us: https://apnews.com/article/electricity-prices-data-centers-artificial-intelligence-fbf213a915fb574a4f3e5baaa7041c3a
Rolling blackouts, my dude. Dig it.
I can dig it
I always ignore power savings requests. If they really can’t serve the population, they need to make more power. If we all turn down our usage to make it work, they won’t make more.
crypto scam, AI is the new crypto
And all we get in return are chat systems that make up bullshit facts. I mean, I don’t disagree that they can actually do some useful stuff, too. But the proportion of the public that benefits from them in any meaningful way is tiny compared to the cost to the rest of us. I hope a tornado lands on Elon’s gas-powered monstrosity in, where, Tennessee, I think? Destroy that shit, please.
Unlike this place, I bet most people out there actually enjoy Google’s AI summaries. I mean, it’s almost the Wikipedia article verbatim, but if you just need to know what a thing is, they actually save people time
And in return, they drive traffic away from the sites that collect the information in the first place, causing the sources to lose revenue.
In the case of Wikipedia, it saves them money
It saves them money in the same sense it saves every other information source money, it reduces traffic. But just like other sites can’t serve ads without traffic, Wikipedia can’t prove its worth and ask for donations without traffic. Eventually, people will start asking themselves why they need to support Wikipedia when Google’s AI tells them everything they need to know, unaware that Google’s AI can only do so because it scrapes Wikipedia without paying for it.
Our culture disintegrates every time we choose convenience over everything.
Our… web search culture?
Can you not see how tech company driven ai search responses can influence broader culture and society? It’s not only about web search.
They also broadened from web search to other instances of full on convenience being detrimental to culture.
Wao, I watched this video yester, precisely about how detrimental all this bullshit is to us right now. How disconnected from reality and self-reliance it is making us.
Here’s the link to the video if anyone is interested (yes, I know, it’s YouTube, but I saw it in newpipe, Sue me) :
The evidence so far is that the AI summaries have driven away traffic from Google.
They have driven traffic away from the websites, not from Google itself
Considering Google has the worst AI in the entire industry I wouldn’t be surprised if this was true. This is Google’s Siri moment.
It is not like I did not have access to that information before. I don’t need to be trapped in some closed browser environment labeled as “search”
You had to look at all the results yourself before getting to the thing you wanted. Similarly, before search engines existed you could just find the information by directly accessing the website
Why isn’t the roof of that facility covered with solar panels? It might not provide all the juice they need, but it will offset some. Future facilities like this should be forced to install some sort of energy mitigation strategy before getting approval.
Of course it should be covered in solar panels but so should most roofs everywhere but this single roof would be less than a drop in the bucket.
A square meter solar panel gives you about 100 watts while the sun is at it’s highest point, and only when aimed directly at the sun. Typically over the entire day, the average will be a fraction of that
Meanwhile these servers use multiple CPUs that each take around 200 watts. A single server can take between 1-5 kilowatt in power. A single rack than carry dozens of those server’s, so you see that you’d need way, waaaayyy more solar panels to make up for all of that
Again, not saying they shouldn’t. All buildings should have solar panel roofs, but for this one building it won’t do much to the point that the difference would be a blip
I get it, but you make them all do it anyway, just on principle, if nothing else.
Oh sure, wasn’t saying that
Best we can do is diesel generators 😔
You’re right about the general idea, but I think you’re even underestimating the scale here.
I don’t think these servers will be doing much on CPU, they’ll be on GPUs. HPE will sell you a 48 rack unit behemoth with 36 Blackwell GB200s for a total of 72 GPUs and 36 CPUs. The CPUs are actually negligible here, but each of the 36 units use a total of 2700 watts (single GPU itself is supposedly 1200 watts so that would make the CPU 300 watts?)
36 * 2.7 = 97.2 kilowatts. You put just a hundred of these in a data center and you’re talking over 10 megawatts once cooling and everything is factored in. So this is what, 100k m^2 of solar panels for 100 racks?
You’d want them to be running most of the time too, idle hardware is just a depreciating asset. Say they run 75% of the time. 0.75 * 10 * 24 * 365 = 65700 MWh which I will not even convert to gigawatt hours to simplify this: The average American household uses about ~11 MWh of electrical energy per year. A single AI-focused data center without even all that many racks uses as much power as ~6000 households. They’re building them all over the country, and in reality I think they’re actually way bigger than what I mentioned. It’s putting a significant dent in the power grid, to the point AI companies should be required to commission nuclear power plants before being allowed to build their data centers.
When’s the last time you looked into this?
I just went fully off grid and I have a relatively large house and workshop.
The panels I used, which are great but aren’t the absolute best on the market come out to about 231W per sq. meter.
I have a 39kW system installed just for my house. It’s overkill, yeah but I plan for the future (telling the regional power monopoly to go fuck themselves for the next 30 years).
Covering one of these centers with solar would absolutely make a huge impact. Not only by providing power during the day but also with keeping the building cooler.
For reference, the panels I have (65 of), coupled with 100kWh battery bank.
https://www.runergy.com/wp-content/uploads/download/DH156N8-30F.pdf
Even at over double the other guys estimate on power per area, it isn’t even touching the requirements of major data centres. What it takes to run a normal house is tiny, they likely have servers that individually draw more power than my entire household, and they have hundreds if not thousands of these servers.
Do it anyway because solar is the closest thing to free power we have, but it isn’t gonna cover the building.
Well of course. Which is why I mentioned it making a significant impact. Full offset wouldn’t be feasible without it being as large of a scope a the data center construction itself; not even considering storage requirements.
The unfortunate likelihood of projections (currently taking shape) being well understood, and accepted, at the time is extremely high.
It’s a win-win if you’re the owner of the server farm who had closed door discussions with the power company beforehand. I mean the citizens don’t win, but when has this ever been a concern?
If it was in their best interests financially, it would be included in the financial model before construction. My guess is that it was more appealing to just cut deals with various players.
A square meter of solar gives you over 200 watts for many hours of the day in realistic conditions in Europe/Canada, more in the US or tropical countries.
Don’t let the tech bros into your state.
My electric utility just arbitrarily added 170 (~50% of the total) bucks to my bill this month, despite me using 11% less electricity.
The whole point of being a utility is to allow the “efficiency” of a monopoly without the ability to gouge the customers. Frankly, I’m looking to see if there is a lawsuit against the utility at this point so I can join on to it.
Also looking into residential solar. Ideally I can just give my electric utility the finger and disconnect my service. Between them and gas, I’m paying about 400 bucks a month, which could get me a nice loan for a solar array, battery backup, and all electric appliances.
Where I used to live, the electric bill doubled after the city council voted to allow the electric company to charge customers for the cost of storm repairs. Nearly $400 a month for us. I knew people who lived there part time and were getting $200 bills for months when they weren’t living there and had no electrical usage. And people had been saying for years that the electric company wasn’t doing enough to prepare for storms.
And, funny enough, you would be doing them, the world, the datacenters, and yourself some good.
Yeah the problem is going to be getting the loan, and I would need about 1900sqft for the solar array, which would take up most of my yard. I’d need to elevate it up near the roofline of the house, so the entire back yard would be one big partially shaded patio. Which sounds nice, but I don’t think the city will let me build it.
I think that sooner or later GPT 6 and higher models will become too expensive for most people, and they will moderate their ardor and start introducing restrictions on use without all this circus like, look, we have a perpetual motion machine…
But even weak models are enough to spy on you damn well.
All the models are already too expensive for most people. Most people don’t pay to use them, billionaire investors do. When the AI bubble bursts our retirement funds will collapse and billionaires will simply move money somewhere else.
Well, yes, something similar has already happened, it seems that even some rich people, because of one such bubble, passed away when they lost everything.
I’ve been thinking this for some time. It just seems completely implausible that companies like OpenAI will continue letting the people of the world use their product for free, what with the ruthless material requirements involved in it’s distribution and upkeep.
To me it seems clear that the right to intellectual property and the right to work or contribute meaningfully to a workplace (as if that were actually a right) are currently being blitzscaled. I.e. these guys are running their companies at a loss to allow their product to become a necessity. Once that’s achieved you will no longer have the option not to use it and they will be able to charge whatever they like.
We really need to begin pressuring states and governance to protect us from the predatory business models of these venture capitalists.
Well we don’t have much time, we either need to act now or we could end up in something like 1984 and Mad Max. Although I’m not entirely sure, I’m afraid that we will really end up in complete shit due to crop failure, hunger and, of course, death and poverty, so we may well live like in those works. There seems to be a theory that the world is not run by governments but by corporations and governments are like puppets for the rich.
They will just let people use some micro model that’s basically as good as the current mini one and call it a day
They increased their energy use to produce a provably inferior model. What the hell are they doing?
Raking in vc money?
“States feel pressure to act”
First of all, did they interview all the States? Secondly did the states say they “felt” “pressure” “to act”? And lastly, Bull.Shit.
Tiered pricing would help.
It does
The more you use, the cheaper it is
I thought that was just a China thing and others learnt from them, not to make that mistake.
