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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/32465427
Datacentres consume just 1% of the world’s electricity but may soon demand much more. Their share of US electricity is projected to more than double to 8.6% by 2035, according to BloombergNEF, while the IEA projects datacentres will account for at least 20% of the rich world’s growth in electricity demand to the end of the decade.
“This idea that the lower cost of renewables alone will drive decarbonisation – it’s not enough,” said Daly. “Because if there’s a huge source of energy demand that wants to grow, it will land on these stranded fossil fuel assets.”
Tech companies have resisted pressure to provide detailed data on their AI energy footprints,
The IEA estimates that AI could boost technically recoverable oil and gas reserves by 5% and cut the cost of a deepwater offshore project by 10%. Big oil is even more bullish. “Artificial intelligence is, ultimately, within the industry, going to be the next fracking boom,” Mike Sommers, head of the American Petroleum Institute, told Axios.
At the same time, the oil and gas industry says AI can cut its carbon intensity, for instance by analysing satellite data to spot methane leaks. But even here, critics say there is a gap between digital insights and corporate actions.
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Unpopular opinion of the day: LLMs are a distraction from the climate fight.
Using chatbots emits the same tiny amounts of CO2 as other normal things we do online, and way less than most offline things we do. Even when you include “hidden costs” like training, the emissions from making hardware, energy used in cooling, and AI chips idling between prompts, the carbon cost of an average chatbot prompt adds up to less than 1/150,000th of the average American’s daily emissions. Water is similar. Everything we do uses a lot of water. Most electricity is generated using water, and most of the way AI “uses” water is actually just in generating its electricity. The average American’s daily water footprint is ~800,000 times as much as the full cost of an AI prompt. The actual amount of water used per prompt in data centers themselves is vanishingly small.
Because chatbot prompts use so little energy and water, if you’re sitting and reading the full responses they generate, it’s very likely that you’re using way less energy and water than you otherwise would in your daily life. It takes ~1000 prompts to raise your emissions by 1%. If you sat at your computer all day, sending and reading 1000 prompts in a row, you wouldn’t be doing more energy intensive things like driving, or using physical objects you own that wear out, need to be replaced, and cost emissions and water to make. Every second you spend walking outside wears out your sneakers just a little bit, to the point that they eventually need to be replaced. Sneakers cost water to make. My best guess is that every second of walking uses as much water in expectation as ~7 chatbot prompts. So sitting inside at your computer saves that water too. It seems like it’s near impossible to raise your personal emissions and water footprint at all using chatbots, because using all day on something that ends up causing 1% of your normal emissions is exactly like spending all day on an activity that costs only 1% of the money you normally spend.
There are no other situations, anywhere, where we worry about amounts of energy and water this small. I can’t find any other places where people have gotten worried about things they do that use such tiny amounts of energy. Chatbot energy and water use being a problem is a really bizarre meme that has taken hold, I think mostly because people are surprised that chatbots are being used by so many people that on net their total energy and water use is noticeable. Being “mindful” with your chatbot usage is kind of like filling a large pot of water to boil to make food, and before boiling it, taking a pipet and removing tiny drops of the water from the pot at a time to “only use the water you need” or stopping your shower a tenth of a second early for the sake of the climate. You do not need to be “mindful” with your chatbot usage for the same reason you don’t need to be “mindful” about those additional droplets of water you boil.
“This idea that the lower cost of renewables alone will drive decarbonisation – it’s not enough,” said Daly. “Because if there’s a huge source of energy demand that wants to grow, it will land on these stranded fossil fuel assets.”
Corporations don’t think in savings, they think in budgets. If the cost of electricity goes down, thanks to e.g. renewables being cheaper, that just means that they can afford to use more electricity.
AI is exacerbating the damage we are causing by staying on fossil fuels. I see the issue is mainly political as we have green energy and all
“This idea that the lower cost of renewables alone will drive decarbonisation – it’s not enough,” said Daly. “Because if there’s a huge source of energy demand that wants to grow, it will land on these stranded fossil fuel assets.”
There’s also a huge issue around water use which isn’t mentioned in the article.
The water use issue is largely blown out of proportion or not compared to other sources of water use.
The US Corn industry alone uses 80x the water usage of the entire global AI industry.
Hank Green on YT goes over it in more details and with citations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_c6MWk7PQc
It’s also going to get more efficient, like Amazon’s data centers have been over time. By the way, where was this zeal over water usage from people back when AWS and other data centers started popping up all over the place?
The water issue will end up being more in how local water tables are affected, not overall consumption.
Yeah but when but gets 20% more efficient they build a second one. You still end up with a net increase.
Fair, but corn has a use. (Also not one I agree with but you get my meaning.)
Only 1% of the corn grown in the US is eaten by people. Most of it is used as animal feed (which is catastrophic on their systems as their stomachs aren’t designed to digest corn, so their corn diet slowly kills them) and a large portion is made into ethanol and added to gasoline. The corn subsidies are so dumb that they require a minimum amount of the corn being grown to be turned into ethanol, which is extremely inefficient.
The Hank Green video someone linked above goes over some of the stuff I mentioned.
Yeah, exactly.
This was a subtly sponsored video for which he got a lot of shit iirc. Didn’t he retract this?
I haven’t seen anything saying it was sponsored (other than by a news aggregator) and getting a lot of shit on the Internet isn’t any indication of being incorrect. The video is still up and no mention of anything like what you’re talking about.
Then i might be remembering wrong and if so I apologise.
Edit: ah it was the financial advice related to ai that got him a lot of criticism
Good news is there is increased investment in nuclear energy for data centers, which will go a long way to combat this.
The U.S. government is shelling out a whopping $2.7 billion to three companies in an effort to strengthen domestic uranium enrichment, amid surging electricity demand from AI data centers.
not going to happen lol, nuclear takes at least a decade or more to build, and then approve by regulatory bodies, and people are not keen on having nuclear plants built near cities. plus once the bubble bursts, whos going to maintain those nuclear plants.
God no, it will not. Aside from the discussion whether nuclear is really a good way to generate electricity (and I think it’s not): The demand is so insanely huge that it’s actually stacked: green plus coal plus gas plus oil plus nuclear is currently getting “assigned” to genai.
What do you think will replace fossil fuels as our baseload source? Because (to my understanding) renewables don’t have the output and stability required to fill that void.
Watt for watt, nuclear is one of the safest methods of generation and generates tons of energy with minimal waste (which already has methods of storage and reprocessing).
random, barely related thought
It always amuses me to point out that fossil fuel plants like coal are more radioactive than nuclear power plants. Because nuclear plants have strict regulations they have to follow, but coal plants concentrate radioactive materials into the ash as part of their normal operation, which can make it to the outside.
Please see my other comment: whether nuclear power is good or bad is not my point, the monstrously power hungry genai shit is.
(to my understanding) renewables don’t have the output and stability required to fill that void.
Your understanding would change if you actually looked into the facts and the numbers, and change even more if you’d been keeping track of what financial markets have put their money into for well over a decade.
So fossil fuels better? Nuclear works great for France.
All nice and well but it is not my point here. My point is that I disagree that adding nuclear is good as it doesn’t remove fossils from the mix in the first place. LLM/genai is a problem no matter how much power you throw at it.
What has worked great for France is keeping their nuclear mishaps very well hidden… as it did for the Saint-Laurent meltdown in 1980, and at the Centraco plant in 2011, for two examples.
I’d rather just not build them
Is Coal and Gas is your preferred energy source? Because that’s what nuclear would be replacing.
That expenditure would displace the 10x the power which renewables + storage have already proven to do all over the world… that’s what nuclear would replace. Nuclear is never good news.
There are no other alternatives for baseline power generation.
You can’t run a national grid on 100% renewables and batteries. If you’re not using nuclear then you’re using fossil and fossil fuels are not only polluting but the dependence on them creates a huge amount of political instability around the world.
Nuclear plants use less uranium than Coal plants burn into the atmosphere. Coal has trace amount of radioactive uranium and if you burn hundreds of thousands of tons of it every year then you’re putting pounds of radioactive uranium into the atmosphere.
Nuclear investments will probably just meet the increase in energy consumption due to new datacenters, not make an energy transition
The datacenters.
I’d rather it didn’t rain today, but it did and I still needed to bring an umbrella no matter how much I didn’t like the rain.
Nuclear energy is never good news.
Solar energy can boil water too. At much lower cost, 10x faster build times, and MUCH less waste … none that has to be guarded for centuries.
Never safe, never clean, never too cheap to meter. The exact opposite of the sales pitches. Rarely built without taxpayer dollars. Name the companies willing to insure one.
Crazy people still get downvoted in Lemmy for reminding everyone that Nuclear energy is the most expensive form of generating power while solar, wind, and water are the cheapest.
generating power while solar, wind, and water are the cheapest
When you include storage in your cost calculations, this is far, far from the case. If you don’t include storage, you are pairing renewables with natural gas peaker plants, which defeat a good bit of the point of renewables being fossil-fuel-free.
People just eat the “nuclear waste isn’t a problem actually ignore that in some places we’re already seeing it wasn’t stored safely aftet all” propaganda from the nuclear lobby right up.
And forget that just because nuclear plants are pretty damn safe when everything is done properly, people are notoriously great at not doing things properly, hence why 2 of the things have melted down so far (though i should say the same applies to hydro, except I only know of 1 disaster instead of 2, and the financial damage is less because water doesnt contaminate the ground for forever. Killed a lot of people though).
I’ll take it over fossil fuels still because co2 is also a huge problem, and having nuclear waste at all is a bigger problem than adding slightly more while we transition to full renewables.
I disagree. AI is causing huge increases in the demand for energy in general. Renewables are the most economic energy source and pretty much all new generation will be renewable since its cheaper. AI is just accelerating the transition process.
Shew, what a headline. Keep in mind that AI is not just all LLM. I’m not sure how much more juice we can squeeze out of LLMs, but we’re just scratching the surface with other prediction models.
The ability to have smart cars that improve fuel efficiency by adjusting to traffic conditions may very well compensate for the increased electricity demand created by data centers.
New chemistry models may finally help us produce batteries that can meet the demands of a renewable energy grid.
We’re standing at a precipice. What we’re doing as a society is not working today - it’s not sustainable. And I’m not shy to say that I’m one of the few here on ActivityPub that think we may be able to leverage AI to dig us out of this hole we’ve started to dig ourselves in. But, in order to do that, we need clear heads, with clear goals and the incentives to encourage others to execute on them.
What we’re doing right now, just complaining about what’s not working isn’t going to save us.
The ability to have smart cars that improve fuel efficiency by adjusting to traffic conditions may very well compensate for the increased electricity demand created by data centers.
That just reads mindblowingly stupid for me after only one semester of the “automatic guidance of trains” subject with a few simple methods of numeric optimization. And I wasn’t studying very well, to say the least.
The rest of what you write feels as if you’d missed the whole “digital computer” thing and what it already allows us to do since 1970s and that is being done since 1970s.
