Essay by Eric Worrall
Tech giants which in public virtue signal their commitment to useless renewables are quietly arranging more potent and reliable energy sources for their own needs.
Don’t let a hyper-data center suck up CT’s electric power
by Bryan SaylesApril 19, 2024 @ 12:01 am
Fred V. Carstensen’s March 22 “Opinion: CT SB299—afraid of the future, data centers and AI” ignores the legislative events and legitimate concerns that led to SB-299 being introduced in the first place.
For starters, House Bill 6514 (HB-6514), a law passed in 2021, incentivizes data center development. Under HB-6514, any data center built or rehabilitated in Connecticut does not pay property or sales and use tax for the life of the facility, typically 20 to 30 years. Instead, it is required to pay the host municipality a Payment In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOT), an often absurdly low fee negotiated with the host municipality.
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Siphoning 15% of nuclear power production to power Quinn’s Waterford data center will create grid scarcity. Instead of selling full capacity to the grid wholesale market, Dominion will only be offering 85% of daily capacity. That shortage will handicap wholesale electricity markets run by Independent System Operator-New England (ISO-New England).
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Read more: https://ctmirror.org/2024/04/19/ct-data-center-nuclear-plant-bill/
15% of the capacity of a nuclear power plant, for one data center? No wonder they are quietly sidelining wind and solar.
I decided to delve more deeply into this nuclear tech center controversy. Turns out all the tech giants want properly reliable energy for their data centers.
Amazon, Google and Microsoft signal growing interest in nuclear, geothermal power
Rising demand from artificial intelligence is forcing big technology companies to look beyond wind and solar for clean energy.
By Heather Clancy
March 25, 2024The push to commercialize artificial intelligence is swelling the electricity demands of the three biggest cloud computing companies — Amazon, Google and Microsoft — and they’re looking for carbon-free energy, including nuclear and geothermal, to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from that growth.
In mid-March, Talen Energy announced a $650 million deal with Amazon Web Services to sell a data center powered by one of the largest U.S. nuclear plants. The Pennsylvania campus hosts a 48-megawatt computing facility, and Amazon plans to build a 960-megawatt campus there.
“To supplement our wind and solar energy projects, which depend on weather conditions to generate energy, we’re also exploring new innovations and technologies, and investing in other sources of clean, carbon-free energy,” Amazon said in a statement. “This agreement with Talen Energy is one project in that effort.”
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Read more: https://www.greenbiz.com/article/amazon-google-and-microsoft-signal-growing-interest-nuclear-geothermal-power
From Times of India;
How AI may force Google, Microsoft and others to push their nuclear energy game plan
Sourabh Kulesh / TIMESOFINDIA.COM / Mar 8, 2024, 14:14 IST
Tech giants like Apple, Google and Microsoft are working to become carbon neutral in their operations by 2030. But as the next-gen AI technology grows, offices and data centres are becoming more energy-hungry. As per a report published last year, by 2027 AI servers may use between 85 to 134 terawatt hours (Twh) annually – which approximately equal to what Argentina, the Netherlands and Sweden each use in a year.
To solve this problem, these companies have been pushing for nuclear energy as a source to power their AI tech.
“If you were to integrate large language models, GPT-style models into search engines, it’s going to cost five times as much environmentally as standard search,” Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute, a research group focused on the social impacts of AI, recently told CNBC.
…Last year, Microsoft agreed to buy power from Helion starting in 2028. Microsoft signed a deal last summer with Constellation, a top nuclear power plant operator, to add nuclear-generated electricity to its Virginia data centers.
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Read more: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/gadgets-news/how-ai-may-force-google-microsoft-and-others-to-push-their-nuclear-energy-game-plan/articleshow/108323674.cms
Don’t forget, these are the same hypocrites who until recently were ignoring nuclear in public and pushing renewables, until they suddenly discovered they themselves needed reliable, industrial scale energy.
From Google;
Five years of 100% renewable energy – and a look ahead to a 24/7 carbon-free future
June 24, 2022
Google operates the cleanest cloud in the industry, and we have long been a leading champion of clean energy around the world. Since we began purchasing renewable energy in 2010, Google has been responsible for more than 60 new clean energy projects with a combined capacity of over 7 gigawatts — about the same as 20 million solar panels. Our long-term support for clean energy projects has contributed to the rapid growth of the industry, remarkable declines in the cost of solar and wind power, and innovative new contracting models and industry partnerships to accelerate corporate clean energy procurement.
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Read more: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/sustainability/5-years-of-100-percent-renewable-energy
Microsoft;
Advocating for decarbonization of the power sector
Aug 16, 2023 | Michelle Patron – Senior Director of Global Sustainability Policy
This month, Seattle hosted the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Senior Officials’ and Ministerial Meetings, and Microsoft was honored to welcome the APEC member energy ministers and their delegations to our campus for a private-sector decarbonization roundtable.
APEC’s member economies play a critical role in advancing Microsoft’s and the world’s clean energy goals. The 21 economies account for more than half the world’s energy demand and over two-thirds’ the world’s electricity generation.
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At Microsoft, our long-term vision is to reach a state where, on all the world’s grids, 100% of our electricity, 100% of the time, is generated from zero-carbon sources. On the path to reaching this vision, our target is to cover 100% of Microsoft’s load with renewable energy purchases by 2025; meaning that we plan to have clean energy contracted for 100 percent of carbon emitting electricity consumed by all our data centers, buildings, and campuses.
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Read more: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2023/08/16/apec-sustainability-decarbonization-fusion-energy/
Soon it won’t just be the tech giants.
Large data centres will continue to be a part of the AI revolution, but you can’t do everything via a connection to a remote data center. No imaginable internet network could carry all the data traffic which would be required to do everything remotely. So a lot of AI hardware will have to be installed in homes, right next to where it is used, to realise the full potential of the AI revolution.
Computer manufacturers are already anticipating this demand for AI in the home, and are rushing to market with AI ready desktop and laptop computers. They are developing PCs filled with power hungry AI chips capable of efficiently executing massively parallel neural net programs, in addition to the usual graphics chips and CPUs.
While initially these “AI ready” products will be quite rightly derided as a joke, a product looking for a purpose, it won’t take long for programmers and entrepreneurs to make them more interesting. The hunt is already on for the breakthrough software app which drives the next cycle of PC upgrades. I anticipate over the next 10 – 30 years power hungry AI systems will become increasingly integrated with all our lives, and everyone’s energy needs will surge.
We’ve barely scratched the surface of the surge in energy supply levels ordinary households could demand in the near future. As our houses will fill with machines which take care of everyday chores without any human intervention at all, the promise of AI is that within most of our lifetimes, everyone will have the opportunity to live like the rich people of today who have teams of servants looking out for all their needs, providing household energy supplies keep up with demand.
In the rush to automate everything, politicians who stand for green power rather than more power will be brushed aside.
Of course, with every household running AI systems which emit thousands of watts of heat on a near continuous basis, people in urban areas will need more powerful air conditioners as well to deal with all that additional waste heat.
Imagine a large inner city apartment block, where every apartment’s energy use over the course of less than a decade goes up by an additional 3-4 thousand watts. That one large apartment block could be pumping megawatts of extra heat into the surrounding environment over today’s heat emissions, once all the near future AI toys are installed. And of course, that apartment block won’t be alone, all their neighbours will be doing the same. This coupled demand for energy and more air conditioning will likely create a positive feedback cycle of increasing energy use and urban heating, along with ever more powerful air conditioners to push back the rising urban heat load dumped into the environment by all those newly installed AI systems. The pump motors in those bigger air conditioners will themselves contribute to the surge in urban heat pollution.
My prediction, when the AI revolution really kicks in and reaches into every corner of everyone’s lives, the only reason for say installing rooftop solar will be if you need a small topup, because you can’t suck enough electricity out of the grid to run all your toys.
Back in the day, aluminium smelters used to have priority consumption deals for coal powered electricity.
But at least they were making a resource that was used in thousands of products all around the world.
AI produces something important too – it liberates leisure time.
An hour ago I was at a local self serve supermarket checkout. I didn’t have to enter the names of vegetables, most of the time – recently the supermarket installed an AI vision system which recognises what vegetables have been placed on the self service weight measure. I think the AI saved me around 2 minutes of searching through menus during my self service purchase experience.
If you have enough of these 2 minutes savings on daily chores, eventually it adds up to a lot of extra time when you can decide what to do, rather than having to do chores.
Obviously I’m not really happy that far left silicon valley types currently dominate AIs, but there are other players emerging.
One of the most unlikely emerging tech centers is Turkey. During the recent Libyan civil war following the fall of Libyan dictator Colonel Gaddafi, Russia and Turkey decided it was a great opportunity to show off their latest high tech weapons, so they started arming Libyan street gangs with sophisticated drones and other hardware.
The surprise winner of this mini arms race was Turkey. Russia has become so good at jamming drone control signals, a new approach was needed, so the Turkish company Baykar created AI drones which don’t need a control signal, and helped their pet Libyan militia group, the Government of National Accord, win a decisive victory over Russian supplied groups.
https://www.reuters.com/article/apps-drones-idUSL5N2NS2E8/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayraktar_TB2
This may have been a world first – the first time true fully autonomous AI weapons were deployed in a war zone.
Israel are also masters of high tech warfare, they have made no secret they are deploying semi-autonomous AI weapons in their conflicts.
At some point companies with AI expertise like Baykar will be attracted to the consumer AI market, and will challenge Silicon Valley for dominance.
Think about how much time it would have saved you if they had a good checkout clerk.
Ah but the checkout clerk is having their time liberated as well, even though they might not immediately appreciate the benefit. It is counterintuitive but the more jobs you destroy while keeping productivity the same, the more chance everyone has of becoming wealthier and having to work less.
Something Ned Ludd and the original Saboteurs didn’t understand. Their pain would lead to an overall gain.
A checkout clerk “having their time liberated” is an odd euphemism for being unemployed. Just sayin’…
And become wealthier in the bargain.
With the money being saved, other jobs are being created.
Tell that to the unemployed checkout clerk. Guess s/he could always get a job coding…
So the deployment of robots, supplanting the human, makes people wealthier. Not quite sure how that works.
By improving productivity. That’s the way it has worked ever since Og figured out a better way to sharpen rocks.
Imagine how much more he would have to pay as well.
Is Baykar Turkish for Cyberdyne?
That’s not liberating your time…. It’s the market making sure the customers aren’t doing arbitrage on what type of vegetable it is , ie choosing a lower priced item to key in
It is liberating your time, but it is also being used to make sure that honest shoppers aren’t being forced to subsidize the dishonest ones.
I guess in the much larger scheme of things I think internet-organized flash robberies are a much bigger problem than someone dishonestly shaving a couple bucks by entering bananas ($0.59/lb) for apples ($2.49/lb).
The market cant monetise your time for their benefit. Parking is a bigger hassle than 30 sec less at the checkout process.
I dont see this as AI anyway, just image matching following an software algorithm. No ongoing learning involved !
Can it tell truss tomatoes from loose tomatoes, or are they the same price to prevent arbitrage
LOL, self-service checkouts stole your time, now AI liberates your time?
Seems to me that a bar code is much simpler and cheaper to utilise. AI doesn’t necessarily add any value.
Thought most aluminum was made with hydro..on a sweetheart deal at $.01/kWhr.
Canadian hydropower pulled aluminum can industry north
Tech centers don’t just need “properly reliable” electricity. They need electricity that is also controlled to several 9s of frequency and voltage precision. Wind and solar simply cannot do that.
Modern switching power supplies can ride over multiple sins such as power dropouts and surges. They still can’t handle a loss of power from about .1 to .25 seconds depending on the power supply loading. That’s why I use a UPS at home because power company switching sometimes causes my computer to hick-up. If I wasn’t running it at near 100% load, I wouldn’t need the UPS as the computer power supply would be able to handle the problem.
You still are correct that running a site that requires 100% up time off wind and solar would be very risky.
I’ve had to deal with poor power quality and computers for the last 35 years. Started with drop-out surge protectors (they stay off when tripped and protect delicate circuitry), added battery UPS on all the computers and AV equipment, then recently installed a whole house 12-kW propane generator (which came with a whole house surge protector) on top of it.
Because of all this I don’t even realize the power blips or even complete shutdowns during storms. There is some equipment here which has lasted over 20 years because of all this protection. In my case the poor power quality had nothing to do with the load, it has just always sucked.
Traditional, reliable turbine-generators offer more specific physical benefits derived from massive mass rotating at 3600RPM….allowing more time for keeping frequency and power factor stable in events of breakdowns and grid issues. A grid engineer could explain that better. IEEE just had an article showing mathematical/physical differences between Inverter Generation of wind/solar and conventional generation.
That’s just not true. Data centers use either full double conversion UPS or rack battery backup units. They don’t need precision inputs to the site, they just demand several 9’s of reliability in supply. And solar can deliver very high quality of frequency & voltage, though supply reliability must come from other sources.
In short, wind and solar are virtue signaling, not viable power sources by themselves. Alphabet and Microsoft should stop humoring (read:sucking up to) greens delusions. But they feel a need politically to cater to the delusions of various politicians.
Yes. Not unless they have grid scale batteries attached to ….change that to across the road because of the fire risk…the data centre.
The power doesn’t travel like cars down the freeway from generation site to user, it’s a grid supply so a pooling system
We’ll be stuck with what wind and solar produce.
The Big Guys will get the rest.
Power supply by grid doesnt whose worthy or not. Blackout software is district specific not individual places.
Some decades back an area of my city had some underground power lines fail so peak cuts lasted some weeks . if you were in same suburb as a hospital there were no cuts , commercial and residential areas still got them
Wind and solar have entered a cul de sac, they may keep moving but it won’t be forward. Nuclear, gas and other technologies will provide our electricity. We must preserve oil for our hot rods, plastics, fabrics and such.
AI is another story. There may be many positive uses for AI but there are clearly many more ways to abuse it. We must go forward very carefully. It could be a really bad thing.
Be careful what you support. Biden is totally in favour of a government AI lockdown, so new uses of AI have to be approved by politicians. Naturally his friends get a blank check when it comes to using AI to clear the internet of “misinformation”, or other uses approved by the Democrats.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/ai-bill-of-rights/
Has to be bad news for Biden angle , not true at all
watermarks !
Is AI just another one of those technologies still searching for a practical application / purpose?
AI is a weapon, mainly found in the hands of the ruling class, looking for the next million victims.
Um, all due respect, but you’re out of your mind. With power prices as they are, and inevitably only going to go up, no-one is going to be paying for thousands of watts of wasted energy. Especially not with “surge pricing” enabled on all the new smart meters we’re being strong-armed into installing! The 1% I’m sure will swallow the cost, but the rest of us will go back to playing Monopoly by the fireplace.
It’s the AI learning that uses the MW , house hold desktops are getting even lower power usage and they are getting the hard work done at the data centre not in a personal cpu
Not according to the article –
AI ready is just marketing. Doesnt require power hungry desktops at all. The story says that . The hype is 30 years out or something where a breakthrough app will make it all possible . LOL
you might need $150 mill and an actual AI server farm using 1000s of $10,000 each graphics processors to build the learning into your AI application
Commercial grade CPUs which cost in $10s of 000 exist already , and larger organisations will have plenty of them.
I recently read something by a well known scientific biographer , who had visited the google Campus around 2005
One of the researchers had told(whispered) him that they werent scanning all these books to be read by humans but to be read by AI.
Can we assume then that these companies, all of which tell us peasants to use less power, will have the reliable energy denied to the rest of us either through cost or climate change propaganda? Hypocrites much?
Notice the “dog not barking” here is the concept of grid-connected Long Term Energy Storage. Just overbuild wind and solar and use the “excess” power from the grid to store energy in, say, hot sand or bricks to convert back to electricity when needed! Right.
Why are big data center projects not announcing they will install LTES systems for reliability? Because they know it is costly, foolish, wishful thinking in comparison to nuclear power.
And all of this AI load is in addition to the electrification load to reach net zero. Near me is a chip fab plant which will use as much electricity as Vermont and New Hampshire. How long before they admit that they need nuclear power too?
Micron and New York State are playing some kind of game. What will be Micron’s response be if the state cannot live up to its side of the bargain they’ve struck with Micron to give the company access to wind and solar power?
The major issue with nuclear is that considerable time and effort is needed to rebuild the nuclear construction industrial base in the United States.
If Micron decides it needs to supply its own electricity through its own behind-the-meter electric power generation facilities, and they want it to be nuclear, competition for access to nuclear construction services will be fierce.
Micron eventually would have no choice but to consider constructing its own dedicated gas-fired power plants. But New York State could not allow this under current provisions of the Climate Act.
Does Quebec have surplus from their hydro or is it mostly spoken for? I imagine that power is in the background but am curious.
I have read comments at various times on WUWT that Quebec sells hydropower to the US Northeast at favorable prices which has the effect that Quebec citizens are subsidizing US power consumers. If Quebec runs short of power, then this practice will probably end. (Unless it doesn’t.)
The IEA estimate that by 2026 data centres will be consuming over 1000TWh of electricity, “roughly equivalent to the electricity consumption of Japan.”
IEA ‘Electricity 2024 Analysis and forecast to 2026’
“by 2027 AI servers may use between 85 to 134 terawatt hours (Twh) annually – which approximately equal to what Argentina, the Netherlands and Sweden each use in a year.”
what could possibly go wrong?
A prediction: AI technology developments will continually reduce power consumption, computing requirements and as a result, ‘minor AI applications’ will be less costly. But the downside will be that the ruling class/tech giants can take it to the next level in its use to control all of us plebs/proles.
and it is not intelligence. It is a technology that can be (okay, already is) used as a weapon.
Good grief the matrix.
I was actually thinking of the last days of the planet Krypton, the back story home of Superman, when I wrote this – a society where technology, automation and obscene luxury and convenience had been taken to such such an extreme, the entire planet exploded when they failed to manage all the waste heat from their technology.
But I think we have a long way to go before that becomes a possibility.
Yeah, but think, I, Robot. Not as extreme as an exploding planet but a revolution of autonomous against civilization (except Will Smith nipped it in the bud). Or Ultron without The Avengers around to save the day.
I recently met a bloke who was hired by one of the biggest e-media corporations on the basis of his experience with nuclear propulsion. You probably easily can work out what his previous employment was.
Is TMI 1 still available–great producer!
“growing interest in nuclear, geothermal power”
Is one of those items only in the quote to deemphasize the other?