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.
It's like saying "our crypto mining energy is carbon neutral" but ignoring the fact that if the carbon neutral energy is going into crypto mining, it's not going into something more useful. If crypto mining buys all the carbon neutral energy sources, then those sources aren't being used by other industries.
Carbon neutrality doesn’t refill a drained reservoir used to cool off these machines. Running your servers on wind power doesn’t make the millions of gallons they’re dumping into cooling systems any less gone.
The water cycle refills drained reservoirs - the "carbon cycle" is not one we want to be part of.
Also note that there's other cooling solutions than evaporative cooling, such as closed loop water cooling with chillers, cooling with sea water, using heat pumps to redirect the heat to district heating loops (making use of the heat!), just building in colder places requiring less cooling, etc.
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 that there are several other cooling solutions. Most proper facts die tragic deaths before they make it to mainstream news media. :/
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 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.
All the small things that affect the climate pile up.
> 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
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 infrastructure than there is generation? I don't know that that will change?
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.
Ish? I'm still not clear where you would be using that much electricity.
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?
You get a $500 bill for using 1000 kWh/mo - that's just leaving a 5000W AC on for 200 hours. My apartment AC is probably 2000W, but similar principles apply.
Add in a fridge, cooking equipment, water heating, leaving a server on, etc., and it should be straightforward to get to that number.
None of this contends with my question? I get how an AC can lead to an expensive bill. I'm assuming your numbers are to intend running the AC for daytime hours and that it will get you there. How do you get there without an AC?
About the only other large power use thing I could think of would be a pool?
Searching also shows average power bills in CA are 160? If focused on LA, it would be 200ish? What is putting some folks here so far above average? Was that the quarterly bill? I know we get bills every few months.
I don't think you get there without an AC, but the point is that many people have AC and central air and use both of them.
My guess is that most people don't have AC or are sensitive to price increases and choose not to run it. There's also multiple electricity providers in the state; NorCal uses PG&E and SoCal uses Edison.
For a variety of complicated and corruption-related reasons, PG&E has jacked rates through the roof in an absolutely unconscionable way and Edison's rates have only increased by a lot.
So it sounds like we mostly agree? One of the starter posts was claiming 450 without AC. I'm curious how that happens. Even with AC, I was never seeing bills that big unless we were running it a lot.
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.
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.
Oh 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.
yes let’s listen to the well thought out and impartial criticisms of “meta_ai_x”
obviously the big AI companies are using lots and lots of energy, making big claims like you are about “brainwashing” and such without anything to back it up is cancerous to real discussion. as are the bad faith arguments.
Tech companies are trying to lock the market and create monopolies to abuse later. And have pretty much established track record or genuinely not caring who or how they harm ... or even brag about it.
Tech companies literally brag about disruption, about making groups of people obsolete and dont even pretend their compliance with rules is anything but bad faith.
Like common here. We as a tech lost the goodwill because of the culture of people we celebrate.
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.
We have limited carbon neutral energy production.
Carbon neutrality doesn’t refill a drained reservoir used to cool off these machines. Running your servers on wind power doesn’t make the millions of gallons they’re dumping into cooling systems any less gone.
The water cycle refills drained reservoirs - the "carbon cycle" is not one we want to be part of.
Also note that there's other cooling solutions than evaporative cooling, such as closed loop water cooling with chillers, cooling with sea water, using heat pumps to redirect the heat to district heating loops (making use of the heat!), just building in colder places requiring less cooling, etc.
MS revised its climate goals thanks to AI
https://technologymagazine.com/articles/how-ais-rise-changed...
Google stopped claiming "operational carbon neutrality" shortly after the release of chatgpt.
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 that there are several other cooling solutions. Most proper facts die tragic deaths before they make it to mainstream news media. :/
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 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.
All the small things that affect the climate pile up.
> 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
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-cloud/blog/2024/12...
But 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 infrastructure than there is generation? I don't know that that will change?
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.
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.
Ish? I'm still not clear where you would be using that much electricity.
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?
You get a $500 bill for using 1000 kWh/mo - that's just leaving a 5000W AC on for 200 hours. My apartment AC is probably 2000W, but similar principles apply.
Add in a fridge, cooking equipment, water heating, leaving a server on, etc., and it should be straightforward to get to that number.
None of this contends with my question? I get how an AC can lead to an expensive bill. I'm assuming your numbers are to intend running the AC for daytime hours and that it will get you there. How do you get there without an AC?
About the only other large power use thing I could think of would be a pool?
Searching also shows average power bills in CA are 160? If focused on LA, it would be 200ish? What is putting some folks here so far above average? Was that the quarterly bill? I know we get bills every few months.
I don't think you get there without an AC, but the point is that many people have AC and central air and use both of them.
My guess is that most people don't have AC or are sensitive to price increases and choose not to run it. There's also multiple electricity providers in the state; NorCal uses PG&E and SoCal uses Edison.
For a variety of complicated and corruption-related reasons, PG&E has jacked rates through the roof in an absolutely unconscionable way and Edison's rates have only increased by a lot.
So it sounds like we mostly agree? One of the starter posts was claiming 450 without AC. I'm curious how that happens. Even with AC, I was never seeing bills that big unless we were running it a lot.
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.
Poles and wires for a datacenter should be much cheaper than for a subdivision.
Privatize the gains, publicize the losses
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 peak residential rates hit over 50 cts/kwh.
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.
You can thank all the wildfires for that
Yeah...I hate when wildfires neglect their infrastructure to the point that they start themselves
It'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.
https://archive.is/YOo1H
bullish silver
Oh 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.
this 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.
what? solar is cheaper than natural gas.
Solar+battery is the proper comparison.
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.
[flagged]
> “… grandmother knows about AI energy demand.”
Uh huh. Tell us more about how gramma should have planned for the AI future.
yes let’s listen to the well thought out and impartial criticisms of “meta_ai_x”
obviously the big AI companies are using lots and lots of energy, making big claims like you are about “brainwashing” and such without anything to back it up is cancerous to real discussion. as are the bad faith arguments.
Tech companies are trying to lock the market and create monopolies to abuse later. And have pretty much established track record or genuinely not caring who or how they harm ... or even brag about it.
Tech companies literally brag about disruption, about making groups of people obsolete and dont even pretend their compliance with rules is anything but bad faith.
Like common here. We as a tech lost the goodwill because of the culture of people we celebrate.